The Old Parsonage: Where John Hancock Came Calling

This modest house was once the home of Phineas Whitney, the first minister of Shirley, Massachusetts. In the years before the Revolution it received two notable visitors: Dorothy Quincy and Madam Lydia Hancock, who had come to stay in the quiet of the countryside. John Hancock himself traveled here to accompany them home, a small domestic errand that placed one of the Revolution's most famous signers on this quiet road not long before Lexington and Concord.

The house was later moved to its current location. The original structure dates to the mid-eighteenth century, making it one of the older surviving buildings in this part of Middlesex County and a quiet footnote in the story of Boston's patriot families.