USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > Andover: symbol of New England; the evolution of a town > Part 13
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39
The impact of these exiles on our rather provincial Andover must have been both humorous and romantic. It was salutary for a Protestant, Anglo-Saxon community to see that people who went to mass and spoke French could be industrious and con- genial neighbors. When, in 1760, they were transferred to an- other section of Massachusetts, to be among more of their own people, they were sincerely missed. Ten years later two of them sent to their host, Mr. Abbot, a beautifully carved and polished powder horn made with their own hands and inscribed:
JONATHAN ABBOT His Horn Made In Alenstown April ye 5, 1770 I powder with my brother ball Most hero-like doth conquer all.
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So far as I can ascertain no descendant of the Acadian refu- gees now lives within the limits of the town. But the tale of their arrival and sojourn has become a very pleasant legend.
The pages of Miss Bailey's Historical Sketches dealing with this period are filled with the pathos and the tragedy, the humor, and the glory of war days. After the episode in Acadia, Major Frye, promoted to be colonel, because of his services to Crown and Colony, was presented by the officers of his battalion with a huge silver tankard, given "from a just sense of his care and con- duct of the Troops while under his command at Nova Scotia and a proper Resentment of his Paternal Regard for them since their Return to New England." The use of the word "Resentment" in such a tribute is as inexplicable as it is unique.
Heroic in his conduct, Colonel Frye was also unceasing in his requests for financial recognition. As we have noted, he was in command of a regiment at the capitulation of Fort William Hen- ry in August, 1757. In January, 1759, he asked the General Court to compensate him for his "faithful services, uncommon fatigues, sufferings, and losses." An entry in the Journal for March 16, 1759, indicates his success:
The House being informed that Col. Frye was at the Door accord- ing to the order of the House the last session, he was admitted into the House; and having been fully heard upon the subject of his memorial he withdrew and after a debate; voted: that the memorialist be allowed wages from the time of his entering into the service till the 4th of April 1758 at eighteen pounds per month, deducting what he has already received out of the treasury for said service.
Many of the details of Frye's picturesque, adventurous career have been related in a former chapter. In March, 1762, in asking the General Court for the privilege of settling a township in Maine, he stated that he had "spent the prime of his life in the defense of his country, viz: the last war from the beginning of the year 1745 till the settlement of a peace and the present war from the year 1754 till last December (saving a suspension of
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eighteen months occasioned by his falling into the hands of the enemy when Fort William Henry was taken and by which he sus- tained a heavy loss)." In view of this record nobody in Andover or in Massachusetts was likely to begrudge Colonel Frye this modest recompense for the hardships which he had under- gone.
For pathetic and humorous contrast we turn to the case of John Beverly, one of those ne'er-do-wells, half amiable, half irri- tating, to be found in every Yankee village. Andover has always had its share of individualists, like Martha Carrier, who catch the imagination because they are different. As a minor, Beverly enlisted in 1760 but apparently saw no fighting. On January 5, 1761, at what was then called "Number 4," now Charlestown, New Hampshire, he was dismissed from service and set out in the dead of winter for Lunenburg, Massachusetts, where he had relatives. What followed was described by Beverly not once but many times in appeals to the town officials:
The day Proved extream cold & there arose a violent snowstorm and Being lost in the woods & destitute of any Fireworks could not come to any inhabitance for more than forty-eight hours in which time your memorialist was taken by the surgeon & others. He lost both his feet which came off in three weeks from that time & ever since is obliged to Go upon his knees & draw his legs behind him which are yet running sores; & so Has received his support by the charity of Tender hearted & well meaning people.
In 1763 the General Court voted him a special pension of six pounds a year, in those days a sufficient sum to keep him in com- fort. He proved, however, to be a perpetual nuisance. With an inordinate capacity for food and drink, he haunted the homes of his benefactors. In one household the family kept a barrel of hard cider, known as "Beverly's Barrel," for his delectation. In 1775, the selectmen published notices in the Essex Gazette warn- ing people to have nothing to do with Beverly, "a person of bad character." As late as 1801, he petitioned the General Court to
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have his pension raised to 40 dollars a year, and this appeal was approved.
Meanwhile the French and Indian War had gone through many phases, with alternations of failure and triumph, of gloom and hope. But the end, as we see it from our perspective, was in- evitable. Parkman has written of the conflict:
This war was the strife of a united and concentrated few against a divided and discordant many. It was the strife, too, of the past against the future; of the old against the new; of moral and intellectual tor- por against moral and intellectual life; of barren absolutism against a liberty, crude, incoherent, and chaotic, yet full of prolific vitality.
We now realize, with Parkman, that the English were sure to win. Nevertheless at the time uncertainty, and the possibility of disaster, kept Andoverians in a tense mood. Most of the fighting men were untrained except for an occasional muster on the com- mon, and many of them enlisted direct from the farm or work- shop. Never having been subjected to military discipline, they sometimes resented orders. But face to face with the enemy, whether Indians or French grenadiers, they performed credit- ably. Some underwent almost incredible suffering. Consider, for example, Andrew Johnson, who joined up with Colonel Frye in the expedition against Crown Point in 1756. His widow, Han- nah, told his story as follows:
On his return home he was taken sick by the way and was oblidged to sell his gun and blanket for less than one half their worth for nec- essary to support him by the way, or he thought he must have per- ished, for he had no money and he was brought so weak and low that I was oblidged to send a man and hors to fetch him home, which cost me twelve shillings and he was brought hom the 25th day of Novem- ber 1756 and so he remained in a Languishing Condition and at great expence for nurses, watchers, and necessaries for nine weeks and then he Died.
Still another moving story out of many was related by a man named Charles Furbush, about his great-grandfather:
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Charles Furbush had a son of the same name. Charles the son as soon as he was of age was called to serve in the French and Indian War at the forts on Lake George and Champlain. He was so young that his father chose to enlist and go with him. Father and son camped and bivouacked together and they were sleeping under the same blanket upon the ground together one night when Charles awoke and ascertained by the light of the moon shining in his father's face that he was dead.
Personal tragedies like these were frequent and disheartening. Furthermore, some early reverses led to doubt as to the outcome. Braddock's defeat on July 9, 1755, was an unexpected and colos- sal disaster; and the later catastrophe in 1757 at Fort William Henry, in which Colonel Joseph Frye had so sensational a part, was indeed discouraging, especially to the many Andover fami- lies involved. But on July 27, 1758, Admiral Boscawen and Colo- nel Jeffrey Amherst, working efficiently together, recaptured Louisbourg; and the victory of Wolfe over Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, September 13, 1759, brought the French to the verge of total defeat.
Miss Bailey lists twenty-six Andover citizens, headed by Colo- nel Joseph Frye, who served as officers during the years between 1745 and 1763. The names include those of two surgeons- Ward Noyes and Abiel Abbot-Lieutenant-Colonel James Frye, Adjutant-General Moody Bridges, and various captains, lieu- tenants, and ensigns. The expenses of the campaigns were nat- urally heavy. In the year 1753, for example, Andover's share of the provincial tax levy was 81 pounds, and the town, in addition, had its own large local charges to meet.
A delay in the peace negotiations ensued, but under the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, between Great Britain on one side and France, Spain, and Portugal on the other, France withdrew from the North American continent, at the same time turning over to Spain all the territory which she claimed west of the Missis- sippi River. This time Louisbourg was English "for keeps," and today it is a national historic park. The war had been prolonged,
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costly in men and money, full of mistakes and disappointments, and often marked by savagery and suffering, but much had been gained. The treaty with which it closed marked the end of an era. Within a few years the provincials who had been fighting shoulder to shoulder with the British in a common cause would be preparing for a rebellion against the mother country, their former ally. Seldom has the irony of intercountry vicissitude been better illustrated.
While so many of the young men were off at the wars, busi- ness in Andover was being conducted as usual. The population centered around the two stores-those of Samuel Phillips in the North Parish and of John Abbot in the south end-and around the two churches and their parsonages. The two Andover minis- ters, the Reverend John Barnard, who presided over the North Parish for thirty-eight years, from 1719 to 1757, and the Rever- end Samuel Phillips, pastor of the South Parish from 1711 to 1771, were not only contemporaries but close friends, and both conservative in their theology. They did not like the evangeli- calism of the English pulpit orator, George Whitefield; and both protested when the associated ministers of Boston and Charles- town allowed him to preach in their churches. Whitefield paid several visits to America and died in 1770, in Newburyport, where his bones still rest in the Old First Church. Although he stirred deeply many pious, well-intentioned people in Massachu- setts, Andover would have nothing to do with him. As a "flaming apostle," he was largely responsible for the Great Awakening, the influence of which on Andover was negligible.
Samuel Phillips, of the South Parish, was quite ready to guide his flock on matters both spiritual and secular, and watched over their welfare and demeanor as if they were his own children. A man of impressive physique and bearing, he walked each Sunday morning from the parsonage to the meeting house, his Negro servant on his left and his wife, with her maid, on his right. It was a slow and stately procession which the congregation rose to
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greet as it entered the church door. Phillips preached by the hourglass, to the last grain of sand, and filed his sermons away meticulously for possible repetition. Of these, some twenty were published during his lifetime, including one delivered in 1767 over the body of a suicide in the parish. This sermon was printed with a gruesome title page, headed with a skull and crossbones and bordered heavily in black. The unfortunate victim was not allowed to be buried in the churchyard, but was laid by the min- ister's order in a lonely grave under an oak tree on his farm.
On June 8, 1762, the Reverend Mr. Phillips preached with vigor on the inadequacy of his salary, a subject on which he fre- quently dwelt. Although he was well-to-do and had married a woman of property, he insisted on regular payment of his salary as a matter of principle. He himself gave one-tenth of his con- siderable annual income to the poor. He paid his parochial calls on horseback, with his madame on a pillion behind him. His portrait, one of the earliest to be painted of an Andover resident, shows a man with long hair falling down to his shoulders, in clerical garb, with firm lips and jaw. He was a person accustomed to command, without apologies, explanations, or fears.
In enforcing moral standards among his parishioners, Phillips was stern and inflexible. The two most popular sins, according to the Historical Manual of the South Church in Andover, Mass., were drunkenness and fornication, as they had been among the Pilgrim Fathers. The flesh could not be restrained. Formal trials were held in the church, with the minister questioning witnesses and taking affidavits. The common penalties were the require- ment of full confession and suspension from church privileges. Cases of formal excommunication were very rare. Mr. Phillips never hesitated to reprove his congregation for their misbehav- ior in church, and more than once rebuked them sharply for "inattentive manners in the House of God." Sometimes he took more drastic action. In 1769, he procured a warrant for the ar- rest of a youth who "sported and played, and by indecent ges-
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tures and wry faces, caused laughter and misbehavior in the be- holders, and thereby greatly disturbed the Congregation."
The original church building in the South Parish was out- grown within a quarter of a century. On June 6, 1732, the con- gregation, which had increased considerably in size, passed a vote "that the precinct will build a new meeting house upon the school-house hill: known and commonly called Roger's Hill." An attempt in the following year to designate a more central location was voted down, 65 to 24. The new church, constructed "after the same form and fashion as the old," was "thirty feet between plate and sill, and forty-four feet wide, and fifty-six feet in length." Mr. Phillips preached his last sermon in the old church on May 12, 1734, from the appropriate text, "Arise, let us go hence." A week later he delivered his first sermon in the new edifice, using as his text two verses from First Chronicles, 29:
Now therefore, our God, we thank thee, and praise thy glorious name. But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to offer willingly after this sort? For all things come from Thee and of thine own have we given Thee.
The allotment of pews was as difficult as assigning politicians seats at a Democratic Party dinner. A proposal to sell pews was rejected, and finally a committee was appointed to seat the con- gregation, "by their judgment, having respect to both money and age." We may be sure that few of the assignees were satis- fied. In 1762 the policy was changed to allow the highest tax- payers the first choice, and thirty-three pews were sold outright, in the order of the local assessments "in the last province rate." On this basis the first ten were:
John Foster Thomas Holt George Abbot Zeb. Abbot Henry Abbot
Samuel Abbot James Parker Timothy Ballard Timothy Chandler John Abbot
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It may be taken for granted that these ten were the financial magnates of the South Parish. They are all old Andover names, and exactly half of them are Abbots. The Abbots seem to have been more peace loving than the Fryes, and among them were clergymen, physicians, scholars, schoolmasters, and businessmen, as well as prosperous farmers. An unusually high proportion were college graduates at a time when it was a real distinction to hold a bachelor's degree. Some of the women were distin- guished for their strong character, one of the most conspicuous being Sarah Abbot (1737-1831), housekeeper for Esquire Samuel Phillips in the North Parish. It is said that after his death in 1790 she kept up the family farm and planted herself a nursery of a thousand trees. Stricken with blindness in her old age, she continued to work outdoors, using a rope to guide her on her walks. The Abbot Genealogy mentions hundreds of descendants from all over the country, many of whom joined in the nine- teenth century in erecting in the South Church Burying Ground a monument to the memory of the original proprietor :*
GEORGE ABBOT Born in England Was One of the First Settlers Of Andover A.D. 1643 Where in 1647 he Married HANNAH CHANDLER He died Dec 1681, aet 66 She died June 1711 aet 82 Their Descendants In Reverence for their Moral Worth and Christian Virtues Erected This Monument A.D. 1843
* Merely to preserve the record, the first person to be laid to rest in the South Parish burying ground was apparently Robert Russell, who died in December, 1710. The old- est existing monument, however, is that to Mrs. Ann Blanchard, erected in 1723.
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Of the South Church which the Abbots so handsomely sup- ported we are fortunate to have a description written by a man with a literary sense, Josiah Quincy (1772-1864), first cousin once-removed of Judge Samuel Phillips and well acquainted with Andover and its people. It is true that this second meeting house was, in 1788, superseded by a still newer building and that Quincy's recollections are those of a boy. Furthermore, the Rev- erend Mr. Phillips died in 1771, and Quincy knew only his suc- cessor, the Reverend Jonathan French. Nevertheless the picture, although inaccurate in some minor details, is true in spirit:
It was surrounded by horse-blocks innumerable, with a dispro- portionate number of sheds ;- for the pillion was the ladies' traveling delight, and alone or in pairs, with their husbands or fathers, they seldom failed to come trooping to their devotions. The church it- self was a shingled mass, lofty, and, I should think, containing twice the area of its successor. This, however, may be the exaggeration of my boyish fancy, but it had three lofty stories, with three galleries in the interior, always densely filled with apparently pious zeal, and ear- nest listeners. In the left hand gallery sat the ladies, in the right the gentlemen, in the midst of whom and in front sat the tything man, with his white pole three or four cubits in length, the emblem of his dignity and power, and in his right hand a short hazel rod, which, ever and anon, in the midst of the sermon, to the awakening and alarm of the whole congregation, he would, with the full force of his arm, bring down with a ringing slap on the front of the gallery, shaking it, at the same time, with a terrific menace, at two or three frightened urchins who were whispering or playing in a corner. In a square box in front of the pulpit sat the Deacons, one of whom had pen, ink, and paper, and was carefully taking the heads of the preach- er's discourse, preparing documentary evidence, either that the ser- mon was old, or its doctrines new, or consonant with the orthodox platform. In the front gallery sat Precentor Ames, or Eames, with a pitch-pipe, the token of his authority, with which, as soon as the first line of the Psalm was read, he gave the note to the choir of both sexes,-twenty or thirty of each,-following the Deacon, reading line
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by line in an ecstasy of harmony which none but the lovers of music realize. ...
And the mighty congregation seemed to realize their felicity, for they joined the choir with a will, realizing or exemplifying the hap- piness of which they sung. It is true, as Washington Irving relates, concerning a like assembly in an English country parish, sometimes when they began,-
"Come let us sing with one accord,"
it was a signal for parting company, and every one setting up for himself. Yet upon the whole, it was an exciting scene, elevating and solemnizing the mind, by the multitude that took part in it.
The windows of the vast building were of diamond-shaped glass panes, of rhomboid form, in length about three or four inches, in breadth perhaps two or three. Opening like doors outward, these windows were loose and shackling. In the winter, when the north wind shook the vast building with unmistakable power, their rat- tling was often a match, and sometimes an overmatch, for the voice of the clergyman, while the pious females in the pews, sitting, for the most part, on hard benches, with small muffs, and their feet only comforted with small stoves, or stockings over shoes, or heated bricks, had much ado through their sufferings to keep their attention fixed, or the text in memory, and register the infinitesimal heads into which it was divided.
The Reverend Samuel Phillips was, of course, in his day the center of all these various ceremonial procedures. Not only was he a figure of considerable intellectual and moral proportions, but he was also the founder of a dynasty notable even in New England. Its quality in the town for four generations was un- mistakable, and among the later descendants outside of Andover in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were some of the Com- monwealth's foremost citizens-John Phillips (1770-1823), the first mayor of Boston, Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), the great liberal orator, Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), the eloquent Bishop, and William Phillips, our ambassador to Italy and Canada.
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The oldest son of the Reverend Samuel Phillips was another Samuel Phillips (1715-1790), known as Esquire Phillips to dis- tinguish him from the minister, his father, and from the judge, his son. Esquire Phillips, like his two brothers, John Phillips (1719-1795) and William Phillips (1722-1804), engaged in what were called, rather loosely, "mercantile pursuits" and became in the North Parish as prominent and respected as his father was in the South Parish. After being graduated from Harvard in 1734-where he was rated socially Number Eight in a class of twenty-seven-he taught for two or three years in the Andover town grammar school. In 1730, however, he married Elizabeth Barnard, who brought him a considerable fortune, which he so increased by judicious investments and the profits from com- mercial ventures that he accumulated a considerable property. When he set up a store in the North Parish, his father wrote him a letter, dated September 27, 1738, giving him some sound advice:
As to your trading, keep fair and true accounts, and do wrong to no man; but sell as cheap to a child as you would to one that is adult; never take advantage of any, either because of their ignorance or their poverty; for if you do it will not turn out to your own advan- tage; but ye contrary. And as you may not wrong any person, so nei- ther wrong ye Truth in any case whatever, for ye sake of gain or from any other motive. Either be silent or else speak ye truth.
And be prudent but not yet over timorous and over scrupulous in ye article of Trusting, lest you stand in your own light. Some peo- ple are more honest p'haps than you think for, and it may be will pay you sooner than you expect. Keep to your shop, if you expect that to keep you and be not out of ye way when customers come.
To these descendants of middle-class Englishmen there was nothing discreditable in storekeeping, especially if it could be made to pay. Esquire Phillips not only became a prosperous citi- zen, but was also the recipient at various times of the highest honors which his fellow townsmen could bestow.
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When a community has a doctor as well as a minister and a schoolmaster, it must be regarded as civilized. Although Dr. Israel How settled in the South Parish in 1718, we know nothing of his professional training or standing. When he died in 1740, he was evidently succeeded by his son, Dr. Daniel How. About the same time Dr. John Kittredge moved to Andover from Tewksbury, establishing himself in the North Parish, where he acquired a wide reputation as a surgeon and a large amount of real estate. He had three physician sons, one of whom, Dr. Thom- as Kittredge, inherited his father's extensive Andover practice and built in 1784 the fine residence on Academy Road still oc- cupied by his descendants. Of it Miss Bailey wrote:
This, at the time of its erection, had no equal for elegance in the North Parish, and was only rivalled by the Mansion House of Judge Phillips in the South Parish. The Kittredge mansion remains nearly unaltered from its original construction. The lofty ceilings, the great hall and broad staircase (a contrast to the small entry and winding, narrow stairs of the great houses of the colonial period), the heavy door and ponderous brass knocker, the long avenue leading up from the front yard gate, mark it as one of the stately homes of a yet court- ly period, when even the most "republican" and democratic in theory held, in respect to style of living and social customs, the aristocratic ideas of the Old Country traditions.
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