USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > Andover: symbol of New England; the evolution of a town > Part 29
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
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
These bitter animosities and manifestations of bigotry did the Seminary much harm. The attention of thoughtful people was directed to the outmoded provisions of its constitution; and its decline, when the light of modern investigation was turned on them, was inevitable. Professor Tucker became president of Dartmouth College, and Professor Harris of Amherst. Professor Hincks was still on the faculty when the Seminary was moved to Cambridge in 1908. Meanwhile the Seminary continued to function, although the teachers nearly outnumbered the stu- dents. Eventually the Seminary shook off the grip of the Dead Hand. It would have perished lamentably if it had not done so. The townspeople watched these strange proceedings with in- credulity, knowing that the accused professors were both schol-
347
ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
arly and saintly, good neighbors whom they viewed with respect.
A very important event for all Andoverians was the observ- ance in 1878 of the centennial of Phillips Academy. Dr. Cecil F. P. Bancroft, who had succeeded Frederick W. Tilton as prin- cipal in 1873, found a school which was running behind finan- cially each year and falling off in attendance. Realizing that something dramatic was needed to revive interest in his institu- tion, the imaginative Bancroft perceived in the approaching one hundredth anniversary a means of kindling enthusiasm. The trustees, more concerned with the Seminary than with the Acad- emy, somewhat reluctantly let him have his way, and in 1877 appointed a committee to make the necessary arrangements. As one of the three members, Bancroft himself did far more than his share of the work. It was he who secured the active coopera- tion of the town fathers, who named a large special committee, with Marcus Morton, one of the leading citizens, as chairman. In 1878 he was a Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth, and he was to become Chief Justice in 1882. An outstanding nisi prius judge, he was in private life plain and unassuming, content to do the day's work without acclaim or ostentation. His association with the celebration gave it prestige throughout the state.
Justice Morton appointed several subcommittees from the town, and 242 donors subscribed the sum of 2,024.85 dollars. The additional cost of the program, amounting to 897.02 dol- lars, was provided by the always generous Deacon Peter Smith. Nearly a hundred families in the town placed their homes at the disposal of the committee for the entertainment of guests. Indeed only the cooperation of the townspeople made a success- ful anniversary possible.
The town had seen nothing like this celebration since the Seminary semicentennial in 1858, and as the hour drew near the excitement was intense. Streets and residences were lavishly decorated with flags and bunting; historic sites were marked by
348
PLACES AND PERSONALITIES
draped inscriptions; the Academy campus was illuminated at night with Chinese lanterns hung from the ancient elms, and a full moon made the scene even more romantic. The exercises opened on Wednesday afternoon, June 5, and on that evening a crowd of nearly four thousand people gathered in a huge tent which had been set up on the training field, where the Memorial Tower is now located. There Principal Bancroft delivered an address of welcome, and the Reverend William E. Park, Profes- sor Park's son, read a scholarly paper, The Annals of Phillips Acad- emy, in which he incorporated much valuable and hitherto un- published material on the early days of the school.
On the following morning, still with good weather prevail- ing, a program was held in the pavilion, including an almost interminable oration by the Reverend Alexander Mckenzie and the reading of an original poem, The School Boy, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. At noon, a procession, headed by General William Cogswell, as chief marshal, and the Boston Cadet Band, marched around the campus, ending at a second large tent, where 1,556 persons, by actual count, sat down to lunch. The toastmaster, Professor John W. Churchill, who in those days had a virtual monopoly on that office, introduced a long list of speakers, including Governor Alexander H. Rice, Phillips Brooks, Josiah Quincy, the young President Eliot, of Harvard, and other major and minor celebrities. The exercises concluded with a band concert, an evening reception, and reunions of the various classes.
The volume of trustees' Records in which, a century before, the first clerk, Jonathan French, had inscribed the constitution in flowing script, was now, by a remarkable coincidence, filled all but one page. On this the jubilant Principal Bancroft wrote these words:
The Trustees, assembled this day at the Mansion House, review with thankfulness and exultation the historical facts, that more than 9000 students have enjoyed its advantages; that it is richly honored
349
1
1
ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
in its alumni, among whom are many distinguished merchants, man- ufacturers, inventors, scientists, college presidents and professors, doctors of medicine, statesmen, diplomats, missionaries, and minis- ters of the Gospel; that large numbers of its graduates have risen to high places of trust and honor; that not a few, for various eminent services, have been placed on the roll of the most distinguished men of our age, and that the Academy has been a fountain of measureless influences which through many channels have flowed forth for the good of our country and the world.
To the credit of the town it must be noted that the largest of many gifts at this celebration was the Peter Smith Byers En- dowment Fund of 40,000 dollars, the income from which was to be "forever used for the support and maintenance of the Prin- cipal for the time being of Phillips Academy." Its creators were Peter Smith, of Andover, who gave 20,000 dollars; his brother, John Smith, also of Andover, who gave 10,000 dollars; and their nephew, John Byers, of New York, who gave the remaining 10,000 dollars. Peter Smith Byers, another nephew of the two Smiths, had been a teacher at Phillips Academy but resigned in 1853 to become principal of Abbot Academy. He shortly left to accept a position at Providence High School but returned with- in a few months to Andover as principal of the new Punchard Free School. He died in 1856, at the age of twenty-nine, before he had taken his new post. He was regarded as a gifted young man, with a brilliant future ahead of him in his profession.
The centennial marked a decisive turning point in the history of Phillips Academy. Its lean years were now left behind, and it gradually became more prosperous than the Seminary. Before Dr. Bancroft died, on October 4, 1901, it had become the great national independent school which it is today.
Perhaps this is an appropriate place for introducing some comment on various books dealing with the Andover of "olden times," now half forgotten. Leaving aside the poems of Anne
350
PLACES AND PERSONALITIES
Bradstreet and such unexciting stuff as the printed sermons of the Reverend Samuel Phillips and other local divines, the ear- liest volume about the town and its people was Wensley, A Story without a Moral, published in 1854 by Edmund Quincy (1808- 1877), a graduate of Phillips Academy in 1823 and of Harvard in 1827. Quincy, a Garrisonian abolitionist and a radical re- former, was actually a genial soul who has been described as "an old-fashioned scholar and gentleman" and had a good sense of humor of the Washington Irving type, arousing smiles rather than laughter.
The hero of this tale, a convivial and rusticated Harvard un- dergraduate named Osborne, has been sent to be tutored by the seventy-year-old Reverend Adrian Bulkley, of Wensley-a thin- ly disguised Andover-whose prototype is said to have been the Reverend Jonathan French, minister of the South Parish from 1772 until his death in 1809. Bulkley, like French, served in the Revolution, from Lexington to Yorktown, first as a chaplain and then as a regular officer. The author describes him as "a Calvinist of the very straitest sect," adding, "A milder and kind- er soul never looked forward to the ultimate damnation of the vast majority of mankind, including all heathendom, ancient and modern, and all unregenerate infancy." Commenting fur- ther, Quincy says of Bulkley, "He pitied the Unitarians; but he cordially despised those divines, claiming to hold the good old Orthodox faith, who devised ways of escape from the stern re- sults of election and reprobation, of original sin and redemption by grace."
The plot of the tale is complicated and confusing, obviously influenced by the Waverley tales. Osborne, an engaging young rascal, meets in Wensley a wealthy Colonel Miles Atherton, of a Tory family, who lives on an estate called Woodside and has a charming daughter, Miss Eleanor. The descriptions of the An- dover countryside seem realistic even today. Here, for example, is a picture of what Quincy calls the "Quasheen River":
351
ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
The innocent little stream had not yet been compelled by the genius of the lamp or of the ring to help build the palaces of our New England Aladdins; it yet ran sparkling and dimpling to the sea, without having to buffet with mill-wheels, and to fling itself head- long, as it fled, over injurious dams in desperate waterfalls. Cows stood up to the middle in its shady little bays; ducks let out their flotilla of ducklings upon its waters; and swallows dipped in it with none to molest, or make them afraid.
Osborne, we are told, often whipped the river for trout; and on one dramatic occasion he rescued Miss Eleanor from the water into which she had been thrown from her horse.
In due season a villainous foreigner, dark-browed and sinis- ter, turns up and threatens to reveal Eleanor's father as a forger if she does not marry him. Meanwhile, also, Osborne has to con- front another handsome rival in the person of Harry Markham, a young graduate of Oxford who brings to his wooing something rich and strange. The accusations of the villain, Ferguson, be- come the talk of Boston, but in the end, as the reader must have suspected, his evil plotting is disclosed, and he is lodged in the county jail. The novel ends with the fair Eleanor confessing that she cares nothing for Markham and is ready to take the long- suffering Osborne for a husband.
Although this novel was mildly praised by contemporary crit- ics, it is slow reading in our generation. However, its picture of Andover in the period after the Revolution but before the Sem- inary is drawn from an accurate memory. At a formal dinner, Colonel Allerton's table linen was of "the finest of damask"; and his silver forks "were the first that had penetrated to Wensley, and were a marvel, and a mystery to its oldest inhabitants, who had never heard of the like." "At that time," says Quincy, "this luxury, which has now become almost a necessity, was confined, even in the cities, to the very rich, and, indeed, not always in daily use with them."
Quincy's recollection of a post-Revolutionary church gather-
352
PLACES AND PERSONALITIES
ing on Sunday morning as described by his hero is the best that I have found:
After the first bell had rung the roads leading to the meeting house, which was fully commanded by my window, began to be alive with church goers, and to put an increasing tide upon the green on which the building stood. Some came on horseback, but more in bellows- top chaises, or gigs with leathern heads, that shut back with springs, and had a certain resemblance to the fullicular convenience from which they derived their name. A few were conveyed in vehicles which have long been numbered among the extinct races, and which had come down from the middle of the last century. Square-top chaises they were denominated, or gig with immovable leathern heads, and little windows at the back and sides. Some of them had a seat in front for a boy to sit upon, and drive ....
But the greater part of the people, young and old, honestly trudged on foot. They came trooping along in families, and sometimes in pairs, the latter not infrequently looking rather sheepish and con- scious; though I'm sure I don't know why they should. They were perfectly well-behaved young men and women, for all I could see. Arrived at the church, the "leathern inconveniences" were put in the horse-sheds, which formed a sort of outwork on three sides of the meeting house. The women all entered the house as they arrived, and were seen no more by me for the time; but the men remained without, standing about the door, or dispersed in groups over the green discussing the weather, the crops, or the next election. It was their weekly exchange.
Nowhere can the investigator learn better than in these pages what our town was like when the Federal Government was still very young:
So I passed on through the main street of the village, which, in- deed, was no street at all, but a country-road sprinkled with farm- houses, none of which seemed to have been built since the old French War, with fine old elms and button-wood trees in front of most of them. Near the bridge which spanned the pretty little Quasheen, which ran through the town, was the grocer's shop, which also con-
353
ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
tained the post-office, from which favorite retreat and the bench in front of it stared whatever loungers the village could boast; but in sooth they were not many, and were mostly made so by the potent spirits of which Major Grimes had boasted himself.
About the Seminary period, when the Hill was alive with articulate men and women almost panting to be heard, we nat- urally have more details, and their impressions were recorded with an affectionate nostalgia. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's A Singu- lar Life (1894) deals in its earlier chapters with the romance be- tween a professor's daughter and a Seminary "theologue." Mrs. Ward, as she was called after her marriage, certainly knew the surroundings, having spent her girlhood in the household of her father, Professor Austin Phelps, in the stately Bulfinch resi- dence now occupied by the headmaster of Phillips Academy. The names which she gave to the institution and the buildings did not prevent them from being easily recognizable:
Helen Carruth, for one, did not object to the old red boxes and held them in respect; not for their architectural qualities, it must be owned, nor because of the presence therein of a hundred young men for whose united or separate personalities she had never cared a fig. But of the Cesarian sunsets, which are justly famous, she was observant with the enthusiasm of a girl who has so little social occu- pation that a beautiful landscape is an object of attention, even of affection. And where does reflected sunset take to itself the particular glory that it takes from Cesarea Hill?
While the love story does not precisely throb with passion in the modern sense, the author does treat sensitively the romance between the lovely Helen and "young Bayard," the city-bred theological student whose "eyes were living light." The major part of the book deals with the problems which the fledgling clergyman and his bride face in the rather "tough" fishing port of Gloucester.
In her Chapters from a Life, an informal autobiography pub-
354
PLACES AND PERSONALITIES
lished in 1896, Mrs. Ward commented particularly on the emo- tions of a maiden growing up among so many young men:
Legends of the feminine triumphs of past generations were hand- ed breathlessly down to us and cherished with awe. A lady of the vil- lage, said to have been once very handsome, was credibly reported to have refused nineteen offers of marriage. Another, still plainly beautiful, was known to have received and declined the suits of nine theologues in one winter. Neither of these ladies married. We watched their whitening hairs and serene faces with a certain pride of sex, not easily to be understood by a man. When we began to think how many times they might have married, the subject assumed sensa- tional proportions. In fact, the maiden ladies of Andover always, I fancied, regarded each other with a peculiar sense of peace. Each knew-and knew the rest knew-that it was (to use the Andover phraseology) not of predestination or foreordination but of free will absolute that an Andover girl passed through life alone.
Many of Mrs. Ward's diverting anecdotes of her girlhood days help us to understand the limitations of the Seminary faculty as well as their more obvious virtues. Speaking of the "theologues," she wrote:
One in particular I remember to have heard of who neglected the lecture-room to cultivate upon his own responsibility the mission world of what was known as Abbott Village. To the Christian social- ism of our day, the misery of factory life might seem as important for the future clergyman as the system of theology regnant in his par- ticular seminary,-but that was not the fashion of the time; at all events, the man was a student under the professor's orders, and the orders were, Keep to the curriculum; and I can but think that the professor was right when he caustically said, "That -- is wasting his Seminary course in what he calls doing good!"
Mrs. Sarah Stuart Robbins' Old Andover Days appeared in 1908, the year when the Seminary was moved to Cambridge. She was a daughter of the distinguished Professor Moses Stuart and, as the aunt of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, shared many of the
355
ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
same memories. In her reminiscences, she rather tended to sen- timentalize and idealize the scene:
Andover Hill! are there many still living, I wonder, who know what those words meant in the old days? Pisgah, the Anniversary discourses used to call it, or Sinai, or the Hill of Zion, where Siloa's brook did flow fast by the oracles of God. Oh, they used to compare our Hill to every height mentioned in the Bible,-except, of course, the mountain of the temptation.
It was not that our Hill was so very lofty: it was high enough to afford wide views of plain and river and distant delectable moun- tains; high enough to get the full glory of sunrise and sunset and of the nightly hemisphere of stars; high enough, also, to receive the purifying and flesh mortifying sweep of all the long, cold winds of winter. But when they called it Pisgah and Zion, they had rather in mind the presence there of Andover's Theological Seminary, which was set on a hill in man's thoughts as is no similar institution in these widely different days.
Mrs. Robbins deals pleasantly with the Andover schools, the Puritan Sabbath, the week-day religious meetings, the holidays, the trysting places, and particularly with some women and "men of the olden time," concluding with her father, Professor Stuart, whose "home life was only an incident in his scholarly career" and who was dedicated to a task of supreme importance:
I think it must have come to us early that we were born to no com- mon lot. Andover homes were, every one of them on that sacred Hill, withdrawn in a monastic seclusion from the rest of the world. Strict Puritan rules governed every household, and yet the young life obeyed the Must and Must Not of the regime. To us as a family this was most imperative; for our mother, wisest and kindest of mothers, kept the fact constantly before us that our father was chosen and set apart from the rest of the world to do a great and important work.
Still another volume, thin and described by its author, Susan E. Jackson, as "a sort of sequel to Old Andover Days," appeared in 1914 under the title Reminiscences of Andover. This added a few
356
PLACES AND PERSONALITIES
more anecdotes to those already assembled, including the story, probably apochryphal, of the pastor of the South Church who was dismissed because he was seen kissing his wife on Sunday morning.
As a jejune chronicler of unusual events, Abiel Abbot, the town's earliest historian, duly recorded such items as exception- ally heavy snowstorms, disastrous floods, and destructive winds, mentioning not only the earthquake of 1755 but also the famous Dark Day of May 19, 1780, when the sky at noon was almost as black as midnight. He noted succinctly and without amplifica- tion that Pompey Lovejoy, once a Negro slave, died in 1826 at the age of one hundred and two, and his wife, Rose, later in the same year, at ninety-eight. These were facts which Abbot did not wish his readers to miss.
On the other hand, the reminiscent Seminarians were delib- erately literary, with pride in their style and technique. They were consciously articulate, trained in the use of written words, even the women, who seem to have been even more bookish than the men. They were somewhat self-centered and avowedly un- worldly, possibly a little too smugly devoted to higher themes and things. However they left a charming picture of an unusual social group. After one has pored over contemporary formal obituaries, it is rather thrilling to come across an anecdote like the following regarding Professor Stuart:
When the first steam-engine drew its train of cars through the pleasant meadows that, stretching back of his house, bordered the Shawsheen River, we were at the dinner table. He started from his seat, and, clasping his hands as if in prayer, said fervently, "Thank God! Thank God!"
Still more recent is a delightful volume, Sequestered Vales of Life (1946), by Arthur Stanley Pease, professor of the classics at both Amherst and Harvard and president of Amherst College from 1927 to 1932. Among a series of brief sketches of persons and places are several of people well known in the Andover of half a
357
ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
century or more ago. These articles are urbane, mildly satirical, discerning, and witty, filled with overtones and revealing under- statements. Dr. Pease, whose childhood was spent in Andover, looked with a humorist's eye on those around him: Miss Dwight, the corpulent sister-in-law of Seminary Professor Egbert Smyth, who in later life occupied a room on the second floor of a Main Street house where she could survey the passing scene and re- ceive gossipy visitors; William Fisher, a retired clergyman, known irreverently as "Willy the Fish," the suspicious victim of constitutional irresolution; Mr. Soehrens, the local barber, known to his customers as "Johnny Shoestrings," from whose lips flowed a constant stream of unorganized gossip; and the twin bachelors, customarily referred to as "Castor and Pollux," who worked around the Pease place.
Most picturesque of all was Professor John Phelps Taylor, of the Seminary, with his dark eyes and heavy white eyebrows, his silvered hair and flowing Lord Dundreary whiskers, whose flow- ing, irresponsible oratory delighted specialists in homiletic rari- ties. His habit of introducing into every discourse all the per- sonalities within his recollection sometimes convulsed his more appreciative listeners. His pulpit style, described by Pease as "florid and Asianic," led him once in a Thanksgiving sermon to refer to "the spoils of the marsh, the barnyard, and the hunter."
No one who ever heard Professor Taylor's sonorous but often meaningless rhetoric was likely to forget it. In his tributes to the departed dead, he was impressively florid and all-inclusive, but he could make any public occasion memorable. A quotation from an address delivered at the presentation to Abbot Academy of a portrait of Miss Laura Watson will show the heights to which he could rise:
For one and twenty years the school has longed in vain for Miss Watson's counterfeit presentment. Monday the gem was installed. By a rare felicity the daughter of Principal Farwell was present at the hanging. The air was redolent of the loving thoughtfulness, the se-
358
PLACES AND PERSONALITIES
vere taste, and the truthful artistry of Miss Means. The winged ac- cents of Miss McKeen were breathing in our ears. With a hospitality all her own, Miss Phoebe's black eyes welcomed Miss Watson's blue ones. The "tall, fine-looking gracious woman" Miss Kelsey knew and Tuesday, at prayers, commended to the school for her good work had brought a benediction. May the original soon return in person to this hall, enshrining her precious gift, with the shining cloud of witnesses of four and fourscore years. Among them we all but see the lamented Stone and Farwell, Hasseltine and Taylor, Park and Smith, Prof. Churchill and Dr. Donald, Kate Roberts and Mary Means, Mrs. Coburn and Mrs. Byers, Messrs. Porter, Mason, and Ty- ler, Miss Kimball, Mr. and Mrs. Downs, Colonel George Ripley, and Dr. Daniel Merriman. They and their peers are our holy dead. Above them sirs their invisible Lord and hers. May He, the Light of the World all taught and served, grant Mrs. Draper's double wish. For what? For an assurance of a New Year's present on her next and nine- tieth birthday. First, that "from the platform of Miss Watson's Sun- days, Miss Bailey's pupils may hear ere long that golden voice." Sec- ond, that "Miss Means's stately presence, limned by Miss Patterson's hand" may crown another Christmas no less graciously than this.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.