Excerpt from The Biography and Phrenological Character of Deacon John Phillips: With the Addresses, Poem, and Original Hymns, of the Celebration of His C Birth-Day

He has been twice elected a representative of the town in the Legislature, and served during the years 1814 and 1815. He then and there Opposed the Hartford Convention with all his might. For fourteen years, from 1810 to 1824, he was a justice of the peace, and married many a couple.

He has used tobacco, too, ever since he was a young man. Till he was upward of fifty, he chewed and smoked the filthy weed; for the last fifty years he has snuffed it, and continues snuff-taking to this day. But, he says, it is of no use - a bad habit and he would not advise any young person in this respect to follow his example.

At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, when he was sixteen years of age, he was drafted into a militia company, under Captain Abel Mason, and ordered to Providence, R. I.' He served here as a private seven weeks, from the latter part of December, 1776, to February, 1777. He had the offer, however, he says, of being made corporal of the tr00p, but did not accept, for he never sought office. While at Providence he was spoken of as the largest man in the Regiment, and was called out of the ranks by his captain to measure with a soldier in another company. They measured. The other was an inch taller, but not so heavy.

Since he was ninety years of age, he has laid up and re-laid on his farm, alone, about twenty rods of stone wall, handling some pretty heavy stones, and he has done it well, working at it two or three hours in the forenoon, and the same in the afternoon, making about two rods per day.

At eleven years of age, his attention was called to the subject of religion by a discourse he heard preached by an Elder Jacobs, of Thompson, Conn., from 2 Sam. Viii. 2. He immediately afterward betook himself to reading the Bible, feeling that he was a great sinner. He read the four Evangelists through in course. One Sabbath he read the last ten chapters of John, and when he came to and read that passage, It is finished, his burden left him. He thinks he then met with a saving change, and his sins were pardoned. He did not, however, make a public profession of his faith till the year after his marriage, when he was baptized and united with the Baptist church in Sturbridge.

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