John Adams, Cupid’s Grove, and the Memory of a Very Old Walk
In the early 1820s, nearly ninety-year-old John Adams reportedly welcomed Hannah Storer, once the young woman he had called “Orlinda,” with a teasing invitation to walk again in Cupid’s Grove. Her reply recalled that it would not be their first walk there. The Adams Papers preserve this charming exchange while carefully identifying its status: it comes from Josiah Quincy’s later reminiscence, not a contemporaneous diary entry. That distinction offers a practical lesson for family historians. A story can remain warm and memorable while clearly separating witnessed facts, later recollection, and uncertainty. When recording a family anecdote, save the place, people, remembered words, source, and approximate date. The small exchange may reveal more than a formal milestone: affection, humour, privacy, and the meaning a familiar place gathers across a lifetime.
John Adams was nearly ninety when an old acquaintance came to visit him. The visitor was Hannah Storer, once Hannah Quincy, a woman he had known as a young man in Braintree. The meeting might have passed as a pleasant but ordinary reunion between two elderly neighbours. Instead, Adams greeted her with a teasing invitation that reached back across roughly seven decades.
“What! Madam, shall we not go walk in Cupid’s Grove together?” he asked.
According to the account preserved by Adams’s great-nephew Josiah Quincy, Storer answered with equal playfulness: “Ah, sir, it would not be the first time that we have walked there!”
It is a small scene. No law was changed, no battle won, and no famous speech was delivered. Yet it has survived because it contains the things that make a life feel lived: an old place, a private history, a surprise greeting, and two people who could still recognise the joke.
The archive gives us a story, and a warning
This episode appears in the editors’ introduction to The Earliest Diary of John Adams, published through the Adams Papers project. The project is an authoritative scholarly edition of the Adams family papers, and its editors are careful about what the evidence can and cannot prove.
That care matters. The story is not an entry written by Adams on the day of the visit. It is a later reminiscence by Josiah Quincy, who remembered accompanying the elderly Hannah Storer sometime in the early 1820s. The editors identify his source as Figures of the Past, a book of reminiscences published in 1926.
So the archival status is precise: we have a published recollection of a family memory, preserved and contextualised by the Adams Papers editors. We should not turn it into a verbatim transcript certified by a witness’s notebook. We can say that Quincy reported the exchange. We can say the editors judged it part of the story of Adams’s relationship with the woman he had called “Orlinda.” We should not claim that every gesture, pause, or expression is independently documented.
That distinction does not make the scene less interesting. It makes it more honest. Many family stories reach us through this kind of chain: someone tells a story, a relative remembers it, a memoir records it, and a later reader tries to keep the proportions right.
Who was “Orlinda”?
The young John Adams’s diary and correspondence refer to a woman by the pseudonym “Orlinda.” The Adams Papers introduction explains that this was Hannah Quincy, who later married Bela Lincoln. The surviving records show that Adams’s affection for her did not disappear immediately, even after their paths diverged.
The nickname itself is part of the period’s record, but it also tells us something about privacy. Adams did not simply write a full identifying name in every personal note. A pseudonym could create a little shelter around a feeling. It could also make the story harder for later generations to decode.
The newly identified diary fragment helped editors understand more about Adams as a young man. It begins in June 1753, when he was seventeen and entering his third year at Harvard, and includes notes on college life, weather, lectures, law, and personal matters. The manuscript was discovered in 1965 among the Royall Tyler Papers in Vermont, more than two centuries after it was written. The Vermont Historical Society’s finding aid lists the diary as part of that collection.
The diary’s survival is almost as remarkable as the romantic story attached to it. Adams’s early booklet had moved out of the family’s hands without anyone noticing that it was missing. It was later found in a collection belonging to a figure only indirectly connected to the Adams family. The editors describe the manuscript’s journey as circumstantial, not certain.
That is an important pattern: both the courtship story and the document’s own history contain gaps. The gaps do not erase the record. They tell us how cautiously to hold it.
A greeting that travelled through time
By the time of the reported visit, Adams and Storer were both approaching ninety. Quincy remembered that the old friends had once known a particular “sylvan spot” in the part of Braintree that later became Quincy. People called it Cupid’s Grove.
Adams’s greeting was not a solemn declaration. It was deliberately theatrical: “What! Madam” followed by an invitation to repeat a walk associated with their youth. Storer, after an initial moment of embarrassment in Quincy’s telling, answered in the same register. Her reply acknowledged the shared past without explaining it to anyone else in the room.
That is why the line feels so alive. It is a piece of conversation between people who do not need to provide the whole backstory. The place-name does some of the work. So does the word “first.”
For a family historian, a location can be a relationship record. “We walked there” may sound insignificant until someone adds who “we” were, what the place was called, and why the path mattered. A street corner, cottage, railway platform, or grove may carry a story no formal record explains.
What the story does not prove
It is tempting to decorate a charming anecdote. We might imagine the colour of the room, the weather outside, or the exact look on Storer’s face. Quincy’s account gives us only a limited description: she seemed embarrassed, then regained her self-possession and answered with what he called a suspicion of girlish archness.
The responsible version keeps those boundaries visible. We know the reported words. We know the broad relationship. We know that the Adams Papers editors connected the scene with the earlier history of “Orlinda” and identified the source. We do not know every detail of the visit, and we should not fill the silence with invented dialogue.
When families preserve memories, small additions can gradually harden into “facts.” A story retold at every holiday may acquire a precise date nobody checked, a sentence nobody wrote down, or a motive inferred long afterward. A good family archive can preserve both the story and its status: confirmed, remembered, approximate, disputed, or unknown.
If you are recording an old family anecdote, try adding a short note such as: “This is how Aunt Rose told it in 1998,” or “The date is approximate; the place is confirmed by a letter.” That sentence gives future readers something valuable. It tells them how the memory reached them.
A practical prompt from Cupid’s Grove
The Adams story suggests a gentle interview prompt: “Was there a place that belonged to a particular friendship or love story?”
Do not ask only for the landmark’s official name. Ask what people did there. Who suggested going? Was the place public, hidden, fashionable, or ordinary? What did the person remember decades later—the path, the weather, a joke, a disagreement, or the fact that someone waited?
Then ask a second question: “Who told you this, and when?”
That question can separate a firsthand memory from a family tradition without dismissing either one. A granddaughter may not have witnessed her grandparents’ first meeting, but she may accurately remember how her grandmother described it. Both layers belong in the record if they are labelled clearly.
Memory Share’s guide to building a memoir around turning points offers a related approach: place a specific scene inside a larger life timeline, then identify what changed or what the moment came to mean. Cupid’s Grove works in miniature. The walk itself may have been brief, but the place became a marker for a relationship remembered across a lifetime.
The value of the small exchange
The public John Adams is easy to find: patriot, lawyer, diplomat, president. The private Adams appears differently in a diary fragment, a pseudonym, a remembered courtship, and a mischievous greeting to an old friend.
That contrast is the real gift of the story. A life is not made only of its official milestones. It also includes the names used in confidence, the places that gathered meaning, and the jokes that still work after many years. Those details do not compete with the historical record. They give it texture.
When you preserve a family story, keep the scale of the moment. You do not need to turn a walk into a legend. Record the place, the people, the remembered words, and what is uncertain. If a story came through someone else, say so. The care you take with the edges allows the centre to remain believable.
And if an old friend walks through your door one day, you may not need a grand speech. A familiar place and one well-timed question might be enough.
Your story matters to us.
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