Austin Phelps was born in
West Brookfield, Massachusetts. His father, Eliakim Phelps was a clergyman and the principal of a girls’ school in
Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Eliakim Phelps was later pastor of a Presbyterian church in
Geneva, New York, where he was installed as in 1830, and in 1835 he was elected Secretary of the American Educational Society of Philadelphia. They had three children,
Mary Gray (b. 1844), Moses Stuart (b. 1849) and Amos Lawrence (b. 1852). In the spring of 1848 he moved his family to
Andover, Massachusetts, where he became professor of sacred
rhetoric and
homiletics at Andover Theological Seminary. their 8-year-old daughter Mary Gray asked to be renamed in honor of her mother. He married Elizabeth's sister, Mary Stuart (b. 1822), in 1854, but she died only eighteen months later. He married for a third time Mary Ann Johnson (1829–1918) of Boston, with whom he had two more children, Edward and Francis. Austin died on October 13, 1890, at
Bar Harbor, Maine. == Works ==