Ellen Gould Harmon White

• Ellen Gould Harmon White
• Born: November 26, 1827
• Died: July 16, 1915

Founder of the Seventh-day Adventist church, and temperance, health, and educational reformer, was born in Gorham, Maine. She and her twin sister Elizabeth were the youngest of the eight children born to Robert Harmon, a hatter, the descendant of a servant who came to the United States in the seventeenth century, and his wife, Eunice (Gould) Harmon. The family soon moved to Portland, Maine, where Ellen Harmon became a student at the Brackett Street School. She was a semi-invalid from the age of nine, when she was struck in the face by a rock thrown by an older schoolgirl. The accident left her in a coma for three weeks and permanently disfigured her face. When she regained consciousness, she was unable to concentrate on her schoolwork, even when she was privately tutored. After briefly attending the Westbrook Seminary and Female College in Portland in 1835, she withdrew completely from formal education and spent her time at home helping her father make hats.

Once confined at home, Harmon redirected her energy to religion. She had her first religious awakening at a Methodist camp meeting in 1840 and was baptized in June 1842, but was expelled from the Methodist church, along with the rest of her family, when she became a follower of William Miller, a Baptist preacher from New York who declared that the Second Coming of Christ would take place in 1844.

Christ’s failure to appear in person left Miller’s followers deeply disappointed. It was Harmon who ultimately gave many of them a new focus for their religious beliefs. At the age of seventeen, while attending a meeting of her women’s prayer group, she experienced a vision, the first of many she claimed to have had in her life. When she came out of her trance, she announced she had seen Advent people marching to the City of God. She also developed the view that Christ would return at some unspecified time in the future and that meanwhile believers should prepare for redemption by, among other things, stressing healthful living. She began to communicate her visions to eager listeners, and by 1845, despite poor health, she had journeyed as far south as New Bedford, Massachusetts, preaching her version of Adventism and urging the observance of Saturday as the seventh-day Sabbath.

While preaching in Portland in 1845, Harmon met James Springer White (1821-1881), a twenty-three-year-old Adventist. The two began to preach together, and in August 1846 they were married. The following year, Ellen White gave birth to the first of their four sons. Finding that the responsibilities of motherhood made it impossible for her to sustain her career as a preacher, she decided to place her son, Henry Nichols, in the care of a friend, although she said the separation broke her heart.

With the child thus placed, the Whites left Portland and went on the road to preach the Adventist message. Ellen White gave birth to their second son, James Edson, in 1849. He was left with a family in Oswego, New York, while the Whites settled temporarily in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, where James White began to publish a paper, Present Truth, to spread their religious message. Present Truth evolved into the official publication of the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald.

While in Rocky Hill, Ellen White began to do some writing of her own. Her first publication was an autobiography, v4 Sketch of the Christian Experience and Views of Ellen G. White (1851), which included descriptions of many of her early visions. This autobiography marked the beginning of her prolific writing career. During her lifetime she produced more than fifty books, numerous pamphlets, and thousands of articles.

Between 1852 and 1855, the Whites lived in Rochester, New York, where in 1854 Ellen White gave birth to their third son, William Clarence. In 1855 they resettled in Battle Creek, Michigan, making it the center for their religious teachings. These were based on the principle that the Bible, properly interpreted, is the source of all truth about God and about the divinely ordained design of history. Their church was founded in 1863 with the adoption of the formal name Seventh-day Adventists, the incorporation of a publishing house, and the formulation of a plan of organization for the sect. Ellen White was the central figure in all of this activity, and although there were skeptics who broke from her ranks, church members believe that her visions were revelations from God. Under her direction, the Seventh-day Adventist church became one of the major religious denominations founded in nineteenth-century America.

White’s influence extended beyond the founding of her church. She was an important health reformer as well, intertwining good health and Christian living. Perhaps her interest in health reform went back to her early years when she had been weak and sickly. But her interest in health persisted into her young adulthood and reflected a pressing concern of many nineteenth-century reformers.

White’s role as a health reformer was based on a series of visions in which, she said, God revealed to her the connection between Christian living and healthful habits, including deep breathing, good hygiene, and abstention from sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea, and meat. This interest in health was reinforced by the birth in 1860 of the Whites’ fourth and last child, John Herbert, who died three months after a difficult delivery, and by her oldest son’s death of diphtheria in 1863. She became deeply committed to hydropathy, popularly known as the water cure. Grounded in the belief that water is the natural sustainer of life, hydropathy encompasses a regimen that includes steam, wet compresses, douches, and the drinking of cold water. White also advocated regular exercise, fresh air, and a simple, bland, grain-based diet. In 1866, with Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, she opened the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek. Whereas most water-cure establishments were secular ventures that combined hydropathy with such leisure activities as billiards or bowling, the institute provided White’s followers with the water cure in an atmosphere compatible with Seventh-day Adventist religious principles. Patrons, for example, referred to each other as “Brother” and “Sister.” The institute was a success and became the first of many Seventh-day Adventist sanatariums that now operate around the world.

Eventually Kellogg expressed a desire to transform the institute from a minimally equipped water-cure establishment into a scientifically reputable institution that offered the latest medical and surgical techniques. Although White was initially skeptical about this expansion, eventually she threw her support behind Kellogg, believing that the establishment of a highly respectable health sanatarium would dissuade her critics and bring prestige and credibility to her church. In 1878 an impressive, up-to-date medical and surgical institution opened in Battle Creek.

White also involved herself in dress reform, an issue closely linked to health reform in nineteenth-century America. Typical feminine garb consisted of complicated dresses with long, full skirts made of layers of heavy material suspended from the waist; undergarments included tight, constricting corsets that displaced internal organs and made breathing difficult. To many critics, including White, women’s fashions were not only unhealthful and immodest, they infringed upon physical and social freedom. The Bloomer—loose-fitting ankle-length pants covered by a comfortable tunic—popularized by Amelia Bloomer, offered a healthy, comfortable, and modest alternative to the fashions of the day. For ten years White tried to persuade Adventist women to adopt the Bloomer costume.

White also involved herself in educational reform. She was among those who believed that education should be subject-centered and practical as well as classical and that all children—rich as well as poor—should have access to it. Aside from training in Bible, physiology, and health, her program consisted of English, history, and arithmetic; it did not permit instruction in non-Christian literature and non-Christian science. To implement her ideas, she founded Battle Creek College in 1874, with her husband as president. It was the first of many schools founded by Seventh-day Adventists, ranging from graded church schools to colleges, including the well-known College of Medical Evangelists, which opened in 1906 in Loma Linda, California. White popularized her educational ideas in her book Education, which was published in 1903.

White supported a range of other reforms as well. In the years before the Civil War, she became active in the antislavery movement, urging her followers to disobey the Fugitive Slave Laws and turning Battle Creek into an important stop on the Underground Railroad. After the war she became interested in social problems caused by rapid industrialization. Her solution was to look backward to an era gone by, and to urge a return to an agrarian way of life modeled after the pastoral communities of the Old Testament.

White was more persuasive in her lectures in behalf of temperance, which drew large crowds. In the summer of 1876, she attracted 20,000 people to a camp in Groveland, Massachusetts, to hear her speak. Unlike many female temperance advocates, she did not become a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union because, as an observer of a Saturday sabbath, she opposed the union’s campaign to restrict business activities on Sundays.

The death of her husband in 1881 threw White into a depression from which she did not emerge for a year. In 1885 she left her home in Healdsburg, California, to travel in Europe for two years, lecturing on temperance and visiting Seventh-day Adventist institutions. She returned in 1887 to Battle Creek. In 1891 she went to Australia, where she spent a decade as a pioneer missionary, evangelizing in cities and founding a school, Avondale College, at Cooranbong.

When White returned to the United States in 1900, she turned her attention to the problem of combating the effects of the commercial development of Battle Creek. Battle Creek College (now Andrews University) moved to Berrien Springs, Michigan, in 1901. When the Adventist printing house at Battle Creek burned in 1901. the denominational headquarters and the Review and Herald moved to Takoma Park, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C.

After 1903 White settled in St. Helena, California. Still, she continued to be active, traveling to Washington in 1909 for the church’s General Conference Meeting. She died in St. Helena in 1915 at the age of eighty-seven, five months after breaking her hip. Her funeral, attended by 4,000 mourners, took place at the Dime Tabernacle in Battle Creek, and she was buried there with her husband in the Oak Hill Cemetery.

Ellen White’s reform legacy is less well known than it should be. Scholars have been put off by the creationist views of her sect as well as by the secrecy surrounding some of her writings. The fact remains, however, that Mother White, as she was often called, was a pioneer in her emphasis on good health through dietary means and on sensible dress for women. To a remarkable degree, her mundane concerns reflected the main reform tendencies of her time.

Ellen G. White’s large collection of unpublished letters and manuscripts are a vital source for a study of her life. Much of this material, which is part of the Ellen G. White Estate in Washington, D.C, is restricted, but much of her published work is in print. She wrote several autobiographies, including Spiritual Gifts: My Christian Experience, Views and Labors . . . (1860); Life Sketches of Ellen G. White (1910); and Life Sketches: Ancestry, Early Life, Christian Experience, and Extensive Labors of Elder James White and His Wife, Mrs. Ellen G. White (1880). For a listing of the fifty-four books still in print, see Comprehensive Index to the Writings of Ellen G. White, 3 vols. (1962-63). For a history of the Seventh-day Adventists, see M. Ellsworth Olsen, History of the Origin and Progress of Seventh-day Adventists (1925).

The best biography is R. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (1976). Other biographies include A. W. Spalding, There Shines a Light (1976), and R. Noor bergen, Ellen G. White, Prophet of Destiny (1972). Works by disillusioned followers include D. M. Canright, Life of Mrs. E. G. White, Seventh-day Adventist Prophet: Her False Claims Refuted (1919), and H. E. Carver, Mrs. E. G. White’s Claims to Divine Inspiration Examined (1877). Works by White’s apologists include F. D. Nichol, Ellen G. White and Her Critics (1951), and A. L. White, Ellen G. White: Messenger to the Remnant (1969). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936) and Notable American Women (1971).