Ellen G. White

A stone thrown by a classmate hit Ellen Harmon in the face when she was nine, walking home from her school in Portland, Maine. She was unconscious for weeks. Her health never came back and her education stopped there. She was the seventh of eight children of a farmer who also made hats, and what she had instead of schooling was her parents' religion. At 12 she heard William Miller preach that Christ would return, and the family was expelled from their Methodist congregation for believing him. October 22, 1844 passed without incident. Two months later, at 17, praying with four other women in a Portland parlor, she reported the first of her visions.

Her grandson later counted more than 2,000 visions and dreams across 70 years, most described aloud in meeting halls and then printed. Adventists took them for the biblical gift of prophecy, and still do. With her husband James White and Joseph Bates she built a church out of the wreckage of Millerism, organized formally at Battle Creek, Michigan on May 21, 1863. She wrote without stopping: over 100,000 pages of manuscript, more than 200 titles in English. It now reports upward of 20 million baptized members. No other woman founded an American denomination that lasted.

The visions were disputed in her lifetime and the writing has been disputed since. In 1982 Walter Rea, an Adventist pastor whose employment the church had already ended, published The White Lie, laying her paragraphs beside earlier authors she had not credited. The General Conference commissioned its own study. Fred Veltman examined 15 randomly chosen chapters of The Desire of Ages and reported in 1988 that 31.4 percent of the text depended to some degree on literary sources. The church published the finding and kept the prophetic claim. White had written in 1911 that she quoted historians without always crediting them. What the borrowing means is argued still, inside the church and outside it.

On June 6, 1863, at Otsego, Michigan, she reported a vision about the body, and the church took it as instruction: no alcohol, no tobacco, a plant diet, and hospitals of its own. The Western Health Reform Institute opened at Battle Creek in 1866. She brought in John Harvey Kellogg to run it, and out of his experimental kitchen came the flaked cereal his brother Will turned into an industry. The rest is measurable. Loma Linda University has tracked Adventists for decades and found the men of California outliving their neighbors by 7.3 years, the women by 4.4. Smithsonian has since listed her among the 100 most significant Americans.

Ellen G. White's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Great Controversy book
  Her account of a cosmic conflict, from a vision she reported at an Ohio funeral in 1858 1888
• Steps to Christ book
  Published in more than 140 languages 1892
• The Desire of Ages book
  Her life of Jesus, and the book at the center of the borrowing dispute 1898
• The Ministry of Healing book
  The health teaching set out in full 1905
• Western Health Reform Institute other
  Battle Creek, Michigan — later the Battle Creek Sanitarium under John Harvey Kellogg 1866
• Avondale School for Christian Workers other
  Cooranbong, New South Wales — now Avondale University 1897

• 1836 aged ~9 A classmate throws a stone that ends her childhood She was nine, unconscious for weeks, and never returned to school.
• October 22, 1844 aged 16 The Great Disappointment The date William Miller's followers had set for the return of Christ passed without event.
• December 1844 aged 17 Reports her first vision, at 17, in a Portland home She described the Advent people walking a lit path toward the New Jerusalem.
• August 30, 1846 aged 18 Marries James White in Portland, Maine
• May 21, 1863 aged 35 The Seventh-day Adventist Church is formally organized at Battle Creek
• June 6, 1863 aged 35 Reports the health vision at Otsego, Michigan It became the basis for Adventist vegetarianism, temperance and hospital building.
• August 6, 1881 aged 53 James White dies, leaving her to lead alone for 34 years
• December 1891 aged 64 Arrives in Australia for a stay of nine years She pushed for the school at Cooranbong that became Avondale University.
• July 16, 1915 aged 87 Dies at Elmshaven and is buried beside James in Battle Creek

• Mary Baker Eddy 1821–1910
  Founder of Christian Science and a major female religious leader and publisher. parallel founder
• Joseph Smith 1805–1844
  Founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, one of the most consequential religions to originate in the United States. earlier prophet-founder
• Brigham Young 1801–1877
  Religious and territorial leader who directed Mormon migration and settlement in the American West. rival church builder