QUINCY, a city of Norfolk county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., on Massachusetts bay, just south of Boston, occupying 16.77 sq.m. between the Neponset river on the north and Fore river on the south. It is served by the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad. Pop. 47,876 in 1920, 29% foreign-born white; 1930 it was 71,983. It is a beautiful residential suburb of great historic interest, and has distinctive manufacturing industries, with an output in 1927 valued at $23,400,798. The Quincy granite quarries have been celebrated since the middle of the 18th cen tury, and the Granite-Cutters' Journal (established 1877) is pub lished here. On Fore river are ship-yards (established 190o), which have built many of the modern vessels of the U.S. navy, including 36 destroyers during the World War. The city has 2,600 ac. of parks and playgrounds, and an assessed valuation for 1927 of $130,038,700. A settlement known as Merry Mount or
Mt. Wollaston was established within the present bounds of Quincy in 1625 by Thomas Morton (q.v.), but was abandoned after his arrest; and in 1634 a second settlement was made, by Puritans. In 1792 Quincy was set off from Braintree and in corporated as a town (named in honour of John Quincy, 1689 1767) and in 1888 it was chartered as a city. It was the home of the Hancocks and the Adamses, the birthplace of the first governor of Massachusetts and of two presidents of the United States. The houses in which John Adams and John Quincy Adams were born (built in 1681 and 1716) and the Edmund Quincy homestead (1685) are colonial museums, open to the public. The granite for King's chapel, Boston, in 1752, and for the Bunker Hill monument, in 1826, was quarried in Quincy.