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Today, we welcome new History Buzz contributor Chris Klein and the Andover Celebrates America 250 Committee.
When the Marquis de Lafayette Visited Andover
When the Marquis de Lafayette visited Andover on June 21, 1825, the nation’s guest was not quite as young, scrappy, and hungry as he was a half-century earlier. The teenaged aristocrat who adopted the American cause was now 67 years old, limped with the help of a cane, and rarely traveled on an empty stomach during what amounted to an all-inclusive buffet circuit tour of America.
Note: An actor portraying the Marquis de Lafayette came to Andover June 21, 2025, on the 200th anniversary of Lafayette’s original visit to Andover. The photos here are from that 2025 event.
The United States had also undergone considerable physical transformations since Lafayette last left its shores more than 40 years earlier. The infant country had grown up, quadrupling in population and territory.
As the United States approached its golden anniversary, however, a sense of unease gripped the new nation. Andover citizens had just lived through the most rancorous presidential election in the country’s history, the first without a Founding Father on the ballot. Newspapers dripped in partisan bile. “The Era of Good Feelings” had dissolved into bad blood over tariffs and slavery.
As the number of Revolutionary War veterans steadily dwindled to a precious few, memories of the Spirit of ’76 were shifting from the personal to the historic, raising questions about whether the American experiment could endure with a new generation who took their freedom for granted.
The visit of the last living Continental Army general to Andover promised to re-kindle the flickering revolutionary fire, the spirit that drove approximately 700 Andover residents—old and young, free and enslaved—to fight in the American Revolution, a cause for which 22 sacrificed their lives. From Ticonderoga to Saratoga to Monmouth, Andover natives took up arms, sometimes fighting shoulder to shoulder with Lafayette himself.
With Andover so deeply committed to the fight for American independence, Lafayette’s tour stop was greeted with all the fervor of an 1820s version of Beatlemania. The town was festooned with patriotic banners. Citizens dressed in their Sunday finest.
Four days after laying the cornerstone for the Bunker Hill Monument on the 50th anniversary of that notable battle in which four Andover residents lost their lives, Lafayette departed Boston around 9 A.M. and traveled north. After a stop in Reading, the Frenchman was greeted at the Andover town line by a calvary company that escorted his carriage to Academy Hill, home to the Andover Theological Seminary and Phillips Academy.
There, locals greeted him with hearty cheers. Infantry companies fired salutes. Squire John Kneeland, a 77-year-old Revolutionary War veteran and prestigious lawyer who represented Andover for 21 years in the legislature, welcomed Lafayette on behalf of his fellow townsmen. Following the oration, Lafayette waded into the crowd and reunited with familiar faces, now weathered with age, that he had commanded nearly 50 years earlier.
The infantry and calvary accompanied the marquis to the Mansion House, originally the home of Samuel Phillips, Jr., who produced gunpowder for the Continental Army at a mill on the Shawsheen River shortly before establishing Phillips Academy. Lafayette was introduced to the faculty and students at the seminary and academy along with local militiamen and citizens before eating yet another meal. Lafayette according to one account “spoke in the most flattering terms of that consecrated hill from which light had gone out to the heavens and religion to the ends of the earth.” Phillips Academy Principal John Adams marveled to Josiah Quincy III, a Phillips alum who accompanied Lafayette on his journey out of Boston, that his school’s reputation had reached as far as France. Quincy didn’t have the heart to tell the beaming headmaster that the full extent of Lafayette’s knowledge of Phillips Academy came from the debriefing he himself had provided earlier that day.
After a campus tour, Lafayette paraded into town along with his military escort. Newspapers reported that at “almost every house on his route through Andover had the windows filled with ladies and children anxious to view the nation’s guest.” According to town lore, Kneeland brought Lafayette to his home—the Rose Cottage that still stands on the corner of Chestnut and Central Streets—and that the general spoke to the townspeople from the front steps before fortifying himself with a hot toddy in the home’s west parlor and saying goodbye to Andover.
With a tug of the reins, Lafayette’s carriage departed. The calvary that welcomed the marquis to Andover remained at his side as he wheeled through Methuen to the New Hampshire line. The only sour note was a Salem Gazette report that a “great number of pocketbooks” were stolen during the general’s visit.
Weeks later, Lafayette returned to France with memories of Andover—and every hamlet he visited on his 13-month tour—along with a bag of dirt that accompanied him on his pit stop to our town. The soil had been shoveled from Bunker Hill four days earlier. When the Marquis died in 1834, his son scattered that dirt atop his coffin in a Paris cemetery so that “The Hero of Two Worlds” could be laid to rest in both American and French soil—just as he had requested.
Watch for more Andover Celebrates Revolution 250 posts coming up! Leave a comment. Ask a question. We look forward to connecting with you.
Thanks for reading!
~Chris
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