Ellen G. White: The Australian Years: 1891-1900 (vol. 4)

Chapter 20—(1895) Fannie Bolton and Her Witness—True and False

Although Ellen White ministered successfully at the camp meetings in Melbourne and Hobart, it was against great odds. Her health had been so poor through the preceding four months that only in the strength God gave her did she dare to venture to attend. There were also problems she was called to face of which others had little knowledge, problems within her working family. “I could not possibly relate,” she wrote to Edson, “the suffering of mind while attending the camp meeting at Melbourne.”—Letter 123a, 1895. The problem lay in the changeable moods, erratic course, and unfaithfulness of Miss Fannie Bolton, the secretary who had replaced Sara McEnterfer at the last minute as the Whites left America; she assisted in preparing Ellen G. White articles for the journals of the church. 4BIO 237.1

Ellen White had not thought to take Fannie with her on this camp meeting tour, but Fannie insisted on going and promised that the trip would bring very little break in her work. Reluctantly, her employer consented. But things did not work out as Fannie had promised. Soon she became involved in the children's meetings, and then there followed a resumption of an old attitude that in her work for Ellen White she was not being given proper recognition. Added to this was a courtship developing between Fannie and W. F. Caldwell, the man who in 1893 had come from America with the message that the Seventh-day Adventist Church had become Babylon. After a change of heart he had been employed by Ellen White, but with his long stay overseas, his non-Adventist wife had divorced him on grounds of desertion. 4BIO 237.2