The Ellen G. White Letters and Manuscripts: Volume 1

CRAWFORD, Marion Concordia (née STOWELL) (1829-1913) and (first husband) Delos Lagrange Truesdail (1829-1892) and (second husband) Franklin A. Crawford (1827-1902)

Marion Stowell and her brother Lewis Oswald Stowell, of Paris, Maine, were the first among future Seventh-day Adventists in Maine to keep the Sabbath, after reading a Sabbath tract by T. M. Preble in the spring of 1845. During the early 1850s Marion Stowell taught school at the home of Sabbatarian preacher George W. Holt in Oswego, New York, and subsequently was a district school teacher in Warren, Illinois. She married Delos Truesdale in 1860. The Truesdales brought up at least two orphans, one of whom, M. Bessie DeGraw Sutherland, later became a well-known Seventh-day Adventist educator. In 1894, after the death of her first husband, Marion married a childhood friend, Franklin Crawford, a prosperous Episcopalian businessman from Kankakee, Illinois. 1EGWLM 817.2

An active layperson throughout her life, Marion Stowell Crawford had a wide network of persons to whom she sent Adventist literature. After the death of Franklin Crawford, Marion was left with substantial assets, which she liberally used to support a number of church projects, including schools, sanitariums, and work in the Southern states. She also lent money to Ellen White in order to help speed up the production of White's books. 1EGWLM 817.3

Marion Stowell first met Ellen White (then Harmon) in the summer of 1845, when Ellen visited Paris, Maine. During the next few years Marion visited the Whites several times both in Maine and in New York, traveled with them on occasion, and saw Ellen White in vision “nearly a score of times.” Marion had firsthand acquaintance with the outbreak of fanaticism in 1845 among some Adventists in Paris, and denied later claims that Ellen White was herself involved in the fanaticism. Some of Marion Stowell's testimony on this issue was published by John N. Loughborough and others, and can also be found in Ellen White's earliest autobiography. 1EGWLM 817.4

See: Obituary: “Marion Stowell Crawford,” Review, Dec. 18, 1913, p. 1230; W.H.H. Stowell, The Stowell Genealogy: A Record of the Descendants of Samuel Stowell of Hingham, Mass. (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle Co., 1922), p. 366; Mrs. M. C. Stowell Crawford, “A Letter From a Veteran Worker,” Southern Watchman, Apr. 25, 1905, p. 278; T. M. Preble, A Tract, Showing That the Seventh Day Should Be Observed as the Sabbath, Instead of the First Day “According to the Commandment” (Nashua, N.H.: Murray and Kimball, 1845); Portrait and Biographical Record of Kankakee County, Illinois, Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens, Together With Biographies of All the Governors of the State and of the Presidents of the United States (Chicago: Lake City Pub. Co., 1893), pp. 311, 312; Episcopal Church, Journal of the Forty-Eighth Annual Convention of the Diocese of Chicago (Chicago: Skeen and Stuart, 1885), p. 78; SDAE, s.v. “M. Bessie De Graw Sutherland”; J. N. Loughborough, Rise and Progress of the Seventh-day Adventists, p. 119; M. C. Stowell Crawford to Ellen G. White, Oct. 9, 1908; Ellen G. White, Spiritual Gifts [vol. 2], p. 301. 1EGWLM 817.5