Andover
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Andover. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Massachusetts, a town of Essex County, first settled in 1643. It was named for Andover, England, a market town in the vicinity of Winchester. It is a thriving town of about 7,000 inhabitants. It is noted for Phillips Academy, a strongly endowed school for boys. The academy has long maintained a reputation for scholarship, and is known usually as "Phillips Andover" to distinguish it from a similar school of the same name at Exeter, New Hampshire . The town is noted also as the seat of Andover Theological Seminary, founded in 1807, an institution under the care of the Congregational church. The question of modifying the theological doctrines taught has given rise, at one time or another, to the famous "Andover Controversies." Successive generations have struggled, each to secure the acceptance of its views by the preceding generation, and then a few decades later taking the defensive against the younger men who were coming on. The town has several factories and a fine public library of over 12,000 volumes. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived here for a number of years, while her husband, Dr. Stowe, was professor of sacred literature in the Seminary.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a town in Essex co., Mass.; on the Merrimac river and the Boston and Maine railroad; 23 miles N. of Boston. It is widely known as the seat of the Phillips Academy for boys, and the Abbot Academy for girls, formerly also the Theological Seminary, and has manufactories of flax, shoes and woolen goods, a National bank, Memorial Hall and school libraries, and a property valuation of over $4,000,000. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived here many years, and it is the birthplace of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Pop. (191) 7,301; (1920) 8,268.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's town of "about 7,000 inhabitants" and Collier's 8,268 in 1920 has grown into a Boston commuter suburb of roughly 36,000, and the flax, shoe and woolen mills Collier's listed in 1921 are gone. The Andover Theological Seminary, which Aiton in 1910 still placed in the town, had already left for Cambridge; it merged with the Newton Theological Institution in 1931 and, after decades as Andover Newton, moved to Yale Divinity School in 2017. Abbot Academy, Collier's "Academy for girls," merged into Phillips Academy in 1973, making the school coeducational. Phillips Andover itself has far outgrown the "strongly endowed school for boys" of the 1910 entry, counting George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush among its graduates.
Written for this edition, 2026.