Samuel Phillips Jr. (February 5, 1752 – February 10, 1802) was an American merchant, manufacturer, politician, and the founder of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Phillips is considered a pioneer in American education.
Beginning in 1775, Phillips aided the revolutionary cause by producing gunpowder for Washington's troops at a mill on the Shawsheen River in Andover. Though plagued by difficulties, the powder mill remained active into the 1790s. During this period, Phillips also ran a paper mill in Andover.
In the midst of the Revolution, and with financial backing from his father and his uncle, Dr. John Phillips, Samuel Phillips Jr. founded Phillips Academy in Andover. It opened on April 21, 1778. He was a charter member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1780.[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. In the preamble to his constitution for the new school, Phillips wrote: "Youth is the important period, on the improvement or neglect of which depend the most important consequences to individuals and the community." 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."
^Bond, Henry and Jones, Horatio. Genealogies of the Families and Descendants of the Early Settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts, Including Waltham and Weston: To which is Appended the Early History of the Town. New England Historical and Genealogical Society, 1860, pgs. 872-882
^Vital Records of Andover, Massachusetts to the end of the year 1849. Volume II, Marriages and Deaths. Topsfield, Massachusetts: Topsfield Historical Society. 1912. pp. 272, 526.