HISTORICAL NOTE

The material in this collection is centered around Mary James Abbott, 1810-1857, daughter of James and Mary Foster Abbott of Andover, schoolteacher and Protestant missionary to French Canada, 1836-1838. It was found in the Benjamin Abbott house, and was given to the Society in two batches: By Mrs. Lucy Abbott Pollock of Malden and Mrs. J. Everett Collins in 1970 and by Mrs. Philip A. Vigeant in 1974 (Accession Number 1974.13). Because the donations were unsorted when received, they were combined when processed in 1982.

The Abbotts, who were the authors of most of the material, were the descendents of George Abbott of Andover in the sixth and seventh generations. Barachias Abbott (5), 1739-1812), married in 1770 Sarah Holt(5), b 1747, daughter of James Holt(4), 1723-1812 and his first wife Sarah Abbott. Barachias and Sarah, who moved from Andover to Wilton, New Hampshire in 1786, had seven children. Those who wrote letters in this collection were Sarah (sally), b.1778; Elizabeth (Eliza), b.1784 and James, 1780-1858. The two sisters, who never married, stayed in Wilton, but James came back to Andover and lived on the farm first owned by Benjamin(2) Abbott where the papers were found. James married in 1806, Mary Foster, d.1850, daughter of Isaac Foster and Mary Holt, daughter of Deacon Joshua Holt.

The Fosters, like the Abbotts, had moved to New Hampshire, first to Temple, then to Greenfield where the family settled. Mary Foster was the eldest of nine children. Her sister, Dorcas Foster Taylor, d. 1889, wife of Joshua Taylor, remained in Greenfield, as did her brothers Isaac and Timothy and her sister Abigail Foster Putnam, 1799-1853. Hannah Foster Abbott, b. c. 1792, came down to Andover to become, in 1829, the second wife of Deacon Paschal Abbott and mother of many children. (Paschal Abbott was a near relation of James Abbott. Paschal and his first wife, Mary Abbott, were descended via Job(4) from the original George. Paschal's father was Nathan(5); Mary's was Nathan's brother Job(5)). Ann Foster Pratt married Thomas Pratt of Medford, Mass. in 1837 and thereafter lived in that town. The youngest sister, Phebe, 1802-1886, married in 1847, as his second wife, Joseph Cummings of Andover. She was almost twenty years younger than her eldest sister and only eight years older than her niece, Mary James Abbott, with whom she went to Canada as a missionary in 1836.

James Abbott and Mary Foster had eight children. Mary the missionary, who called herself Mary James Abbott, was born in 1810 and died unmarried in 1857. The three years spent as a schoolteacher and missionary among the Catholics of Quebec were by far the most exciting period of her life. James Holt Abbott, 1812-1835, attended Phillips Academy and trained as a teacher at the Teacher's Seminary attached to it. He was teaching at the experimental Manual Training Academy in Maury County, Tennessee when he died young. The next child, Sarah, 1814-1859, was a schoolteacher for many years until she became in 1848 the third wife of Joshua Holt of Bradford and the mother of James Abbott Holt. The second son was named Barachias Hartwell for his grandfather Abbott, but soon reversed the names and became Hartwell B. Abbott. He was born in 1816 and wrote very little that has been preserved in this collection. The third daughter, Dorcas, born 1818, barely appears in the letters. Phebe Elizabeth, 1820-1891, the fourth daughter, was also a schoolteacher. She never married. Timothy, the third son, 1823-1913, remained in Andover on the farm, never married and lived to be ninety. Hannah, the youngest, was born in 1826 and like her sister Dorcas, barely appears in these letters.

Various members of the Holt family intermarried with both the Abbott and Foster clans. Nicholas Holt(3) has, among others, three sons: James, Nathan and Joshua. James(4), 1723-1812 had a daughter Sarah who married Barachias Abbott and a son James(5), b. 1749 who married Hannah Foster, b.1754, sister of Isaac Foster. Nathan, 1725-1792, minister of Danvers, had a daughter Mary, 1761-1850 who married Robert Endicott of Beverly and loved to be ninety. Joshua, 1730-1810, deacon and member of the state legislature had, among others, Mary, 1759-1819, who married Isaac Foster; the Reverend Peter Holt, minister of Exeter, New Hampshire and Solomon, 1768-1830 whose son Joshua became the husband of Sarah Abbott, James Abbott's daughter.

There are other family members known only through this correspondence, both Abbotts and descendents of the Foster sisters. In many cases they have not been located in the family genealogies; in some cases the relationship is clear through the salutation of the letters. Other family members who did not write but are mentioned in this collection may be found in the published genealogies listed at the end of this note.

There is also material by unrelated individuals, almost all correspondents of Mary James Abbott in her Canadian years, and almost all related to the South Church, Andover and to the Andover Theological Seminary which dominated it completely during these years. Two brothers named Boutwell, both graduates of the Theological Seminary, were involved with the family. William Thurston Boutwell, graduated from the Theological Seminary in 1831 and became a missionary to Ojibwas of what is now Minnesota. He was supported financially and materially by the South Church. His younger brother James, who graduated in 1840, was running the South Church Sabbath School in the years that Mary James Abbott and Phebe Foster were in Canada. He cemented his ties with the family by marrying, 1837, Mary Paschal Abbott, the daughter of Deacon Paschal Abbott and his first wife Mary. In 1829 Paschal  had married as his second wife, Hannah Foster, Phebe's sister and Mary's aunt. There were other clergymen; Pliny Butts Day, 1806-1869, at the Theological Seminary in 1836 and Cyrus Stone who graduated in 1825 and wrote the children in the Sunday School from his post as a missionary in Bombay, India. There were other American women in Canada at the same time as Mary and Phebe, on the same kind of mission. They wrote each other, and one of them, Harriet Downe of Fitchburg, Mass. continued the correspondence on her return to the United States.

Mary and Phebe were sent to Canada under the direct auspices of the South Church, as a special mission sponsored by the Canadian Missionary Society, a women's group; the Sabbath School and the Juvenile Missionary Society. Mary, both before and after her mission taught in the Sabbath School and ran the Juvenile Bible Society. This church, which was in this period a bastion of orthodox Calvinism, was the second in the original, larger town of Andover. It was the parish of Andover Village which took the name of Andover in the mid-nineteenth century split.

Used in untangling the convoluted family relationships of the writers of these letters were many sources. At the Andover Historical Society were the Abbott Family Genealogical Register by Abiel and Ephraim Abbott (1847), typed genealogies of Andover families by Charlotte Helen Abbott and the printed Vital Records of the town. The Town Clerk has records of citizens after 1850. The New ENgland Genealogical Society in Boston has the Foster Genealogy by Frederick Clifton Pierce (2 vols., 1899) and histories and vital records from other towns, including Wilton, New Hampshire. The Congregational Library in Boston has material on clergymen in the necrologies printed in Congregational Quarterly and on missionaries in particular in the "Vinton Books". At the Andover Historical Society are the Historical Catalogue, 1808-1908 of Andover Theological Seminary and the Historical Manual (1859) of the South Church.

SCOPE AND CONTENT NOTE

The material has been divided into forty-seven part by individuals and institutions. Most of it consists of letters from the period 1836-1838 when Mary James Abbott was in Canada, but it spans the years 1747/8 through 1879 and contains deeds; material from the South Church, Andover; papers of the Andover Debating Society, 1827-8; poems religious and comic and other ephemera.

First is material by seventeen members of the Abbott family, arranged genealogically. Sarah (Sally), James and Elizabeth (Eliza) represent the first generation. Sally wrote to her brother and sister-in-law from Wilton. Very religious, melancholy, devoted to her sister Eliza, she envied her sister-in-law for living in Andover, the center for evangelical religion. James left little except a few deeds. Eliza's material is much like Sally's. It includes an interesting religious musing on the meaning of Thanksgiving from the Neo-Puritan point of view.

The next generation produced much more of interest. Mary James' material consists of her personal state of religious belief; eighteen letters written between 1828 and 1854, the majority arranged alphabetically; letters addressed to her while a missionary, arranged alphabetically; letters to her at Andover; her instructions from the South Church, lesson plans and bills and receipts. Letters by her aunt, Phebe Foster Cummings and materials here collected under the South Church supplement her material. James Holt ABbott, her brother left bits of academic material and one letter. Sarah Abbott Holt left twenty-tow letters, mostly on domestic matters.

Most of her letters, written to Mary in Andover, date from 1839-40 and concern her life as a schoolteacher in Medford. They include one which describes a trip to Boston in 1840 when in one day she attended meetings of the Moral Reform Society, the Seamen's Friend Society and the Anti-Slavery (Garrisonian) Society and did a good deal of shopping for clothes. Hartwell left practically nothing but Phebe Elizabeth, wrote a good many letters, ten letters in all, concerning her life in Beverly as a schoolteacher. Timothy, who never left Andover left very little except a pew deed from the South Church. He may have been the author of a petition to the selectmen protesting high taxes, which is filed at the end of the collection. Hannah, the youngest sister, was teaching school in Manchester Cove, Mass. in 1853 and not enjoying it, when she wrote to Mary. Mary Paschal Abbott Boutwell left very little other than a stuff letter from Bradford Academy written while she was a student there about 1830.

The remaining Abbott material comes from later in the nineteenth century, from family members who did not live in Andover: P. Abbott of Dexter, Maine; B.R. ABbott of Wilton, New Hampshire; I.G. Abbott of Dexter and James Abbott of Weston, Mass. Two women, Caroline and Laura, who wrote to Mary James in 1835 seem to have been Abbotts. Laura speaks of Mary's aunt by marriage, Judith Batchelder Abbott, wife of Joel, and her deranged daughter Rebecca.

Next follows material by seventeen members of the Foster family. Isaac Foster's six daughters lived to advanced years and wrote much to each other. Dorcas Foster Taylor, Hannah Foster Abbott, Abigail Foster Putnam and Ann Foster Pratt left material from the beginning of their lives in Greenfield, New Hampshire and from the 1870s, with little in between. Hannah Foster Abbott, like her nieces a schoolteacher, saved her qualifying certificate issued in 1816 in Greenfield. Ann Foster Pratt wrote a touching letter to her sister and niece about to go to Canada in 1836. Phebe Foster Cummings, the missionary, seems not to have been as forceful a person as her niece Mary, but more timid and introspective.

There are letters from ten Foster descendents, children and grandchildren of these sisters, who have not been otherwise identified, concerning various domestic triumphs and tragedies.

There is not much Holt material: six eighteenth century deed of James Holt(4) and a pathetic letter of 1794 by James(5), describing the death of his first wife Hannah Foster, Isaac Foster's sister; a copy of his self-consciously literary description by the Rev. Peter Holt of the death of a married daughter in 1825; and receipts by Solomon and J.S. Holt. There is also a letter, written in 1851 by Sarah L. Endicott of Beverly, friend of Phebe Elizabeth Abbott and granddaughter of Nathan Holt.

There letters by two individuals, J. Stetson and Theodore M. Brace, who seem not to have been related to any of these families.

There is material on this collection which properly belongs to the South Church, Andover. Mary James Abbot, as president of the Juvenile Bible Society, wrote the annual report for 1841. There also notes on eighteenth century sermon texts; a letter from a missionary, the Rev. E. Y. Swift to the Juvenile Society; a note requesting proposal (undated) to found a juvenile singing school.

Some member of the Abbott family, perhaps James Holt Abbott, must have belonged to the Debating Society of Andover, and preserved its records from 1827-28.

The miscellaneous printed material contains an undated circular from a group of women, anxious to save their families from licentiousness, but fearful of personal contamination that they dared not fight it directly. There a few literary manuscripts: a hymn, a poem "To a young brother on hearing him express a wish to become a foreign missionary"; and fragments of a comic poem and a comic dialogue.

By far the most important material in the collection is that concerning the missionary expedition of 1836-1838. It was important and unusual for two reasons: it was entirely funded and directed by one parish and it involved two women, disguised as schoolteachers, but actually sent alone as foreign missionaries. That they were unsuccessful in converting and French Canadians does not mean that it was an unimportant experiment in evangelical Protestant outreach.

Processed by Mary F. Morgan, November 1982.