John Quincy Adams, known in the House as “Old Man Eloquent,” died in the Speaker of the House’s office in 1848. The following year, the House placed this bust in the room, mere feet from the sofa where Adams expired. The plaque beneath read “John Quincy Adams who, after fifty years of public service, the last sixteen in yonder Hall, was summoned thence to die in this room, 23 February 1848.” Adams’ death severed one of the last living connections to the nation’s revolutionary period. In the decades to come, the artist John Crookshanks King made bronze replicas of the bust that found favor among abolitionists, whose cause Adams championed in Congress.
