Quincy is a city in Norfolk County, Massachusetts. It bears the nicknames "The City of Presidents," "City of Legends," "Birthplace of the American Dream."^[1] A major part of Metropolitan Boston, Quincy is a member of Boston's Inner Core Committee for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.^[2] The name is correctly pronounced "Quin-zee",^[3] as it is named after Colonel John Quincy, though non-locals often mispronounce it as "Quin-cee". Quincy is the birthplace of former Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, as well as statesman John Hancock.

History

The Wollaston neighborhood is the oldest part of Quincy, first settled by English immigrants in 1625 as Mount Wollaston. Quincy itself later became part of Braintree, Massachusetts, was officially incorporated as a separate town in 1792, and was made a city in 1888.

Among its several firsts was the Granite Railway, the first commercial railroad in the United States. It was constructed in 1826 to carry granite from a quarry in Quincy to the Neponset River in Milton so that the stone could then be taken by boat to erect the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Quincy granite became famous throughout the nation, and stonecutting became the city's principal economic activity.

Second was shipbuilding. Sailing ships were built in Quincy for many years, and the final known clipper ship built was in Germantown in the 1870s. The Fore River area became a shipbuilding center in the 1880s — originally owned by Thomas A. Watson of telephone fame — and many famous warships were built at the Fore River Shipyard, including the aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-2), the battleships USS Massachusetts (BB-59) and USS Nevada (BB-36), and the USS Salem (CA-139), the world's last all-gun heavy warship, which is still preserved at Fore River as the main exhibit of the United States Naval Ship Building Museum. John J. Kilroy, the originator of the famous Kilroy Was Here graffiti, was a welding inspector at Fore River.

Quincy was also an aviation pioneer. Dennison Field in the Squantum section of town was one of the world's first airports and was partially developed by Amelia Earhart. In 1910 it was the site of the Harvard Aero Meet, only the second air show in America. It was later leased to the Navy for an airfield, and served as a reserve Squantum Naval Air base into the 1950s.

Of some note, Howard Johnson's and Dunkin Donuts were founded and started in Quincy, and the celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys got its start in Wollaston.