The Old Campus

Classroom in the Old Main Building

No one can lay down Scott Paradise's fine volume, MEN OF THE OLD SCHOOL, without a deepened sense of the rich and varied contribution our great independent schools have made to the life of the nation. Across Andover Hill pass Eliphalet Pearson, the first headmaster of Phillips Academy, and Moses Stuart, leader of the Theological Seminary, that center of the Protestant Counter-Reformation. Those two men set a tone of scholarship and simplicity for the school and the community which survives to this day.

The galaxy of portraits contains an amazing variety: Isaac McLellan, Jr., "the sportsman poet"; Horatio Greenough, the sculptor; George Horatio Derby, a West Pointer who won fame as a humorist under the pen names of John Phoenix and Squibob; William Henry Moody, who failed to convict Lizzie Borden but served with distinction as Congressman, Secretary of the Navy, Attorney General and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court; George Bassett Clark, who with his father made some of the world's best telescopes; Othniel Charles Marsh, the famous vertebrate paleontologist; Henry Augustus Rowland, one of the greatest physicists of the nineteenth century; and two heroic soldiers, William Francis Bartlett, a major general at 25, and Isaac Ingalls Stevens, the Governor and explorer of Washington Territory who gave his life in a brilliant charge at Chantilly to keep open Pope's line of retreat from the stricken field of Second Bull Run. The most illuminating commentaries on school life a century ago are found in the letters of Charles Phelps Taft, half-brother of President Taft.

A school a hundred and seventy-eight years old must have a heritage which, in proportion, is comparable to that of this nation. Andover is fortunate both in its heritage and in Scott Paradise's skillful presentation of an array of 19th-century portraits. His story of the part these alumni have played in our national life is a timely contribution.

Much of my information about Eliphalet Pearson and Moses Stuart and the Academy and Seminary of their day and later is derived from An Old New England School by Claude M. Fuess, Houghton Muffin Company, Boston and New York, 1917, and is used with Dr. Fuess's kind permission. In any biographical or historical task I have undertaken Dr. Fuess has never failed to be an inspiring and sympathetic friend; I should like to express at this time my enduring gratitude for his help over the years.

A further source of material on this period is History of Andover Theological Seminary by Henry K. Rowe, Newton, Mass., 1933. Dean Roy M. Pearson of the Andover Newton Theological School has graciously allowed me to refer to it.

In Old Andover Days, Memories of a Puritan Childhood, by Sarah Stuart Robbins, The Pilgrim Press, Boston, New York, and Chicago, 1908, Mrs. Robbins gives many a delightful glimpse of her father, Moses Stuart, and the Andover environment of the early 19th century.

Short quotations from They Found the Church There, by Henry P. Van Dusen, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1945, are used with the kind permission of the publisher.

For more complete information on General Bartlett see Memoir of William Francis Bartlett by Francis Winthrop Palfrey, Houghton. Osgood and Co., Boston, 1878.

The primary source for General Stevens is the two-volume biography, The Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens by his son, Hazard Stevens, Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York, 1900.

I wish to express my gratitude to my good friend, Frederick S. Allis, Jr., of the Academy Faculty, who read the proofs and offered many valuable suggestions.