His father, Eliakim Phelps was a clergyman and the principal of a girls’ school in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Eliakim Phelps was later pastor of a Presbyterian church in Geneva, New York, where he was installed as in 1830, and in 1835 he was elected Secretary of the American Educational Society of Philadelphia.

[2][1] In 1842, he was pastor of the Pine Street (Congregational) Church in Boston when he met and married in the autumn of that year Elizabeth Stuart (August 13, 1815 – November 30, 1852).

[1] In 1869 he was selected as president of Andover, a role he served in until 1879 when failing health forced him to resign.

[2] For seven months in 1850, his father Eliakim's home in Stratford, CT was the site of bizarre spiritualist rappings and phenomena which were widely reported in the press.

After his wife Elizabeth died of brain fever on November 20, 1852,[1] their 8-year-old daughter Mary Gray asked to be renamed in honor of her mother.

His book The Still Hour[6] (1859), a summary of a series of sermons on prayer, is a devotional classic and remains in publication.