Merrimack Valley · MA-06
Andover
Phillips Hill, Cochichewick water, a town that has been at the leading edge of American education since 1778.
Overview
Andover sits on land the Pennacook and Pawtucket people called Cochichewick, the place of the great cascade. The English town was chartered in 1646. In 1692 more Andover residents were accused of witchcraft than from any other town in colonial Massachusetts, including Salem itself. In 1778, a 26-year-old Harvard graduate named Samuel Phillips Jr. opened Phillips Academy in a converted carpenter's shop. Thirty years later the town added the first graduate school of any kind in the United States. Andover Seminary students launched the American foreign missions movement in 1810, the Smith and Dove mills spun flax thread for Union army boots, and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her later antislavery work in a remodeled stone workshop on the seminary grounds. The 20th century turned Andover into a Raytheon and Pfizer town. The 21st century has made it home to one of the most prominent Vietnamese American legislators in the country.
Tram's connection
Andover is the town Tram came home to. After a childhood in public housing in Lawrence and high school in Methuen, she put down roots here as an adult, an attorney, a state representative, and a neighbor. The Merrimack Valley she grew up in is the Valley that built Phillips Academy and Memorial Hall Library, and it is the Valley that resettled her family after 1975. The documentary thread of this chapter is the long line connecting Cochichewick to Cutshamache to the Jenkins house to the apartment a Vietnamese family in Lawrence made into a first American address.
The moments
The sourced timeline.
- 01
May 16, 1646 · Colonial · pre-1763
Cochichewick becomes Andover
Indigenous HistoryCivic FirstsFor centuries before English settlement, the land that would become Andover was Pennacook and Pawtucket country, watered by the brook the Algonquian peoples called Cochichewick, the place of the great cascade. The largest village and trading center in the region sat downriver at Pawtucket, near present-day Lowell.
On May 16, 1646, the sagamore Cutshamache appeared before the General Court in Boston and acknowledged that, for six pounds of currency and a coat, he had transferred the land to a company of English settlers led by John Woodbridge. The deed reserved the right of a Pennacook man named Roger to continue planting his corn and taking alewives from the brook. The town was incorporated that year and named for Andover, in England.
The deed is one of the small set of surviving 17th-century records in Massachusetts that captures, on paper, the moment a Native sagamore and an English court formally exchanged land. The terms it set, and the terms it did not, would echo through the next two centuries.
Figures · Cutshamache, John Woodbridge, Passaconaway
- 02
Summer 1692 · Colonial · pre-1763
The witch panic moved up the Merrimack
Civic FirstsThe 1692 panic is remembered as a Salem story. The numbers tell a different one. Between July 15 and September 7 of that summer, Justice of the Peace Dudley Bradstreet signed roughly thirty arrest warrants for Andover residents. By the time the trials ended, about forty-five people from Andover had been formally accused of witchcraft, more than from any other town in colonial Massachusetts.
Three Andover residents were executed. Martha Carrier was hanged at Salem on August 19, 1692, with George Burroughs, John Proctor, and two others. Samuel Wardwell was hanged on September 22. Mary Parker, who lived in what is now North Andover, was hanged the same day. Ann Foster was condemned but died in prison before her execution date. Five more Andover residents, several of them daughters and a granddaughter of the local minister Francis Dane, were convicted and reprieved.
The panic moved through Andover so quickly because, unlike Salem Village, Andover was already a tightly networked agricultural town. When the accusations crossed the town line, the chains of suspicion ran through cousins, in-laws, and neighbors. Reverend Dane, whose own family was repeatedly accused, became one of the first ministers in Massachusetts to publicly question the trials.
“More Andover residents were accused than from any other town in colonial Massachusetts, including Salem itself.”
Figures · Martha Carrier, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Ann Foster, Reverend Francis Dane
- 03
April 21, 1778 · Revolution · 1763–1815
Samuel Phillips Jr. opens a school in the middle of a revolution
EducationCivic FirstsOn April 21, 1778, with the Continental Army still fighting for survival, a 26-year-old Harvard graduate and Andover merchant named Samuel Phillips Jr. opened a small academy in a converted carpenter's shop. Phillips and his fellow Harvard alumnus Eliphalet Pearson had written the school's constitution that same month, declaring that the institution would educate youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter for service to the new republic.
The revolutionary moment was not incidental. Phillips and Pearson were already manufacturing gunpowder for the Continental Army. Paul Revere designed the school's seal. John Hancock signed its act of incorporation in 1780. The first class included Josiah Quincy III, future mayor of Boston and president of Harvard, and Levi Hutchins, who would invent the alarm clock.
Phillips Academy is the oldest incorporated academy in the United States. Its early decision to define education as preparation for civic leadership shaped a long roster of American figures: Samuel F.B. Morse in the class of 1805, Frederick Law Olmsted in 1838, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the 1850s, Henry L. Stimson in 1883, Humphrey Bogart, Jack Lemmon in 1943, and George H.W. Bush, also in 1942.
Figures · Samuel Phillips Jr., Eliphalet Pearson, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Josiah Quincy III
- 04
1808 · Revolution · 1763–1815
The first graduate school in the United States
EducationCivic FirstsIn 1808, the trustees of Phillips Academy chartered Andover Theological Seminary on the hill above the academy. It was the first institution in the United States to offer formal graduate study in any field, and the first in North America to endow a professorship.
The seminary opened because a group of conservative Calvinist faculty had left Harvard over the appointment of the Unitarian Henry Ware to the Hollis Chair of Divinity in 1805. Andover became the country's first Protestant graduate school precisely because Harvard had moved theologically away from them. Its three-year curriculum in Bible, church history, doctrinal theology, and practical ministry became the model copied by every American divinity school that followed.
For the next half century, Andover Hill was one of the most influential intellectual addresses in the country. The seminary later merged with Newton Theological Institution in 1965, and its archives are now held by Yale Divinity School.
Figures · Eliphalet Pearson, Leonard Woods, Moses Stuart
- 05
1810 · Revolution · 1763–1815
American foreign missions begin on Andover Hill
Civic FirstsEducationIn August 1806, five Williams College students sheltering from a thunderstorm under a haystack in Williamstown resolved to send the gospel to Asia. The leader of the group, Samuel J. Mills, went on to enroll at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1810 he and his Andover classmates petitioned the General Association of Massachusetts Congregational ministers to organize an American body for foreign missions.
The result, founded that year and incorporated in 1812, was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. It was the first organization in the United States chartered to send Christian missionaries overseas. Its first dispatch reached India in 1812. In the decades that followed, the ABCFM sent Americans to Hawaii, the Ottoman Empire, China, and southern Africa, shaping American engagement abroad in ways that ranged from school-building to deeply complicated entanglements with imperial power.
The whole architecture, the petition, the board, the model of an American religious civil society organization with a global field of operations, was assembled by graduate students on a hill in Andover.
Figures · Samuel J. Mills, Adoniram Judson, Samuel Newell
- 06
1830s to 1860s · Industrial · 1815–1880
An abolitionist town and an Underground Railroad station
AbolitionCivil RightsAndover was among the first towns in Massachusetts to form a local antislavery society in the 1830s. The Andover Anti-Slavery Society pulled members from the seminary, the academy, and the farming families that ran the town. George Foster, an Andover Quaker, traveled New England in the 1830s and 1840s as a circulating agent for William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard.
The town's most documented Underground Railroad station was the home of William and Mary Jenkins. From the 1830s through the Civil War, the Jenkinses sheltered freedom seekers in a hidden room above their attic, large enough to conceal one person at a time. William Lloyd Garrison visited regularly. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the freedom seeker George Latimer called at the house. The Jenkins home also hosted Essex County Women's Anti-Slavery conferences.
Andover sat on a route that ran north from Danvers through Lawrence and across the New Hampshire line. The town's abolitionist culture and its seminary's antislavery theology gave that route both shelter and ideological cover.
Figures · William Jenkins, Mary Jenkins, George Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass
- 07
1835 to 1927 · Industrial · 1815–1880
Smith and Dove turn Scottish flax into Union army boots
LaborInnovationImmigrationIn 1835 the brothers John and Peter Smith and their partner John Dove, all trained in the flax mills of Brechin, Scotland, opened a flax-spinning operation in Andover's Frye Village. By 1843 they had moved up the Shawsheen River into the former Abbot Mill. The company called itself the first factory in America for the manufacture of linen threads.
Through the 19th century, Smith and Dove turned imported flax into the linen thread sewn into shoes, sail cloth, and carpets. During the Civil War they supplied the heavy linen thread used to stitch boots for the Union army. By 1896 the company employed about three hundred workers, many of them recruited directly from Brechin, and offered low-cost company housing and recreation in what became Shawsheen Village.
John Smith himself was a committed abolitionist, an ally of William Lloyd Garrison, and an early donor to anti-slavery organizing in the Merrimack Valley. The mill operated under Smith and Dove ownership until 1927, when it was sold to Ludlow Manufacturing.
Figures · John Smith, Peter Smith, John Dove
- 08
1853 · Industrial · 1815–1880
Harriet Beecher Stowe writes from the Stone Cabin
AbolitionWomen's RightsWhen Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, she was living in Brunswick, Maine. The following year her husband, Calvin E. Stowe, accepted a chair at Andover Theological Seminary, and the family moved to Andover Hill.
Their new home was a long stone shell of a building that the seminary had originally built in 1828 as a student workshop. Stowe used royalty checks from Uncle Tom's Cabin to renovate it, dividing it into rooms, adding fireplaces and window seats, plastering the walls, and installing an Italianate piazza at the entrance. She christened it Stowe Cabin. The remodel cost roughly $2,891.
Stowe lived in Andover from 1852 to 1864, the years in which she wrote much of her later antislavery work. The Atlantic Monthly published essays from the Andover house. Frederick Douglass visited. The Stowe presence on Andover Hill, layered onto an already abolitionist seminary culture, made the town one of the most prominent antislavery addresses in New England in the decade before the Civil War.
“The Atlantic Monthly published her later antislavery essays from a stone workshop on the seminary grounds.”
Figures · Harriet Beecher Stowe, Calvin E. Stowe
- 09
May 30, 1873 · Industrial · 1815–1880
Memorial Hall Library opens as a Civil War remembrance
VeteransEducationCivic FirstsThe cornerstone of Memorial Hall Library was laid on September 19, 1871. The building was dedicated on May 30, 1873, the same date the country had begun observing as Decoration Day. The architect, John F. Eaton, designed it in the Second Empire style. The first floor held the library. The second floor was a Civil War memorial.
Above the front door, the town inscribed the words Lest We Forget. Inside Memorial Hall, marble tablets named the 46 Andover men who died in the war, with the date and location of each death. Three additional plaques recorded the names of 172 more Andover men who had served.
The dedication procession was led by the Andover Brass Band. The Andover Choral Union sang a hymn written for the occasion by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. From its first day, Memorial Hall Library was meant to be both a working public library and the town's permanent record of the cost of the war that ended slavery.
Figures · John F. Eaton, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
- 10
1980 · Contemporary · 1965–today
Raytheon opens its largest plant on Lowell Street
LaborInnovationVeteransRaytheon opened its Andover campus on Lowell Street in 1980. Over the next four decades it grew into the largest Raytheon facility in the world, the headquarters of what was then called Integrated Defense Systems, and the final integration point for the Patriot missile system, which the United States and its allies have deployed in nearly every major conflict since the Gulf War.
The plant gave the Merrimack Valley a 20th-century industrial anchor as durable as the Smith and Dove mills had been a century earlier. In 2024 the successor company, RTX, broke ground on a $53 million, 23,000-square-foot expansion of the Andover plant to scale production of the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, the next-generation system that will replace Patriot radar.
Andover is also a Pfizer town. The Pfizer Andover campus runs eight buildings of laboratories, clinical and commercial manufacturing suites, purification and support, and a clinical drug-product manufacturing facility. Between Raytheon and Pfizer, Andover holds an unusual position in the modern economy: a small New England town that is simultaneously a center of national defense production and a node of the global pharmaceutical industry.
- 11
1975 to present · Contemporary · 1965–today
The Merrimack Valley becomes a Vietnamese American home
ImmigrationCivil RightsAfter the fall of Saigon in 1975 and through the 1980s and 1990s, the Merrimack Valley became one of the principal Vietnamese American resettlement regions in the northeastern United States. Lawrence, immediately east of Andover, took in thousands of refugees and their families. The mill housing built in the 19th century for Irish, French Canadian, and Italian workers became, in the late 20th century, the first American address for many Vietnamese families.
Tram Nguyen was one of those children. She arrived in the United States as a five-year-old political refugee with her family and roughly one hundred dollars, and grew up in public housing in Lawrence before her family moved to Methuen. She went on to Tufts, to Northeastern Law, to the Kennedy School, and into legal aid work in Boston. In 2018 she became the first Vietnamese American woman elected to public office in Massachusetts.
She now represents the 18th Essex District, which covers parts of Andover, Boxford, North Andover, and Tewksbury, and she lives in Andover. The arc from a Lawrence apartment to a seat in the State House to a candidacy for Congress traces, in one biography, the resettlement story of a generation of Vietnamese Americans in the Merrimack Valley.
Figures · Tram Nguyen
Did you know
Surprising facts about Andover.
- Civic Firsts
More Andover residents were accused of witchcraft in 1692 than from any other town in colonial Massachusetts, including Salem itself.
About 45 Andover residents were formally accused. Three were hanged. Five more were convicted and reprieved. Justice of the Peace Dudley Bradstreet issued roughly 30 arrest warrants between July and September of that year.
Source · Andover Center for History and Culture - Education
Paul Revere designed the Phillips Academy seal, and John Hancock signed its act of incorporation.
Samuel Phillips Jr. founded the school in 1778 in the middle of the Revolution. He and his co-founder Eliphalet Pearson were also manufacturing gunpowder for the Continental Army at the time.
Source · Phillips Academy - Civic Firsts
Andover Theological Seminary, founded in 1808, was the first graduate school of any kind in the United States.
It was also the first institution in North America to endow a professorship. Its three-year curriculum became the template for American divinity schools.
Source · Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School - Civic Firsts
American foreign missions began with five college students sheltering under a haystack and ended up being organized in Andover.
The Haystack Prayer Meeting happened at Williams College in 1806. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the first U.S. organization chartered to send missionaries overseas, was established on Andover Hill in 1810.
Source · Congregational Library and Archives - Abolition
Harriet Beecher Stowe used royalty checks from Uncle Tom's Cabin to renovate a former seminary workshop into her Andover home.
She named it Stowe Cabin. She lived there from 1852 to 1864 and published much of her later antislavery work, including essays in The Atlantic Monthly, from that house.
Source · Memorial Hall Library, Andover Answers - Labor
Smith and Dove of Andover claimed to be the first factory in America to manufacture linen thread, and they sewed the boots of the Union army.
The founders trained in the flax mills of Brechin, Scotland, and recruited many of their Andover workers from the same town. By 1896 the company employed 300 people.
Source · Andover News, Andover Center for History and Culture series - Veterans
Memorial Hall Library opened on Decoration Day 1873 with Lest We Forget carved over the door, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote a hymn for the dedication.
Marble tablets on the second floor list the 46 Andover men who died in the Civil War and the 172 others who served.
Source · Memorial Hall Library, Andover Answers - Innovation
Andover hosts Raytheon's largest plant in the world, the final integration site for the Patriot missile system.
The Lowell Street campus opened in 1980. RTX broke ground in 2024 on a $53 million expansion to scale production of the next-generation Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor.
Source · Army Technology
The people
Figures from Andover.
Samuel Phillips Jr.
Revolution · 1763–1815
Andover merchant and 26-year-old Harvard graduate who founded Phillips Academy in 1778 and manufactured gunpowder for the Continental Army.
Reverend Francis Dane
Colonial · pre-1763
Andover's senior minister during the 1692 witch trials. Members of his own family were accused. He was among the first Massachusetts ministers to publicly question the trials.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Industrial · 1815–1880
Lived in Andover from 1852 to 1864 while her husband Calvin Stowe taught at Andover Theological Seminary. Wrote her later antislavery essays from Stowe Cabin on the seminary grounds.
William and Mary Jenkins
Industrial · 1815–1880
Andover abolitionists who ran an Underground Railroad station from the 1830s through the Civil War. Hosted William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.
Samuel F.B. Morse
Industrial · 1815–1880
Inventor of the single-wire telegraph and Morse code. Phillips Academy class of 1805.
Tram Nguyen
Contemporary · 1965–today
Andover resident, legal aid attorney, and Massachusetts state representative for the 18th Essex District. First Vietnamese American woman elected to public office in Massachusetts.