Before the Andover Theological Seminary invented a new way of educating clergy, young men usually prepared for the ministry by studying privately under the guidance of a local pastor. Andover’s curriculum, designed for graduates of liberal-arts colleges, bucked that long-standing trend and started another, in advanced-degree religious education. The first post-graduate school of any kind established in the United States, the first to require a three-year curriculum of graded study that led to a professional degree for clergy, Andover became the standard model for theological education in every denomination across the country for decades. In 1812, four years after Andover’s inaugural class began its studies, Princeton’s theological seminary was founded; Harvard’s followed in 1815; Yale’s in 1822; Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria in 1823; Georgia’s Columbia Theological Seminary in 1828; Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary in 1829; New York City’s Union Theological Seminary in 1836. Even the fictional Mizpah Theological Seminary, attended by Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry in the early twentieth century, had, like Andover’s, a three-year curriculum. [1]


It was startling for me to learn that Lewis, who published Elmer Gantry in 1927, had himself once pledged to become a Christian missionary, preferably in Africa, in 1902-1903 while he was a teenager studying at Oberlin Academy, a then secondary-school department of the eponymous Ohio college. [2] That kind of aspiration was far from the mind of Lewis’s Gantry, originally a traveling salesman for a farm implement company, who, after switching to preaching and securing a pulpit of his own, was, Lewis wrote, “like the new general manager of a factory as he bustled for the first time through the Wellspring Methodist Church, Zenith, and his first comment was ‘The plant’s run down — have to buck it up.’” [3]

The Gantry generation operated in ways starkly different from Andover’s — there wasn’t any money in it back in the nineteenth century, at least not for individual preachers. But in 1939, historian Colin Brummitt Goodykoontz drew a direct line between the beliefs of Fundamentalist Christians — the literal interpretation of the Bible and the imminence of the Second Coming, for example — and the efforts of earlier missionaries. Making his case in Home Missions on the American Frontier, he concluded that “Puritanic theological concepts and practices were set up and cherished in the West through home missions” and that it was “not by chance that the South and Middle West have been the strongholds of fundamentalism and the chief centers of such traces of Puritanism as remain in this country.” [4] Goodykoontz, a member of the First Congregational Church of Boulder, Colorado, where he taught at the University of Boulder for many years, wasn’t unhappy about this outcome, however; he was full of praise for it. “They toiled obscurely and laid down their lives freely in order that others might live more abundantly,” he wrote. “They were spiritual leaders who stood for idealism in the midst of materialism. They believed that righteousness exalted a nation and that sin is a reproach to any people.” [5]

Goodykoontz ended his book by quoting Theodore Roosevelt, who had said much the same thing in 1902, while speaking at Carnegie Hall at the Centennial Meeting of the Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church: “It is because of the spirit that underlies the missionary work, that the pioneers are prevented from sinking seriously near the level of the savagery against which they contend. Without it the conquest of this continent would have had little but an animal side. Without it the pioneers’ fierce and rude virtue and somber faults would have been left unlit by the flame of pure and loving aspiration. Without it the life of this country would have been a life of inconceivably hard and barren materialism.” [6]
​
Leaving aside the fallacies Roosevelt uttered on the occasion, it’s notable that he failed to mention the inconceivably hard lives led by most missionaries. Together with their families, both at home and abroad, they suffered unrelenting disease, death, sometimes violence, and, unless they were superhuman, grave doubts about whether what they were doing was worth all the sacrifices. Granted, doubt doesn’t marry well with dogma, and it seldom manifested itself in missionaries’ mass-produced writings, especially in those posthumously ghost-written and edited by others, but the inner dialogue of fictional missionaries regularly display it.

In Brian Moore's 1985 novel Black Robe, a depiction of Jesuits working among Huron, Iroquois, and Algonquin people in seventeenth-century Canada, Father Laforgue wrestled with theological uncertainty as he watched an Indian friend die. Thinking “of God’s mercy denied him,” he said to himself, “I must not dwell on these things. It is the devil who puts such thoughts in my head.” “But is it the devil?" he wondered. "What has happened to me? Why do I no longer pray?” [7] Likewise, the twentieth-century missionary in Paul Bowles’s short story “Pastor Dowe at Tacaté” fell into a deep despair while experiencing “the sensation of having communicated absolutely nothing” to the Mexican Indians he was trying to convert. [8] He had a little portable phonograph on which he played “Crazy Rhythm” for them over and over again. It had become an integral part of his weekly service, because the Indians had insisted upon it. He reasoned that they would “learn to want God” just as much as they wanted music. [9] But it didn’t happen. “Everything I say is transformed on the way to them into something else,” he said to himself. It was “a manner of thinking that Pastor Dowe had always taken pains to avoid.” [10]  He tried to motivate himself to carry on: “‘God is always with me,’ . . . but the formula had no effect.” [11]

_________________
1. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth (New York: The Library of America, 2002), 542.
2. Lewis, 1318,
3. Lewis, 791.
4. Colin Brummitt Goodykoontz, Home Missions on the American Frontier, With Particular Reference to the American Home Missionary Society (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1939), 425-426.
5.  Goodykoontz, 426.
6. Goodykoontz, 426-427. For the complete speech, see https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-centennial-meeting-the-board-home-missions-the-presbyterian-church-carnegie. Retrieved Apr. 22, 2021.
7. Brian Moore, Black Robe (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1985), 00. 
8. Paul Bowles, The Stories of Paul Bowles (New York: Ecco, 2001), 107. "Pastor Dowe at Tacaté" originally appeared in Mademoiselle, ​February 1949. 
9. Bowles, 115.
10. Bowles, 116.
11. Bowles, 120.

Paul Theroux’s most famous novel and his own acknowledged personal favorite is missionary-themed. It is The Mosquito Coast, published in 1982 and later made into a film, whose protagonist, Allie Fox, hates so much what America has become that he relocates his family from Massachusetts to a remote part of Honduras, where he wants them to live free of popular culture and pollution, hypocrisy and hedonism, and where he’ll be able to indulge his desire to bring his ice-making invention to the jungle. At both the beginning and end of the Fox family’s ordeal, they fatefully encounter the Reverend Gurney Spellgood, who has a drive-in church in Baltimore as well as an outpost in a place called Guampu, where he appears on a television screen when he isn’t actually present to preach. Allie loathes him; yet he is himself often mistaken for a missionary and, inarguably, he is one, for science and technology — he, who preaches a kind of secular theology and whose children naturally call him “Father,” but so does Mr. Haddy, a Honduran who works for the Foxes and in due course acts as their savior, although he pronounces the word “Fadder.”  (“Farter” is what his younger son, Jerry, who grows to hate him and wish him dead, calls him toward the end.) When Allie maniacally sets fire to Goodspell’s church building, after which Goodspell mortally shoots him, he actually is called a missionary in news stories published about the incident in the Caribbean press.

Allie’s older son, Charlie, is the book’s adolescent narrator, as well as his father’s fiercest defender and acolyte, who informs us of his father’s creed. “Father often talked of thing being ‘revealed,’” says Charlie. “That was true invention, he said, revealing something’s use and magnifying it, discovering its imperfection, improving it, and putting it to work for you. . . . ‘It’s savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is. Fiddle around and find a use for it!’ God had left the world incomplete, he said. It was man’s job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it and finish it. I think that was why he hated missionaries so much: because they taught people to put up with their earthly burdens. For Father, there were no burdens that couldn’t be fitted with a set of wheels, or runners, or a system of pulleys.” After his father's death and a series of rude awakenings, Charlie says, “Once I had believed in Father and the world had seemed very small and old.” After Allie was gone, Charlie declares, “I hardly believed in myself, and the world was limitless.” [1]

All proselytizers, including the Allie Foxes of the world, operate under the belief that they’re right and everybody else is wrong for not thinking like they do. [2] It can be argued that tribalism is at the root of their behavior, and that it’s human nature to want to associate with kin and kindred spirits, and be suspicious of or even hostile toward those who aren’t. What made the missionary movement that originated in Andover unique was its timing, at the moment of industrialization. It was not a coincidence, of course. Its principals wisely availed themselves of all the developments in mass transportation, communication, and mechanization — steam ships, telegraphs, printing presses, and the factory system itself — that resulted in what was quickly acknowledged to be a genuine revolution. Nothing so big in the proselytizing business had ever happened before. [3]
  
Not everyone was onboard with the newfangled methods. Reverend Horace Bushnell doubted, for example, that the answer to more converts was printing as opposed to preaching. “As if God would offer man a mechanical engine for converting the world with the least possible expenditure of piety; or as if types of lead and sheets of paper may be the light of the world,” the controversial pastor of Hartford’s North Congregational Church wrote in a 1844 issue of the New Haven-based quarterly journal New Englander. [4] He acknowledged that the press was “a new tongue given to the church,” but believed that such “talk, without the life to give it power and unction, degenerates into empty noise and clatter.” It was his view that expecting the press to be “a substitute for piety, or a piety-saving machine, [was] an egregious delusion.” [5]

The sheer number of clergy being turned out by the seminary in Andover was itself cause for critical comment in some quarters. John Dalton Flagg, who followed his father, Timothy Flagg, into the printing business in Andover in the 1840s, once wrote that he recalled having seen a cartoon showing a seminary faculty member putting pumpkins into a giant hopper while an associate turned its crank — “and at the bottom Theological students were crawling out.” [6] The cartoon, a copy of which, unfortunately, I could not trace, sounds like a clever visual expression of the unprecedented, rote-like manner in which Andover was turning out professional preachers in far greater numbers than had ever been seen before. “Like the locusts of Egypt, they fill all the land; Not a green herb before them, uneaten can stand…,” went one of the rhymed verses of a disapproving broadside titled, “Andover Mill, or Minister’s Factory,” written by an anonymous, self-described “truly pious man.” [7]
​
The image of hayseeds being transformed into holy men can also be read as a commentary on the phenomenon, new in the early nineteenth century, of rural-born young men becoming ministers rather than following their farmer fathers into the fields. Up until then, ministers had traditionally come to their calling with smooth, uncalloused hands, from the ranks of a community’s elite. Mrs. Stowe’s character Reverend Theophilus Sewell, from her 1861 novel The Pearl of Orr’s Island, the sixth of the eight books she wrote in Andover, was the type, “who preserved the costume of a former generation, with something of that imposing dignity with which, in earlier times, the habits of the clergy were invested.” A minister based on a fictional island in Maine, where some of the old ways had more easily been preserved in isolation, Reverend Sewell “was tall and majestic in stature, and carried to advantage the powdered wig and three-cornered hat, the broad-skirted coat, knee-breeches, high shoes, and plated buckles of the ancient costume.” [8] It was the very attire worn by Mrs. Stowe’s own father, Reverend Lyman Beecher.

Reverend William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts — one of the first New England ministers to openly profess Unitarian beliefs [9] —  was unhappy about the mere fact of the seminary’s founding and existence, and so were his like-minded colleagues. “This institution is [the] subject of much public animadversion,” he wrote in his famous diary. [10] The noted bibliophile, scholar, historian, and linguist scoffed at the seminarians’  “love of Biblical Criticism” and did not look forward to its promised “series of liberal publications.” [11] The seminary’s missionary aspect did not please him, either. Regarding that development, he called the seminarians the “Jesuits of New England” and their endeavors “Don Quixote adventures.” [12] “The missionaries [are] mere fanatics without common talents,” he grumbled. [13] “How many Indians are upon our own continent?” he asked rhetorically, implying that there were plenty of "pagans" here at home and apparently unaware that the A.B.C.F.M. was preparing to expand into the American frontier. [14]

​Perhaps, too, Reverend Bentley merely felt threatened. Upon the seminary’s opening, he observed of his fellow Unitarians at Harvard, “All the friends of Camb. are jealous of it…” [15] A few months later, he told himself as if reassuringly, “The Andover Jesuitism does not succeed greatly.” [16] His prediction would eventually turn out to be correct, but it wasn’t at all correct in 1809, when he recorded that sentiment. The class that graduated the following year included Adoniram Judson, Samuel Newell, and Samuel Nott — three men in their early twenties from small New England towns (Malden, Massachusetts; Durham, Maine; and Franklin, Connecticut, respectively) — who were about to become famous in international missionary circles.

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1. Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 374.
2. John Horsch, The Modernist View of Missions (Scottdale, Penn.: Fundamental Truth Depot, 1920), 4: “True missionary work is always based on the conviction that you have the truth and the truth must be given to others.”
3. But of course it would happen again. See televangelist, a term apparently coined by a writer for Time magazine, whose cover story on April 14, 1952 referred to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen as the "first 'televangelist.'" See also Thomas  S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), xxviii:“Evangelicals from George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards to Billy Graham and Rick Warren have always used the latest media technology and techniques to promote revival.”
4. Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (Hartford: Edwin Hunt, 1847), 153.
5. Bushnell, “The Kingdom of Heaven as a Grain of Mustard Seed,” New Englander, II (New Haven: October 1844), 606-607. The essay was retitled,“Growth, Not Conquest, the True Method of Christian Progress,” when included in Views of Christian Nurture, 158-159.
6. Phillips Academy Archives (PAA), Warren Fales Draper “Vertical File,” letter to Draper from Flagg, Sept. 16, 1903.
7. PAA archivist Paige Roberts was unable to supply a notation for this broadside, which can be found in the PAA collection, and I too was unsuccessful in finding one. It is neither dated nor, as mentioned, signed. In any case, for a complete roster of the first hundred years of seminary students, see General Catalogue of the Theological Seminary Andover, Massachusetts 1808-1908 (Boston: Thomas Dodd [printer], 1909).
8. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr’s Island (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1862, 1896), 86.
9. https://uudb.org/articles/williambentley.html. Retrieved Apr. 23, 2021.
10.  William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (Salem: Essex Institute, 1905-1914), Jan. 1, 1809.
11. Bentley, May 7, 1809.
12. Bentley, Nov. 19, 1809 and Mar. 14, 1813.
13. Bentley, Jan. 24, 1813.
14. Bentley, Oct. 13, 1815.
15. Bentley, Sept. 25, 1808.
16. Bentley, Jan. 1, 1809.

​The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a joint Congregationalist-Presbyterian undertaking, was the coordinator of the missionary movement that originated in the United States. Considered to be America’s first official support organization for the work of foreign missionaries, the A.B.C.F.M. has been characterized as “the country’s first multinational corporation” by virtue of its having tasked itself “with creating, staffing, and supervising a transoceanic structure.” [1] Comparisons to the East India Company are not inapt, and missionaries often trod the same routes and settled in the same places as traders. Some apostates became traders themselves. But the Britishers, perceiving the missionaries as rival suitors for the hearts and minds they needed to conquer for their own, earthbound purposes, initially refused them entry. Those turned away included members of a small band of Andover seminarians who, longing to become missionaries but lacking financial backing, were largely responsible for the founding of the A.B.C.F.M in 1810.

The A.B.C.F.M.'s support came from a myriad of newly formed mission societies and from individual donors, all of whose names can be perused in the organization’s printed annual reports. They are listed town by town, so it’s an easy exercise to look up contributions made by Andoverites. In the year 1819-1820, for example, we find the Female Charitable Society ($60) (“of which half for Am. In.”); seminary faculty member Reverend Leonard Woods ($20); “three females” ($3); a “charity box kept by Emily Jane Adams,” the seven-year-old daughter of P.A. headmaster John Adams ($4); and Betsey Cleveland, who, I discovered, was the “family maid” of the Adamses ($1). [2]

A.B.C.F.M.-sponsored missionaries, who came exclusively from Andover for decades, were among the primary interpreters of faraway cultures for nineteenth-century Americans. Through their reports printed in religious newspapers and periodicals, their homely tracts and missionaries’ memoirs published by a robust religious press, and sermons and speeches delivered by missionaries on visits home, they circulated a concept of the world sharply divided into Christians and “barbarians,” holy men and heathen, saved and lost souls that was internalized by large swaths of our population. The A.B.C.F.M.’s original seal pictured a male figure in Western-style clothing handing a Bible to a kneeling, semi-naked “native.” It is as vivid an image as you will find of confidence in the righteousness of imposing a singular belief on a multi-religious world filled with people perfectly content practicing eons-old religions of their own. The same binary thinking pervaded the A.B.C.F.M.’s home missions in cities and in the Indian territories, where some men were assigned to stay for the duration of their careers while others were tested for their suitability to the rigors of missionary life before a greater investment was made in sending them abroad.

The either-or perspective also informed our government’s foreign policies regarding “primitive,” “backward,” “underdeveloped” countries through the twentieth century, after which the terminology may have changed but not the mindset. The United States has never overly pushed religion on anyone outside our borders. The cause has always been democracy, but capitalist policies have allowed us to exploit those countries’ populations in the name of providing them with economic self-determination. The official stance has always been “post-colonial” in name, but has repeatedly given our corporations the opportunity to harvest not souls but raw materials and dollars. One can detect a similar, them-vs.-us mentality today in the groups that oppose immigration, espouse white supremacy, or otherwise demonize differences. “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil,” American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer. [3]

I was born in 1951, the year Hoffer published The True Believer, which has aged well, seeming both prescient and timely. As an infant I was baptized a Catholic. To be sure, the missionaries of the A.B.C.F.M. were just as keen on thwarting the “Papists” in their efforts to bring people into their church as they were on converting non-Christians. But they would have applauded the thought processes I adopted as a parochial-school student, a stint that extended from nursery school through ninth grade. I remember asking new, childhood acquaintances if they were “Catholic or public.” When I got a little older, I prayed for the conversion of “pagans,” and collected money in a mite box for this purpose. Mite box. I had forgotten the term and the concept until a few years ago when, while thumbing through a museum catalog of an exhibition on indigenous art, I spotted an image of an example in the shape of a miniature schoolhouse. Mine had been made of printed cardboard that folded into a three-dimensional shape about the size of a Barnum’s Animals Crackers box. The one in the museum catalog, referred to as a "church collection box," was wooden, the size of a standard bread-loaf pan, and covered with paper illustrated with watercolored images, its early nineteenth-century maker a member of New York’s Tuscarora community who had joined a Congregational church as a teenager. [4]

Eventually, beginning slightly before puberty arrived and lasting until slightly after its onset, I wanted to become a missionary myself. It seemed the logical conclusion if I were truly to follow the edicts of my Catholic-school education. During that phase of my life, I corresponded with the director of vocations for the Maryknoll Sisters; I visited the nuns’ motherhouse in Maryknoll, New York; perhaps most important, I read the many books written by the order’s director of publicity, Sister Maria del Rey. Recently I re-read her In and Out the Andes, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1955. An account of visits she made to Maryknoll missions from Nicaragua to the Yucatán and points in between, the book is partly an engaging travelogue written by a woman who, before entering the convent, earned a college degree in journalism and worked as a reporter and columnist for a Pittsburgh newspaper. Adept at employing the well-chosen anecdote, the telling detail, and her wry sense of humor, she reminded me of Mr. Theroux — in a good mood. Clearly, my faith had been a kiddy kind of faith — no wonder it didn’t survive my young adulthood — and for a variety of reasons, no other kind of religious faith has since replaced it. [5] And yet, I consider that early missionary aspiration of mine another reason why I gravitated to this subject and why it has suited me.

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1. James A. Field Jr., “Near East Notes and Far East Queries,” John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 39. Field compares the A.B.C.F.M. to the U.S. State Department and the Navy Department, in terms of the tasks they undertook, e.g., needing to “set up a tax system, reaching out . . . through Sunday school and church collection” and creating “a network of regional agents.” It also had to deal with “the problems of overseas transfers of funds” and arrived at the same solution as the U.S. government: “the use of the international banking facilities of the English firm of Baring Brothers.” His source is Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University, East Asian Research Center, 1969), 240-242.
2. First Ten Annual Reports of the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1834), “Donations from Sept. 1, 1819 to Aug. 31, 1820.” Dr. Wood's sermon delivered in the chapel of the Theological Seminary, Andover, February 1st 1835 on the death of Henry Lyman and Samuel Munson, missionaries and of Aurelian H. Post, Luke Baker & Chester Lord, all recent members of the seminary (Andover: Gould and Newman, 183.
3. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper & Bros., 1951), 91.
4. Karen Kramer Russell, Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art (New Haven: Peabody Essex Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2012), 188-189.
5. See Jeanne Schinto, “The Trouble with Church Art,” Mars Hill Review, No. 19, 2002, 21-23.

When the novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux reviewed my book Huddle Fever for the New York Times in 1995, he ended it with this curmudgeonly, Therouxesque suggestion: “Perhaps Ms. Schinto will write a similar book about smug little Andover.” [1]   I had revealed in the book’s final chapter that after ten years of living in the once-booming, long-since-floundering, former textile-mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, I had moved to the well-appointed, colonial-era, prep-school town next door. That my husband and I had left the so-called Immigrant City in, as Mr. Theroux phrased it, “disappointment, confusion, [and] alarm” was truer than I liked to admit. I was more than happy to flee the noise of police sirens, fire engines, and car burglar-alarms, and rather liked the quiet peace of my new hometown.

Over the next two decades, except for writing one personal essay about the pond across the street from our house here at 53 Poor Street, I turned my writing attentions elsewhere, and experienced no regrets about failing to be inspired by Mr. Theroux’s offhanded musing. A few years ago, however, I began to type out some thoughts about this place where I have now lived longer than I have lived anywhere else. Eat local? It suddenly made sense for me to “write” local. And so, in between freelance assignments, mostly for an antiques-trade newspaper that published my articles about auction prices and trends, museum exhibitions, the psychology of collectors, and related aspects of American material culture, I began researching primary sources and reading what others had written about Andover’s history. Then, in March of 2020, when the pandemic forced us all to restrict our travels, it made even more sense for me to concentrate my attentions on Andover.

To be sure, I had been locally focussed when I wrote about Lawrence. Mr. Theroux had characterized my book correctly as the result of a “closely observed residence,” except, he’d opined, that previously “such personal accounts … would be concerned with distant cities: ‘Rangoon Jottings,’ ‘Ten Years in Khartoum,’ ‘A Decade in Bangkok.’” He had been making the point that Lawrence resembled “just that sort of city — a remote, bereft, rotting and blighted place that was once prosperous and proud” with, he added, a social structure as complex as the formerly colonized or occupied cities he had named. He had also noticed that the stance I had taken towards Lawrence was not unlike that of writers who intended their stays to be temporary. I wouldn’t have said so when I’d arrived there in 1984, but I realize now that my time in Lawrence had, like any traveler’s, always been fated to end. Long before I’d written my book’s final pages, I had known that I would leave.

Readers of Huddle Fever occasionally asked if I planned a sequel, but I had neither the interest nor a rationale for such an undertaking. I had written the book because I’d kept asking myself questions I needed to answer for my own benefit: “What the hell happened here? How did Lawrence get this way? Was there ever a more dysfunctional entity?” The only other places I had lived were a New York City suburb (Greenwich, Connecticut), a major city (Washington, D.C.), and, for a single year, a one-square mile hamlet just over the D.C. line (Takoma Park, Maryland). The ways of a working-class society living in the ruin of an industrial landscape were a mystery to me. Hence, my bewilderment and urge to understand it, an urge that became a compulsion, not the least because I myself had come from a working-class family: my father had been a carpenter, then town building inspector; my mother, a secretary. In any case, with those questions about Lawrence answered, at least to my own satisfaction, a sequel wasn’t on my mind. Besides, in order to write such a thing, I needed the primary access, by way of daily living there, that I had forfeited by moving to Andover.

As I came to realize, however, this project actually is a sequel. At its most basic, Huddle Fever was a history of what Lawrence once produced: cloth. The Missionary Factory is a history of what Lawrence’s nearest neighbor once produced: men of the cloth. Lawrence had its famous textile factories. Andover had its equally renown Andover Theological Seminary — a “ministerial factory,” in the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose husband was one of its graduates (class of 1827) and later became its professor of sacred literature. [2] The Stowe family lived in Andover from 1852 to 1864, during the  period of Calvin Ellis Stowe's tenure, while Mrs. Stowe adjusted to and then made use of the success that the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had brought her, promoting the abolitionist cause in Europe, where her book was selling even better than it was selling here. At her desk in a faculty house on campus she also wrote the eight books that followed it, a couple of them boldly critical of Prof. Stowe’s colleagues and their efforts to convert the world’s “heathen” to Christianity while failing to rid themselves of their most obvious sin: doing little or nothing to end slavery.
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1. Paul Theroux, “Terminal City,” New York Times Book Review, Sept. 24, 1995.
2. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Letter from Andover,” Andover Advertiser, Oct. 21, 1854. Reprinted from the New York Independent.

When the seminary welcomed its first class, on September 28, 1808, one purpose of the institution was to fill pulpit vacancies in local parishes with ministers who would cleave to orthodox Congregationalist Calvinism. Followers of its gloomy theology, whose seed was carried across the Atlantic by the Puritans, maintained that everyone was born morally corrupt — or “depraved,” as they liked to express it. Besides emphasizing human “depravity,” even a tiny baby’s, strict Calvinists also believed in the cold-hearted doctrine of the “predestination” of one’s soul to either heaven or hell, and an individual’s inability to achieve grace through free will and moral behavior. It's instructive to recall that New England was a theocracy at its founding. Congregationalism was the religion established by law. Every household was taxed for the support of public worship. Nathaniel Hawthorne would grow up to write novels about what John Updike once called “the moral tyranny of the little Puritan theocracies of New England.” [3] Thanks to the newly won freedoms of the American Revolution, however, competing religions, including Unitarianism, whose followers countered that people were born morally good, were gathering congregants into their folds, and the old, state-supported Congregational churches were vulnerable. [4] The founding of the seminary was also therefore meant to thwart that threat by bolstering another key precept of the Calvinist faith, one that would help improve or at least maintain its numbers: that each person had a responsibility to convey the “good news” of the Bible to others via missionary work, either by undertaking it themselves or by supporting those who did.

This book isn’t only about the seminary, however, even though the hundred-year arc of its rise and fall provides a handy narrative, the beginning of its end neatly demarcated by its move to Harvard in 1908 after a heresy trial — the famous "Andover Case" of the 1880s — resulted in, among other things, a disillusioned, then decimated student body. The Missionary Factory is necessarily also about the growth of the town, from a remote colonial village — settled by the  eventual overtakers of the indigenous people who had lived here for eons before them — to its present-day status as an affluent suburb of Boston and source of one of its most renown “products”: the graduates of Phillips Academy. Conceived of and founded in 1778, during our War of Independence, P.A. is the reason why the seminary was situated here in the first place.
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As the seminary gained its fame and influence around the world, the town’s citizenry witnessed the simultaneous burgeoning of the international textile empire next door, in the lineup of Lawrence’s massive, red-brick mills along the Merrimack, a rib having been taken out of Andover to create the mill city in the first place. [5] The spectacle surely helped residents develop a bigger-than-local perspective and allowed them to believe that Andover’s missionary factory was a plausible, intercontinental undertaking. Wealthy, well-connected Andoverites, themselves successful in business, gave substantial amounts of money to the seminary and the associated missionary movement. Ordinary church-goers in turn gave their pennies. The hoi polloi also engaged in such mundane though essential labors as running the boarding houses that were essential in the years before any dorms were built. Indeed, from my perspective, the more important, largely untold story is about the lay people’s role in the seminary’s gargantuan, guaranteed-to-fail, global mission.
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3. John Updike, Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism ​(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 28. Note: Congregationalism was the established church in all but one of the New England colonies. Baptist Rhode Island was the exception.
4. Of course, long before the war began, the Enlightenment's ideas, specifically deism, were starting to challenge orthodox religious beliefs.
5. The Essex Company bought slightly under seven square miles of private farmland, some in Andover and the rest in another riverside town, Methuen, when they set about creating Lawrence in the early 1840s.