The Training Field

Massachusetts depended for defense on a town militia system in which each town’s adult men trained for military service in a local militia or train-band, a forerunner of today’s National Guard and one source of the American principle of civilian control of the military. The Training Field occupied the eastern portion of the present park and extended eastward and northward over two acres, eventually providing the nucleus of Quincy Center. It was used for monthly military exercises by at least 1647, when the only other town institution nearby was the burying ground. In 1732 a new meeting house for the First Parish Church was erected just south of the present church, and the Training Field thereafter was also known as the Meeting House Green. In 1795 a schoolhouse and townhouse was built on the north end of the Training Field, bringing together the meeting-house, school-house, and training-field that John Adams said formed “the virtues and talents of the people.” In the twentieth century, the former Training Field or Meeting House Green was reduced to an island in a flow of motor traffic, and the Hancock-Adams Common seeks to restore some of its original sense of place. John Quincy, who lived from 1689 to 1767 and for whom the town and later city of Quincy was named, was arguably Massachusetts’ most prominent political leader in the decades before the American Revolution. First chosen Town Meeting Moderator in 1716, he held that office for three decades, served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1717 until 1746, was Speaker of the House for 12 of those years, and later served in the Governor’s Council. His title of Colonel came from his long command of the Suffolk Militia. Sympathetic to the embryonic Patriot cause, he worked skillfully with crown-appointed governors, advocated for the Ponkapoag Native Americans for more than twenty years, and in 1753 publicly defended religious freedom during a bitter controversy in the First Parish congregation. In 1764 his granddaughter Abigail Smith married John Adams, in 1767 John and Abigail named their first son John Quincy Adams after his great-grandfather, and in 1792 the town of Quincy was named in Colonel Quincy’s honor.

Milton, Massachusetts · United States