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Biographical Notes
Ellen Gould (Harmon) White, cofounder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church,
writer, lecturer, and counselor, and one upon whom Seventh-day Adventists believe
the gift of prophecy was bestowed, was born in Gorham, Maine, November 26,
1827, one of eight children of Robert and Eunice Harmon.
During her seventy years of active service to the church, she found time to
write voluminously. She is credited with having written 100,000 manuscript pages.
This remarkable legacy to the church could alone have occupied Ellen White’s
entire life, had she dedicated her time to little else but writing.
However, her service for the church embraces much more than writing. Her
diaries tell of her public work, her travels, her personal labor, hostessing, contacts
with neighbors, as well as of her being a mother and housewife. God blessed her
abundantly in these activities. Her ambitions and concerns, her satisfactions and
joys, her sorrows—her whole life—were for the advancement of the cause she
loved.
Ellen G. White is reputed to be the most translated woman author and the
most translated author in American history. For example, her little book Steps to
Christ is available in more than 100 languages.
After a full life dedicated to the service of God and others, she died on July
16, 1915, confidently trusting in Him whom she had believed.
[8]
Born on a late fall day in a farmhouse near Gorham, Maine, Ellen Harmon
spent her childhood and youth in nearby Portland. She married James White
in 1846, and the struggling young couple lived in a variety of New England
locations as they sought to encourage and instruct fellow Advent believers by their
preaching, visiting, and publishing. After eleven irregular issues of The Present
Truth, they launched the Second Advent Review and Sabbath Heral
in Paris,
Maine, in 1850. Thereafter they followed a steadily westward course—to Saratoga
Springs, New York, and then Rochester, New York, in the early 1850s, and finally,
in 1855, to Battle Creek, Michigan, where they resided for the next twenty years.
[9]
The 1860s saw Ellen White and her husband in the forefront of the struggle
to organize the Seventh-day Adventist Church into a stable institution. The
decade was also crucial in that it encompassed the beginnings of Adventist health
emphasis. Responding to Mrs. White’s appeal, the church as a body began
to see the importance of healthful living in the Christian life. In response to
her “Christmas Vision” of 1865, our first health institution, the Western Health
Reform Institute, was opened in 1866. The institute later grew into the Battle
Creek Sanitarium.
[10]
Residing at Greenville and Battle Creek, Michigan, respectively, until late
1872, and then dividing her time between Michigan and California, Ellen White
*
Now known as the Adventist Review, it is one of the oldest continuously published religious
journals in the, United States.
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