[2] A graduate of Governor Dummer Academy in 1767, and Harvard College in 1771, Phillips was a very active and able member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress from 1775 to 1780.

[3] Beginning in 1775, Phillips aided the revolutionary cause by producing gunpowder for Washington's troops at a mill on the Shawsheen River in Andover.

[4] Like the rest of his family and many Massachusetts patriots, Samuel Phillips Jr. was a strict Calvinist, but he was also a practical visionary concerned about the improvement of society.

He set out "to lay the foundation of a public free School or Academy for the purpose of instructing Youth, not only in 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.

[5]" From the first, financial aid scholarships were part of the program of Phillips Academy: "This Seminary shall be ever equally open to Youth, with requisit qualification, from every quarter."