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In the Dictionary of American Biography, Andover's roll call tops all schools except Boston Latin, the oldest (1635) U.S. public school, with Exeter coming in third. In the 1957 Who's Who, Andover counted over 400 names, more than any other prep school. The 1962 Who's Who adds 49 new Andover names; the biggest contingent is seven Foreign Service career men, along with the mayor of Memphis, the editor of The Commonweal, and the president of the International Vegetarian Union.
The Real Business. Andover's founder was Samuel Phillips Jr., a good Calvinist who began to worry about the country's "decay of virtue, public and private" around the time he nearly blew himself up making powder for the Continental Army. To head off decay, the 26-year-old Phillips got his father and uncle to give cash for a school to teach boys "English and Latin Grammar, Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences wherein they are commonly taught, but more especially to learn them the great end and real business of living."
Principal Eliphalet ("Elephant") Pearson learned them just that when he opened the school with 13 boys shortly before George Washington marched out of Valley Forge. A hefty Harvardman, Tyrant Pearson ruled by rod and God. His awed charges, including Josiah Quincy, 6, a future Harvard president, paid $10 a year and toiled from dawn to dusk. On the school seal, Paul Revere engraved Finis Origine Pendet, a Calvinistic commercial meaning: "One's end depends on one's origin." More hopefully, Phillips took it to mean: "Well begun is half done." George Washington thought so well of the school that he sent his favorite nephew and eight grandnephews, and in 1789 addressed the student body on horseback.
Equally impressed was Samuel's Uncle John Phillips, a sometime preacher turned moneylender (at 15%), who founded the second Phillips in his own town of Exeter, N.H. Andover was soon awash with Lees of Virginia, New England Quincys, Lowells, Longfellows. Samuel F. B. Morse arrived at eight and ran away. Many a poor farm boy walked 50 miles carrying his suitcase and a headful of Greek grammar to enter the best school around.
In 1808 Pearson helped launch Andover Theological Seminary, which soon turned town and gown into what Student Oliver Wendell Holmes (1825) called "the very dove's nest of Puritan faith." Great preachers flocked there; on Andover Hill was written My Country 'Tis of Thee. Shunning Unitarian Harvard, the school became such a solid Yale "feeder" that in the 1920s Andover men comprised 10% of many a Yale class.