A Place Called Oakwood

*Note on Ellen White's Oakwood Visits

There is considerable conjecture and debate as to how many times Ellen White visited Oakwood. There are two speeches five years apart (June 21, 1904, and April 19, 1909) that were transcribed and have been preserved. Mrs. White also wrote of these two visits in her diary and personal correspondence. If Mrs. White made additional visits to Oakwood other than in 1904 and 1909, there is no extant record or document to support those visits. Therefore, any other visits to Oakwood by Mrs. White than on these two dates can only be presumed until further evidence is discovered. PCO viii.4

Ellen White returned to the United States from Australia in 1900. The 1904 and 1909 visits took place when she traveled across the country from Elmshaven, her home a few miles from the town of St. Helena (70 miles north of San Francisco) to Battle Creek, Michigan, and Washington, DC, center of the growing Adventist Church. PCO viii.5

These trips coincide with the Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia reference that states: PCO viii.6

“Her journeys across the continent between 1901 and 1909 often took her through the South, where the work of the church was slowly developing. An appeal from her pen in 1891, followed in 1895 and 1896 by articles published in the Review and Herald urging educational and evangelistic endeavors for the neglected black race, sparked a work in which her own son, James Edson White, took an active part. She was keenly interested in the development of missionary endeavors geared for most effective results in white and black communities, and sent the workers in this field many messages of counsel and encouragement. She lent strong support to the establishment of Oakwood College, in Huntsville, Alabama, for black young people, and the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute, near Madison, Tennessee, a privately operated training center for mature white young people. The work of the church in the South was of deep concern to her through the remaining years of her life.” [Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, Second Revised Edition M-Z, Review and Herald Publishing Association, Hagerstown, MD 21740, pp. 879-880.] PCO viii.7