Abigail Adams ran the first Founding-family dairy — and saved it while John built a country from a farmhouse desk in Braintree.

April 11, 1776. The cannons had barely cooled over Boston Harbor. Her husband was in Philadelphia arguing independence. And at the kitchen table, a thirty-one-year-old woman dipped her quill in ink instead of cream and wrote about wanting to be, in her own words, "as good a Farmeress" as John was a statesman. She meant it literally. Over the next four decades, she would run the Adams farm through a short-hay war year, fire the quidlings, order seventy-two milk pans in a single 1794 shipment, and — through a trusted middleman, because coverture law forbade her own name on the paperwork — build a bond portfolio that paid up to twenty-four percent while the Adams land paid two. When Jefferson's heirs were auctioning M ...