HISTORICAL NOTE

William A. Trow, 1868-1949, prominent citizen of Andover, President of the Andover Historical Society from 1936 to  1947, was a most discriminating collector of Andover material, particularly of the period of the American Revolution. He had graduated from the Punchard Free School in 1886 as president of his class and served on every Punchard board as well as the town school committee and on many committees of the West Parish Church. His own historical notes, given after his death, are not very significant, but the documents he collected on the Phillips family during the Revolutionary period are of very high quality. 

Most of the material concerns members of the Phillips family, Andover’s most prominent cal during the eighteenth century and the great benefactors of Phillips Academy and Andover Theological Seminary. The first Phillips, Rev. George, d. 1644, arrived on the Arbella in 1629. His son George, 1625-1696 was minister in Rowley. George’s son Samuel went into business in Salem, but his son, the second Samuel, 1689/90-1771 continued the ministerial tradition. He came to Andover in 1711 as first minister of the Second or South Church. For sixty years he ruled his flock, a benevolent despot, served by black slaves, preaching the Calvinist word. Samuel and his wife Hannah White had five children: Mary, b. 1712, married Samuel Appleton of Haverhill. Samuel, b. 1715, d. 1790, merchant and magistrate, married Elizabeth Barnard of Andover. In 1739 they moved to the North Parish. Lydia, b. 1717 married Dr. Parker Clark, physician of Ipswich. John, 1719-1795, thought of the ministry but instead prospered mightily as a merchant in Exeter, N.H. Never married, he gave liberally to found the Academy in Andover in 1778, but more especially to found Phillips Exeter Academy. William, 1722-1804, merchant of Boston, married a Bromfield and had numerous children, including a daughter who married Josiah Quincy. 

Samuel, 1715-1790 was the town representative to the Great and General Court during the preliminaries to the Revolution. His son, Samuel, 1752-1802, sickly, stubborn, ardently patriotic, decided to serve his country by manufacturing gun powder on the banks of the Shawsheen. He survived the Revolution and later had a distinguished career in state politics, including the unenviable task of being Lieutenant Governor to John Hancock. He is usually known by his title. He was aided in all things by his redoubtable wife, Phoebe Foxcroft Phillips, 1743-1812. Of a prominent Cambridge family, nine years older than her husband, she bore him two sons and encouraged him at every turn by a constant shower of lovingly moralistic letters. They had two children: John, 1776-1821 and Samuel. To the horror and distress of his parents, Samuel, who had been aiming for a devoutly Calvinistic pulpit, suddenly died in 1796. John became a merchant but lacked the Midas touch and died in 18821 leaving little to his family fortune. His parents had given lavishly to found Phillips Academy in 1778 and the Andover Theological Seminary in 1808. 

Most of the material was given to the Society after Mr. Trow’s death, but he had been a steady contributor during his lifetime. Donations have been combined here into one collection. 

SCOPE AND CONTENT NOTE 

The collected material has been divided into seven sections, or sub-groups. Following it are some disorganized historical writings by Trow and some brief genealogies by Charlotte Helen Abbott, the town researcher. So many of the documents concern the Phillips family that the differentiation between official records and private papers is somewhat arbitrary. 

The first section consists of official documents from the town of Andover. The most important of these are the original resolutions of the Revolutionary era. The 1765 material concerning the Stamp Act is here. It consists of the record of the vote to draw up a committee to draw up instructions for Samuel Phillips, their Representative. Both the original and the finial draft with signatures have been preserved. On May 21, 1770, the town meeting voted a resolution on the Townsend Acts, the taxes on tea, paper, and glass which sparked the Boston Tea Party. A note on the back of this copy of the resolution says that it was in the handwriting of Samuel Phillips. There is also a town meeting resolution, November 27, 1774, concerning the need  for a trained militia and voicing support for the Continental Congress. Other official documents include a notice of March 4, 1775 to Samuel Phillips, Jr. as a town treasurer to pay Jacob Tyler Jr. for making bullets for the town stock, obviously supplies for what became the Battle of Lexington and Concord barely a month later. 

The second sub-group contains documents from the South Parish, c. 1788, discussing the feasibility of building a second meeting house to the west of the Shawsheen River. (it was finally built in 1826.) 

The third section contains material from other civil jurisdictions. The state of Massachusetts, House of representatives voted a resolution, June 20, 1778 to send saltpeter to Samuel Phillips to be made into gunpowder. There were also documents from other nearby towns, These include, from an earlier period when the French and Indians were the enemy, instructions, May 25,1723, from the Committee for Garrison Houses of the Town of Tewksbury that David Cargill’s house should be reinforced.  

The fourth sub-group consists of Phillips family material. The first item is a charge against the estate of the Rev. Samuel Phillips, d. 1771 for the care of his slave Cato. Papers of his son Samuel, 1715-1790, date from his service as a magistrate. They include the complaint of John Bragg against Fortune, Nathaniel Lovejoy’s slave manservant and Luce, a mulatto woman, for annoying Bragg’s wife. Trow collected some of the correspondence on Lieutenant Governor Samuel : a 1787 letter to his father concerning politics, a letter to his uncle William and a letter full of fatherly admonishments to his son John at Harvard, written in 1794. Among the letters written to this Samuel are two by the English expatriates paper maker, Thomas Houghton, whom Phillips encouraged to set up paper making in his gunpowder mill. The first, written in 1789, contains a vigorous complaint that a rush order for gunpowder was crowding out the paper mill. The second, from 1792, written on paper with Houghton’s Andover watermark, is mostly concerned with the problem that Houghton’s son, although an alien, was liable to serve in the local militia. There is some material on financial problems caused by the Revolution. Ensign Obadiah Lovejoy’s problems with his pay were unfortunately typical. Ensign Lovejoy, who served for three years, applied to Samuel Phillips to exchange his notes for Continental dollars, in 1781. Samuel Phillips’s political career after the Revolution is also illustrated by a damaged summons from John Hancock as governor, ordering Phillips to Boston to serve as a Senator in 1791. 

Phoebe Foxcroft Phillips’ material in this collection consists of a letter to her husband, 1797, containing domestic news and an undated moralistic essay entitled “The Benevolent Man”.

Their son John wrote his father in 1796 concerning a voyage he was about to undertake with a shipload of gunpowder. There are also two letters to John, concerning politics and some inherited land in Maine. 

Material from members of the other Andover families has been placed in Sub-group V. It is much less interesting. There is a 1792 letter from Herman Abbott to his brother Zebediah containing gloomy reflections on mortality. There are two eighteenth century estate inventories and a list of household goods from about 1770. At the end of the collected material is an attempt to estimate the rise in the cost of living between 1786 and 1794 by comparing prices of staples. 

Trow’s own writings do not hold much interest. They are mostly jottings on historical subjects. He called on Charlotte Helen Abbott to supply him with some genealogical information on the Barnard, Frye and Moore families. 

Processed by Mary F. Morgan, February 1983.