Samuel "Esquire" Phillips

Founder, Phillips Andover Academy; his brother founded Phillips Exeter Academy

The eldest brother, often called Esquire Phillips to distinguish him from his son, Judge Samuel Phillips, was born in Andover, February 13, 1715, and graduated from Harvard College in 1734. For a short time he taught the town grammar school in Andover; but he soon settled down in the North Parish, where he engaged in agriculture and trading.

On July 11, 1738, he married Elizabeth Barnard, only child of Theodore Barnard, and cousin of a neighbor, the Reverend John Barnard. Before his marriage Phillips, assisted by his father, had managed to make a bare living; but his wife brought him a considerable fortune, which he so increased by judicious investments and the profits of mercantile enterprise that he soon accumulated more than moderate wealth.

In 1752 he completed the beautiful colonial house still known as the Phillips Mansion in North Andover Center, and occupied to-day by his direct descendants, Miss Agnes and Miss Gertrude Brooks. There he resided until his death in 1790.

Esquire Phillips, who was a man of energy and talent, naturally assumed a prominent part in town affairs, and was at various times the recipient of the highest honors which his fellow citizens in Andover could offer. So far as we can judge, he was a man to be respected rather than loved. Tenacious in his opinions and haughty in his bearing, he found it difficult to unbend and make concessions to the little amenities of social life.

His townspeople, however, had confidence in him, and accordingly we find him in turn a Justice of the Peace and of the Quorum, a Representative to the General Court, a member of the Convention of Deputies, and one of the Governor's Council. In the critical decade before the Revolution he guided to a large extent the action of the town authorities. In 1765, when be was Representative, his constituents, angered by the news of the passage of Grenville's Stamp Act, instructed him to oppose the operation of the measure. In June. 1768. after Governor Barnard had dissolved the General Court, Phillips was sent as a delegate to a convention of representatives from various towns of the Commonwealth; and in September, when this patriotic assembly met and expressed its aversion "to standing armies, to tumults and disorders," he was present as a leader. In May of the same year, as Chairman of a Special Committee, he presented a report recommending that the citizens "by all prudent means endeavor to discountenance the importation and use of foreign superfluities, and to promote and encourage manufactures in the town." As Chairman of a similar committee in 1774 he was mainly responsible for a resolution supporting and confirming the non-importation agreement recently passed by the "Grand American Continental Congress"; and he was at once appointed Chairman of a large Committee of Safety, whose duty it was to enforce the execution of this memorable agreement. During these troublous years Esquire Phillips was regularly the Moderator of the Town Meeting.

Although he was conservative in temperament and not altogether in sympathy with the movement for total separation from the mother country, he presided when the town directed a part of its militia force to enlist in the Continental army, and voted them food and supplies. With the actual outbreak of hostilities, however, his son, Samuel Phillips, Jr., gradually took his father's place as aggressive leader; but the elder Phillips, despite his instinctive reluctance to the shouldering of arms, was always ready to lend his assistance, whether in money or counsel, to the more radical of his neighbors. The charge of Toryism occasionally brought against him has no justification.