Adams Old House / 'the Gurney farm'

Research notes

John Gurney worked this land ~130 years before it became the home of presidents. In 1647 William Tyng leased John Gurney a 45-acre farm in Braintree (the Mount Wollaston / north-precinct area, now central Quincy) for ten years; Gurney went on leasing it from Tyng’s daughters Bethia and Mercy until 1662. This is the holding in William Tyng’s 1653 probate inventory recorded as land “in the possession of John Gurney” — 45 acres by the National Park Service / Ezekiel Sargent reading, 48 acres in the NEHGR abstract of the same inventory (a transcription discrepancy to settle against the inventory image). It is one continuous tenancy ~1647–1662 (the original ten-year term from William Tyng, then renewed from his daughters), the same property documented in the 1653 inventory and the 28 March 1661 Tyng estate-division indenture.^[1][2]

The northern portion of “the Gurney farm” became the Adams seat. Per the Ezekiel Sargent manuscripts and the NPS Cultural Landscape Report, the northern part of the parcel was later the site of the Adams property — “The Old House” (Peace field), first acquired by the Adams family in 1787, and the nearby Adams Birthplaces of John Adams (2nd U.S. president) and John Quincy Adams (6th). The Sargent map of 1649 labels the parcel “William Tyng / John Gurney (Lease) / Gregory Belcher,” with Salter’s Farm to the northeast, Stoney Field southwest, Edmund Quincy southeast, Crosby north, and “the Plain Land” south, along Adams Street.^[1]

The separate, larger ~500-acre Tyng farm (Salter’s Farm / Mount Wollaston, leased to John Read 1639–49 and Gregory Belcher from 1657–8) is a different property; see the John Gurney (G13) companion and Braintree. John’s own freehold was elsewhere, on the Monatiquot River.