Photos, Part I: 1859-1888 ~ Photos, Part II: 1888-1896 ~ Photos, Part IV: 1902-1906
Clockwise above: Battle Creek Sanitarium, where Sheafe heard “present truth . . . investigated it, tried and proved, then obeyed.” Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, famed medical director of the Sanitarium was crucial in introducing Sheafe to Adventism. Ole A. Olsen, president of the General Conference when Sheafe joined the Adventist church. G.A. Irwin became General Conference president in 1897, when Sheafe became a General Conference employee, commissioned to take the Adventist message to “his people” in the South. Mrs. S.M.I. Henry, a national leader of the WCTU, like Sheafe accepted the Adventist message in 1896 while regaining health at the Battle Creek Sanitarium
Below: Ellen G. White, Adventist prophet and co-founder, was in Australia when Sheafe became an Adventist; this photo was taken in or around 1899, the year that Sheafe wrote her a letter addressing her as “a special servant of the Lord.” Battle Creek Tabernacle, the denomination’s largest church, where Sheafe preached his first sermon as an Adventist on July 18, 1896.
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Above left: J.Edson White, Ellen White's eldest son, spearheaded the expanded outreach to Southern blacks that his mother called for in the 1890s, using the river boat Morning Star as a base. Scores of churches and schools were established under the auspices of the Southern Missionary Society that J.E. White organized and led. At the school in Lintonia, MS, one of the teachers was Franklin G. Warnick (far right in photo above with F.R. Rogers and R.T. Nash families), a Wayland Seminary classmate who succeeded Sheafe as pastor of Mahoning Avenue Baptist Church in Youngstown, OH, and subsequently was persuaded by Sheafe's witness to join the ranks of Adventism.
Below: In the late 1890s, Sheafe devoted portions of each year to ministry in Chattanooga, in connection with the benevolent work of Mrs. Almira Steele, whose four decades of service on behalf of needy black orphans was noted in the New York Age in 1923. Sheafe was the third African American ordained as a Seventh-day Adventist minister, the first being Charles Kinney (right) and the second, Alfonso Barry (middle). The black Adventist congregation organized in Lexington, KY in 1894 was described by the conference president as "company of refined and intelligent colored people." Its membership included attorney J. Alexander Chiles (second row, far right), probably the first black attorney to practice in Lexington, and Mary Britton (second from right), teacher, journalist, civil rights advocate, friend of Ida B. Wells, and, after training at the Adventist's American Medical Missionary College in Battle Creek, Kentucky's first black female physician. After sharp controversy developed between some of the Lexington believers and their pastor, Elder Barry, Sheafe was called to Lexington in Dec. 1897 and Barry transferred to Covington, KY. Elizabeth Evelyn Wright (third from right), founder of Voorhees Industrial School in Demnark, South Carolina, had close ties to Adventism through Mrs. Steele and Dr. J.H. Kellogg, and it was at Voorhees that Sheafe embarked on his evangelistic project focusing on black educational institutions in 1900.
Above: John G. Fee, abolitionist and founder of Berea College, led efforts on behalf of black soldiers and their families at Camp Nelson, KY, toward the end of the Civil War and in the decades following; and the school established at the camp. Fee viewed Camp Nelson "as a place to educate and train the freedmen to become independent, self-reliant members of an integrated American society." Sheafe conducted evangelistic work there beginning in 1898 and found a positive response from the elderly Fee and the community, especially to health reform. A.F. Ballenger rejoiced that racial reconciliation resulted from the "Receive Ye the Holy Ghost" revivals he conducted at the Adventist church in Washington, D.C. and in Louisville, KY, where he and Sheafe worked together for a few weeks in 1899, Both Ballenger and Sheafe envisioned establishing a "colony" for holistic ministry to blacks in the South, but Ellen White counseled Ballenger against the idea because he did not have the needed gifts and temperament for such an endeavor. Sheafe's plans and what happened to them are uncertain, though some of the general ideals involved can be seen in his later work in Washington and elsewhere.
Below (l to r): Smith Sharp opposed the racial integration of the Louisville churches and resisted a call there until discovering that the recently-united congregation had essentially become internally segregated. Smith was a close colleague of Robert M. Kilgore, the most influential white leader in the early decades of the denomination's work in the South, who came to see Sheafe as an instigator of racial conflict and insisted that he leave the Southern Union and minister in the North. A.G. Daniells began his ministry in Texas under Kilgore's tutelage in the 1870s, and in the 1890s worked closely with W.C. White and Ellen G. White in the South Pacific. After becoming General Conference President in 1901, Daniells gave strong support to Sheafe's ministry so long as it was directed toward building up separate black congregations. At the January 1902 meeting in which former General Conference president G.I. Butler was elected president of the Southern Union, Sheafe became the first black minister appointed to the board of the Oakwood Industrial School. Butler spoke warmly of Sheafe after an important, extended meeting of the board in March 1902, but later became sharply critical of him. H.E. Rogers, as financial secretary of the General Conference, seemed understanding and gracious in helping Sheafe straighten out the shortfall in his wages and work through other financial stresses in 1901 and 1902.
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