Phillips Academy began in
Converted carpenter’s shop

	Samuel Phillips Jr. (1752-1802) asked his uncle for money to start a 
school and then opened one in a converted carpenter’s shop. It would become 
Phillips Academy, a leading preparatory school for boys. His school was so 
successful that his uncle established a similar school in New Hampshire, now 
known as Phillips Exeter.
	Phillips Andover became known as a “feeder” school to Yale, while ties 
to Harvard and Amherst were stronger for Phillips Exeter.
	Phillips a graduate of Governor Dummer Academy (1767) and Harvard 
College
(1771) was an ordained Calvinist minister and an ardent American patriot.
During the American Revolution, he produced gunpowder at a mill that supplied 
much of the Minutemen during the war with England. The mill was located on the 
banks of the Shawsheen River and was in full operation until
1778 when an explosion killed three workmen and wrecked a good part of the 
mill.
	He was busily packing Harvard library books for carting to Andover for 
safe-keeping as the Battle of Bunker Hill raged in nearby Charlestown.
Phillips was state senator, a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress 
and a delegate to the state constitutional convention. He served briefly as 
the state’s Lieutenant Governor in 1801, dying in office in Feb.
1802. He is buried in South Parish Cemetery.
	Phillips was known as an innovative educator but intended to stamp a 
“Puritan” doctrine on the students. Yet any soul was open to be taught. He 
wrote “This Seminary shall be ever equally open to Youth, of requisite 
qualification, from every quarter,” the only qualification being that they 
could read English well.
	Historian Claude Moore Fuess contends the influence of English academics 
of the period on Phillips is “greatly exaggerated.” He writes that the English 
academies of the day designed curriculum that was “in part a protest against 
the classical scheme of education then practiced in Eton and Winchester.”
The Phillips School, however, “…followed rather the classical lines already 
laid down by the New England Grammar Schools, such as the Boston Latin School 
and the Hopkins Grammar School.”