Andover Homes For Sale

Long before English settlement, the area that became Andover was known to the Pennacook Confederacy — including the Pentucket and Wamesit peoples under sachem Passaconaway — as Cochichewick, an Algonquian name describing the falls on the lake that still bears that name. In 1646, the Massachusetts General Court granted the land to a group of colonists led by John Woodbridge, who had come from Newbury and Ipswich, and the town was incorporated that year as Andover, likely named for Andover, England. Like many Essex County towns, Andover was swept into the 1692 Salem witch hysteria: more than 40 residents were formally accused, and three were executed. Notably, the town's original settlement and meetinghouse stood in what is now North Andover's town center — when the town's growing South and West Parishes split from the North Parish in 1855, it was the newer, more industrial southern half that kept the name "Andover," while the historic original center reincorporated as North Andover.

That South Parish went on to become home to one of the oldest secondary schools in the United States: Phillips Academy, founded in 1778 by Samuel Phillips Jr. Its campus today includes the Addison Gallery of American Art (1931) and the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology (1901), and its alumni rolls include an unusually deep Bush family lineage — Prescott Bush (Class of 1940), President George H.W. Bush (Class of 1942, later a Phillips trustee for 16 years), and George H.W.'s sons George W. Bush (1964), Jeb Bush (1971), and Marvin Bush (1975) all attended. Phillips Academy's sister school, Abbot Academy, educated girls in Andover from 1828 until the two schools merged in 1973. Andover's industrial history is just as distinctive: in 1919–1922, American Woolen Company president William Madison Wood built Shawsheen Village, a planned "model industrial community" of brick and half-timbered buildings graded by managerial hierarchy, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Ballardvale, Andover's earlier mill village on the Shawsheen River, retains its own tightly clustered 19th-century mill-worker housing and was separately listed on the National Register in 1982.

Today Andover sits directly at the interchange of I-93 and I-495 — a geography that has shaped its modern economy as much as its schools have shaped its reputation. Raytheon (now RTX) opened a 1.7-million-square-foot radar manufacturing campus in Andover in 1980 that remains one of the region's largest employers, alongside Mercury Systems, Vicor, and the IRS's Andover tax-processing campus. Two stops on the MBTA Commuter Rail's Haverhill Line — Andover and Ballardvale — connect the town to Boston's North Station. Facing the state's MBTA Communities Act, Andover's Special Town Meeting voted 434–196 in April 2024 to adopt a Multi-family Overlay District spanning three sub-areas near the downtown Andover and Ballardvale stations and along River Road, zoned for at least 2,031 potential housing units; its Select Board adopted a companion Housing Production Plan in December 2025. Against that backdrop, Redfin data through May 2026 show a competitive market: a median sale price of $979,414 (roughly flat year-over-year), a median of 23 days on market, and homes typically fielding about three offers and closing near or slightly above list price.