Footprints of the Pioneers

Chapter 23—Camp in the Sugar Bush

E. H. Root

A SNOWSTORM, heavy and blustering, was sweeping the streets; but Ellen White said, “We shall go!” The open sleigh was no modern enclosed, heated car, ensuring warmth and protection, but Ellen White said, “We shall go!” The chief passenger, for whom this trip was planned, was an invalid, and friends protested that to take him out on that long trip this winter weather meant his sure death; but Ellen White said, “We shall go!” FOPI 194.3

It was December 19, 1866, and the place Battle Creek. James White had been ill for sixteen months. Stricken down by paralysis in August of 1865, he had, after a month of unavailing home treatments, been taken to the Dansville Sanitarium. After three months there they had returned to Battle Creek, where friends remarked that though he had lost fifty pounds, James White appeared better than when he left a dubious comment, when it is reflected that he was then almost wholly incapacitated, and physicians declared he could never be well. FOPI 194.4

However, that year was passed with Mrs. White’s taking her husband on short trips, in which he endeavored to do public labor as well as write. But as winter closed in, his strength and courage deteriorated, and he seemed ready to sink into the grave. Ellen White determined he must be removed from the bustle and business of headquarters; and, receiving an invitation from Elder E. H. Root, of Wright, Michigan, to make his home their own, she decided on this venture with the transportation means then available. With Brother Rogers as driver, they went away in the swirling storm, followed by grieved and even angry looks and words, on their ninety-mile trip. In two days they made it, with the invalid none the worse, and “were kindly received by this dear family, and as tenderly cared for as Christian parents can care for invalid children.” ¹³⁴ FOPI 195.1

Eighty years later we visited Wright, and found a grandson, Ruel, running a magnificent fruit farm, in which are included the holdings of his grandfather. The house of Elder and Mrs. Root, where the Whites were received, had burned down two years before our visit, and there were only the foundations remaining. But the church building is there, the second edifice on that spot, the building which it took two years to decide to build and to finance, with James White presiding at least in the beginning over the committee. For he recovered, with strenuous labor on the part of his wife, who gave him daily water treatments and massage, took him with her on ministering trips to churches, schoolhouses, and barn meetings, and finally on a purchased farm at Greenville, forty miles away, returned him to the active life of farmer as well as preacher. FOPI 196.1

It was here, in Wright, on the farm of Elder E. H. Root, that the first Seventh-day Adventist camp meeting was held, in 1868, two years after this memorable winter flight of Elder and Mrs. White. Why was the site of that first camp meeting selected so far from the center of the State? For Wright (like Monterey, a farming community rather than a town) is in the western part of the State, northwest of Grand Rapids and near Lake Michigan. FOPI 197.1

An article in the church paper of that year sheds light. It appears that at a meeting held in the Wright church in July of 1868, attended by James and Ellen White and Uriah Smith. The subject of camp meetings was introduced. At first Elder White’s idea seemed to be a general camp meeting for the whole field, at least of the ‘ ‘Lake’ States-Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, perhaps New York. However, he thought the season was too far along to make this effective, and so the general camp meeting must be postponed to another year. However, he suggested regional camp meetings: one for western Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois; one for eastern Michigan and New York; and one for southern Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. FOPI 197.2

It was decided to hold the first-named regional meeting at Wright, because it was near Lake Michigan, and Wisconsin and Illinois brethren could easily reach it by water. Of course the fact that they were sitting in council at Wright, and that Elder Root offered his farm for the camp, was rather conclusive. As it turned out, this camp meeting was the only one for Michigan that year. And immediately after this camp meeting in September, other camp meetings were held in Illinois and Iowa. So the idea of a general meeting such as the General Conference, for the whole field, was dropped, and conference camp meetings became the rule. ¹³⁵ FOPI 197.3

Elder Root had only about forty acres cleared then, so his grandson informed us, but the open woods were ranged by his stock. About a hundred rods north of his house was his sugar bush, as the maple groves were called, where in the spring the sap was collected and boiled down to maple syrup and sugar. That was a beautiful site for a camp meeting, the great trees making an open but shady grove; and there this first affair was held. There was a great deal of dubiety in Seventh-day Adventist ranks then about camp meetings. Adventists had held camp meetings, it is true, in the days of 44, and the Methodists, among whom the camp meeting originated in Kentucky and Tennessee, used it much. But some of these meetings were boisterous and disorderly, and the Seventh-day Adventist leaders were doubtful whether the good resulting would equal the ill. However, they decided at last to try it. This was fourteen years after they began to use tents in evangelistic meetings. FOPI 198.1

Ruel Root, who is the third generation of church elders in Wright, took us out to the site of that first camp meeting. I had hoped against hope for a grove or at least a pasture, so that I might visualize the historic scene. But lo, we stopped in the midst of his apple orchard, the heavy boughs hanging low. “Here,” said Ruel Root, “is where the assembly met, and yonder to the right was the speakers’ stand.” FOPI 199.1

It was a slight depression where we stood, and the bower which made the rostrum therefore would have been on a slight rise to our right. In the opposite direction, up a scarcely perceptible slope, would have been the open-air forum, with its log and plank seats. And around them in semicircle, veiled from our view by the thick orchard, were ranged the twenty-two tents of the campers-nineteen from Michigan, two from Wisconsin, and one, the only heavy duck tent, from New York. FOPI 199.2

The two large tents belonging to the tent companies of Michigan and Ohio were also pitched, one of them for the abundant supply of straw required, the other as a meeting place if it should rain. The open-air forum was patterned after the Millerite camp meetings, and I believe this, our first, was the only camp meeting that used it. For it rained. On Sunday, next to the last day, a deluge drove them all to the big tent, and the rain pierced through all the flimsy cotton-drill tents, and left only the New York tent dry. That decided the future renting material of camp meetings, and also the use of large tents for meetings instead of the open grounds. FOPI 199.3

Some three hundred people were camped on the ground, but the attendance at its height was over two thousand. The speakers were eleven in number, chief of whom were James and Ellen White, Joseph Bates, J. N. Andrews, and J. H. Waggoner. FOPI 199.4

We visited two attenders of that first camp meeting. It was held seventy-eight years before, but these old ladies were there. Sisters, they live in near-by Coopersville, and their names are Mrs. Ella Foxe and Miss Clara Hastings. Mrs. Foxe, though then but four years old, says she remembers how James White gathered the children together and talked with them, and gave them each a small book, titled, from its first story, Little Will. Clara, her sister, was a babe in arms, but she says she made her mark at that first camp meeting by being the only baby who disturbed the assembly. The “only,” of course, might be disputed by some other claimants for honors, if they were accessible. FOPI 200.1

Mrs. Foxe is in the third generation from Grandma Foxe, who lies in the graveyard behind the meetinghouse, a member of the first Wright church, and before that living in Salem Center, Indiana, where Samuel Rhodes and J. C. Bowles first preached. There was much opposition down there to the handful who accepted the third angel’s message, and their meeting place, the house of Mrs. Foxe, a widow with several children, was stoned by a mob. One man climbed to the roof, to put a board over the chimney and smoke them out, but he fell off and broke his neck. Grandma Foxe always said an angel pushed him off the roof. Perhaps the devil was through with a man mean enough to smoke out a widow and her little children. FOPI 200.2

There is other precious dust in that burying ground. Dr. J. H. Ginley, who was the second head of the Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, after Dr. H. S. Lay resigned, is buried here, with his wife and daughter. Elder Ephraim H. Root and his wife Hezzy lie here, and their son James, Ruel’s father, who was the second church elder. The faith has been kept in the family of Root. How well I remember, from my Michigan boyhood, the benevolent face of Elder Root, with his thick white beard and his kindly blue eyes, when he visited our church at Hanover, one of the charter members of the Michigan Conference. FOPI 200.3

The church at Wright resulted from meetings held by Elder B. Frisbie in 1858. The weathered church records in Brother Root’s farmhouse go back no further than 1861, but there are references in it to a “first book,” which is evidently lost. It was one of the charter churches in the Michigan Conference, the first conference organization among us, formed in 1861. FOPI 201.1

The great and the little camp meetings of today stem from this first and very successful experiment. The brethren took good care in advance that all should be organized and well conducted. A daily program was posted, the meetings were regular and well attended, even the interests of the children, so often neglected in that day, were at least partially provided for, and the policing of the grounds at night was thorough. Conditions were rather primitive: beds consisted of straw piled thick between boards on two sides of the community tents, cooking was done outdoors on open fires, and the lighting at night was furnished by blazing fires on earth-filled elevated boxes and by bonfires. The bookstand was a triangle of boards in the open. Yet the spirit of true worship and the nucleus of organization were there; and we may well worship in spirit with the pioneers gathered for the first Seventh-day Adventist camp meeting in the sugar bush of Elder Root at Wright, Michigan. FOPI 201.2