A Maine teenager's visions helped found a church and a vegetarian tradition
Ellen G. White said she experienced her first vision at a small prayer meeting in Portland, Maine, in December 1844. She went on to co-found the Seventh-day Adventist Church, wrote some 40 books, and became a pivotal figure in American vegetarianism. Her grandson called her the most translated woman writer of non-fiction ever.
Born Ellen Harmon on November 26, 1827, in Gorham, Maine, she was one of twins and the seventh of eight children of a farmer who also made hats. At nine she was struck in the face by a stone while at school in Portland, an injury she later credited with turning her towards faith. In 1840 her family joined the Millerites, who expected Christ's imminent return; the local Methodist church expelled them for it, and she was baptised in Casco Bay on June 26, 1842.
Her first reported vision came soon after the Great Disappointment of 1844, when the predicted Second Coming failed to happen, and it pictured the faithful on a perilous road towards the New Jerusalem. The historian Godfrey T. Anderson read it as a promise of eventual triumph to believers sunk in despair. She hesitated to share it widely, but her account appeared on January 24, 1846, in The Day-Star, a Cincinnati paper whose editor printed her letter despite her saying it was not meant for publication. She married the Millerite preacher James White that August.
Arthur L. White, her grandson and biographer, estimated she reported more than 2,000 visions and dreams. Her Great Controversy theme, a cosmic struggle between Christ and Satan, became central to Adventist theology, her devotional book Steps to Christ appears in more than 140 languages, and a compilation of her writing on children underpins the church's school system. Critics focused on the visions themselves and on her borrowing from other writers; the historian Randall Balmer calls her one of the more colourful figures in American religion.
Food was part of the message. A vision at Otsego, Michigan, on June 6, 1863, presented a vegetarian diet as healthful, though she treated it as flexible given how hard meatless food was to find on her travels, and she committed fully only in January 1894 at a camp meeting near Melbourne. She died at her California home, Elmshaven, on July 16, 1915, and Smithsonian later ranked her among the 100 most significant Americans.
Source: Ellen G. White
