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Rob Mellon is the executive director of the Historical Society of Quincy & Adams County, Illinois. This Quincy has the last syllable pronounced “see” and not “zee,” as we do here in Massachusetts.
After we finished recording, I told Rob about how I’d tried to visit Quincy during one of my first vacations as a working adult, when I attended Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal, Missouri. Quincy is just across the river. But in that year of 1993, the river was in flood, and the bridges were all closed. So it’s still on my list.
Rob informed me that Quincy was named after John Quincy Adams. In fact, when the settlement originally called Bluffs took that new name in 1825, the people honored the incoming President in three ways. They named their county Adams, their town Quincy, and their central intersection John Square.
Since then, though, they renamed the town square after Washington. The Adams family would no doubt say that was typical.
And George Moore (1812-1847), a native of Concord, whose father Abel was deputy sheriff, jailor, auctioneer, and entrepreneur in that town for many decades, became the first minister of the Congregational church in Quincy. After completing Harvard Divinity School in 1839, Moore, an erstwhile follower of Emerson and even more devoted to Henry Ware, Jr. He was settled in Quincy as a minister with liberal sentiments in 1840 and died, prematurely, of tuberculosis in 1847.
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