Ellen G. White: The Lonely Years: 1876-1891 (vol. 3)

The Michigan Camp Meeting

As the Michigan camp meeting closed on Sunday, September 30, Uriah Smith in his report declared, “It will be safe to say that Seventh-day Adventists never held a camp meeting like the one just closed. We know not in what respect it did not surpass all its predecessors.”—The Review and Herald, October 4, 1877. 3BIO 69.5

On the first Sunday there were from six to eight thousand people on the grounds, and the second Sunday from eight to ten thousand. The skies were blue and the sun shone full, which made the shade of the grove in which the meeting was held particularly attractive. Some two thousand to twenty-five hundred believers were present for at least a portion of the camp meeting. 3BIO 69.6

Uriah Smith, as he reported the Lansing camp meeting, could not refrain from thinking of other and earlier meetings. He wrote: 3BIO 70.1

We thought of the first general meeting of this people which we attended, twenty-three years ago, in the house of Brother White, in Rochester, New York. All assembled were conveniently accommodated in one room. The publishing work was then comparatively in its infancy, and the issuing of books scarcely commenced. Yet there the loud cry of the third angel's message was looked forward to and talked about.—Ibid. 3BIO 70.2

He pondered as to what those few gathered there in Rochester in 1854 would have thought could they have seen what surrounded him and the Whites on the Michigan campground. He conjectured: “Would they not have thought that the loud cry they were expecting had already come?” 3BIO 70.3