The author would like to thank the Episcopal Church Foundation, Moravian Archives, Calvin University’s Department of Historical Studies and de Vries Institute, and the University of Chicago Library for their support of the archival research that made this article possible.

¹ Stevens, Abel, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, vol. 2 (New York, 1867), 68 Google Scholar; Sprague, William B., Annals of the American Methodist Pulpit, vol. 7 (New York, 1873), 69.Google Scholar

² Given their anachronistic and problematic nature, I avoid using the terms “evangelical” and “evangelicalism” throughout this article. For an important perspective on these terms, see Sutton, Matthew Avery, “Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 92, no. 1 (March 2024): 37–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Nelson Reed, diary, typescript, July 22 and August 9, 1778, March 14, 1779, and March 8, 1780, box 6, folder 4, Church History Documents Collection, c. 1750–1906 (hereafter CDC), Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center (hereafter HHG), University of Chicago.

⁴ In his classic study of eighteenth-century Virginia, Rhys Isaac defined New Light religion as a “reaction to the dominant culture” that defied the region’s “refinements of gentility and the customary indulgences of traditional popular culture.” For more on Isaac’s summation and similar examples in the historiography, see Isaac, Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, New Edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 162, 164 Google Scholar; Heyrman, Christine, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 9Google Scholar, 19–20, 26; Schmidt, Leigh, “‘The Grand Prophet,’ Hugh Bryan: Early Evangelicalism’s Challenge to the Establishment and Slavery in the Colonial South,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 87, no. 4 (October 1986): 238–50Google Scholar; and Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn, “A Tale of Two Patriarchs; or, How a Eunuch and a Wife Created a Family in the Church” Journal of Family History 28, no. 4 (October 2003): 490–505 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a particularly helpful illustration of Southern revivalists’ abiding conservatism, see Jewel Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 2, 4, 8.

⁵ Almost every historian of Southern “evangelicalism” has pointed this out, but there is no more elegant illustration than that found in Mathews, Donald, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xvi–xvii, 13.Google Scholar

⁶ Young, Chester Raymond, ed., Westward into Kentucky: The Narrative of Daniel Trabue (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), 131.Google Scholar

⁷ Benjamin Lakin, commonplace book, n.d., box 4, folder 2, CDC. In its current form, the Lakin commonplace book is a sprawling, irregular smattering of the preacher’s spiritual reflections. Spread across numerous booklets and paper scraps, it is nearly impossible to make reference to specific pages.

⁸ David Barrow to Thomas Ustick, April 25, 1789, Thomas Ustick Papers (RG 1189), American Baptist Historical Society, Atlanta, GA. On this topic, the historian Cynthis Lyerly has asserted that Southern Methodists, at least briefly, created a “moment when class, gender, race, and status were stripped away as the believer stood alone before God, who judged solely by the purity of the human heart.” See Cynthia Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1760–1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vii.

⁹ Edmund Botsford, “A Description of a Gospel Church,” n.d., Botsford Family Papers (hereafter BFP), James B. Duke Library, Furman University, Greenville, SC (hereafter JDL).

¹⁰ Hatch, Nathan, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 128, 144.Google Scholar

¹¹ Religious studies scholars and historians of American religion have become increasingly interested in sound and space over the last two decades. For some significant examples, see Kilde, Jeanne, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bodenhamer, David J., Corrigan, John, and Harris, Trevor, eds., Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, Louis, The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Corrigan, John, “Space, Modernity, and Emptiness: Some American Examples,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 82, no. 1 (March 2014): 163–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weiner, Isaac, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (New York: New York University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Schmidt, Leigh, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

¹² William Hickman, autobiography, 5, Reuben T. Durrett Collection, Miscellaneous Manuscripts and Codices, HHG.

¹³ Joseph Powell, diaries, January 1, 1771 (PHC 258:1), June 22 and October 1, 1772 (PHC 258:6), Provincial Helpers Conference, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA.

¹⁴ Sarah Eyerly, Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020), 11–13. For more on the various “radical” characteristics of Southern revivalism, see Calhoon, Robert, Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740–1861 (Columbia, NC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 27, 59Google Scholar; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 167–68; and Heyrman, Southern Cross, 211.

¹⁵ Smith, Mark M., “Making ‘Others’ Smell,” in Smell and History: A Reader, ed. Smith, Mark M. (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2019), 188.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Smith, Mark M., How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3–5 Google Scholar, 11. To be clear, Smith is focused primarily on the relationship between white and Black Southerners in his text. However, I am extending his model to include Native Americans as well.

¹⁷ Smith, How Race Is Made, 5.

¹⁸ Numerous scholars have illustrated how Anglicanism often functioned to maintain social and religious elitism in eighteenth-century southern America. For examples that draw specifically on space, see Beasley, Nicholas, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650–1780 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 21–53 Google Scholar; Upton, Dell, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 4–5 Google Scholar, 97–98, 194, 215; and Nelson, Beauty of Holiness, 329. For broader discussions, see Annette Laing, “‘Heathens and Infidels’? African Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1700–1750,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 12, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 202, 204, 216–17; Little, Thomas, The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism: Religious Revivalism in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1760 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2013), 72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, xxvi, 64, 120; and Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives, 64.

¹⁹ Thomas Lyell, autobiography, n.d., Albert Smedes Papers, 1790–1890, Southern Historical Collection (hereafter SHC), Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; John Hagerty to Edward Dromgoole, October 3, 1787, Edward Dromgoole Papers, 1775–1840 (hereafter EDP), SHC.

²⁰ For just a few specific examples of the ways in which sound and space structured early American experience, see Rath, Richard Cullen, “Hearing American History,” Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September 2008): 417–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corrigan, John, “Barbarous Howling, Sonic Space, and Identity: The New England Regular Singing Controversy of the 1720s,” New England Quarterly 93, no. 3 (September 2020): 499–505 Google Scholar; Bechtold, Rebeccah, “A Revolutionary Soundscape: Musical Reform and the Science of Sound in Early America, 1760–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 35, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 419–50Google Scholar; Lepore, Jill, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 71–96 Google Scholar; Smith, How Race Is Made, 11–28; and Juster, Susan, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 14–23.Google Scholar

²¹ For a discussion of these concepts in early New England, see Lepore, Name of War, 71–96.

²² Religious studies scholars and historians have defined “noise” in various ways, often emphasizing its subjective nature and, as a result, its racial, gendered, and social applications. See Crowley, Ashon, “Noise,” in Weiner, Isaac and Dubler, Joshua, eds., Religion, Law, USA (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 156–69Google Scholar.

²³ John Smith quoted in Robert Beverly, The History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705), 54–55; John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London, 1709), 183, 233; and Norvell Robertson, autobiography, 1765–1846, typescript, 11–12, Virginia Museum of History & Culture (hereafter VMHC).

²⁴ For brief background on Bosman and his New and Accurate Description, see van Dantzig, Albert, “Willem Bosman’s ‘New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea’: How Accurate Is It?,” History in Africa 1 (1974): 101–108.Google Scholar

²⁵ Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London, 1705), 130, 138, 230; Daniel Defoe, The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, 3rd ed. (London, 1768), 57, 80, 83.

²⁶ Antoine de Courtin, The Rules of Civility, rev. ed. (London, 1678), 62–64, 71–72; Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling: In Two Parts (Oxford, 1673), 2, 6–7. Richard Beale Davis once claimed that Allestree’s guides “rival[ed] even the Bible and Book of Common Prayer in popularity” among Southern Anglicans, and Lauren Winner has likewise noted in her study of Anglican Virginia that Southern colonists were very familiar with Allestree’s work. Others have pointed to George Washington’s engagement with Courtin. See Davis, Richard Beale, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585–1763, vol. 2 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 505 Google Scholar; Winner, Lauren, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 46; Mennell, Stephen, “Manners,” in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, ed. Spencer, Mark G., vol. 2 (London and Boston: Bloomsburgy Academic, 2015), 684–85.Google Scholar

²⁷ Sarah Eyerly has offered valuable perspective on the connection between space and sound, noting that “landscapes are not merely physical topographies: they also exist in sound. Our sense of spatiality is not grounded in only sight but in sound; we listen to perceive distance and space.” See Eyerly, Moravian Soundscapes, 53.

²⁸ Goetz, Rebecca, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 31 Google Scholar; Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613), 1; Alexander Whitaker, “Part of a Tractate Written at Henrico in Virginia, 1613” in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 19, ed. Samuel Purchas (Glasgow, 1906), 112–13; Alexander Whitaker to William Crashaw, in The Genesis of the United States: A Narrative of the Movement in England, 1605–1616, ed., Alexander Brown, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1890), 499.

²⁹ For just one example of this perspective, see S. Max Edelson’s “Clearing Swamps, Harvesting Forests: Trees and the Making of a Plantation Landscape in the Colonial South Carolina Lowcountry,” Agricultural History 81, no. 3 (Summer 2007), 381–406.

³⁰ Lovebury Travel Journal, 1789, typescript, 1, West Virginia & Regional History Center (hereafter WVC), West Virginia University.

³¹ As Richard Cullen Rath has written, early Americans held specific moral convictions toward natural spaces yet untouched by English hands. These landscapes—often termed “wilderness”—represented trouble. Without the ornaments and strictures of civilized life, such spaces blurred “distinctions between humanity and environment, good and evil, or high and low.” They were spaces “inhabited by wild ‘others.’ … To the colonists, the vast unimproved forests of eastern North America were the epitome of wild, as were its inhabitants, whether human, animal, or spirit.” See Rath, Rath Cullen How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 146–47Google Scholar.

³² Oliver Hart, journal, May 4, 1761, Oliver Hart Papers, 1741–1961, South Caroliniana Library (hereafter SCL), University of South Carolina; Henry Ravenel, diary, July 20, 1752, South Carolina Historical Society (hereafter SCHS), Charleston, SC.

³³ Hezekiah Smith to Samuel Jones, February 23, 1763, Mrs. Irvin H. McKesson Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; South Carolina Gazette (hereafter TSCG), July 3, 1736 and December 29, 1758; John Sevier to John Watts, March 5, 1797, Governor John Sevier Papers, 1796–1801, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN (hereafter TSLA); William Bartram, Travels Through North & South Carolina (Philadelphia, 1791), 166, 194, 271–73; Bassett, John Spencer, Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1896), 36–38, 57Google Scholar; and Hooker, Richard, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 20.Google Scholar

³⁴ Hooker, Journal of Charles Woodmason, 14, 30, 42, 61, 63, 118–20.

³⁵ Edmund Botsford, “Some Observations Reflecting General Notions of Christianity,” c. 1790s, BFP.

³⁶ “A Journal and Travel of James Meacham: Part I, May 19 to Aug. 31, 1789,” Trinity College Historical Papers 9 (1912): 67.

³⁷ The South Carolina Methodist itinerant Reuben Ellis touched on the denominationalism which pervaded Southern Protestantism. While riding the Yadkin circuit, Ellis complained of the “great many Baptists, & Presbiterians, who have fill’d the Peoples heads with Predestination.” See Reuben Ellis to Edward Dromgoole, August 30, 1786, EDP.

³⁸ As Brett M. Grainger has recently shown, among antebellum Protestants (especially Methodists) there was a “pervasive curiosity about the natural world as a site of spiritual power, presence, and possibility.” See Grainger, Brett M., Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 5.Google Scholar

³⁹ John Newton, diaries, May 21, 1787, Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Jeremiah Norman, diary, August 6 and 18, November 8, 1793, Stephen Beauregard Weeks Papers, 1746–1941, SHC; Stith Mead to Samuel Mead, September 24, 1794, Stith Mead, letterbook, 1792–5 (hereafter SML), VMHC; and William McKendree, autobiography, n.d., box 1, folder 23, William M’Kendree Papers, 1790–1855, MSS 34, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.

⁴⁰ As Jeremiah Norman put it in his diary, “God is not confined to time nor places.” See Norman, diary, November 3, 1793, SHC.

⁴¹ Sally Eastland to Edward Dromgoole, February 21, 1789, EDP.

⁴² Young, Westward into Kentucky, 132; and William Hammett, journal, February 26, 1793, SCL.

⁴³ Stith Mead to John Kobler, January 15, 1795, SML; John Hagerty to Edward Dromgoole, March 3, 1787, EDP.

⁴⁴ Thomas, David, The Virginia Baptists: Or, a View and Defence of the Christian Religion, as It Is Professed by the Baptists of Virginia (Baltimore, 1774), 63.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Historians have diverged on the issue of the movement’s Southern arrival. Scholars like Thomas Little and Eric Smith have each recently argued that it developed an under-acknowledged pre-revolutionary Southern foothold, particularly in South Carolina. However, this writer finds Christine Heyrman’s original assertion—that “Evangelicalism came late to the American South, as an exotic import rather than an indigenous development”—to be more consistent with surviving primary source material. Apart from scattered, isolated awakenings, Whitefieldian religion did not begin penetrating the South until at least the 1750s—as many New England awakeners worried that their Pentecost had passed. Significant north-to-south migratory patterns between the 1740s and 1760s, during which time the arrival of Northeastern Presbyterians and Baptists, as well as Wesley’s earliest British Methodist missionaries, greatly compromised Anglicanism’s historic predominance. In 1750, nearly 55 percent of Southern church members belonged to an Anglican parish, with Presbyterians claiming 22.2 percent, Baptists 7.9 percent, and Methodists—who had yet to reach the region—0 percent. By comparison, in 1776, Anglican churches could boast only about 27 percent of Southern communicants, while Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists combined for over 49 percent. See Little, The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism, ix, xiv; Smith, Eric, Order and Ardor: The Revival Spirituality of Oliver Hart and the Regular Baptists in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 2–4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Heyrman, Southern Cross, 9, 261.

⁴⁶ Numerous scholars have mentioned Southern revivalism’s noisiness. As Rhys Isaac wrote, the “varieties of physical manifestations such as crying out and falling down” among early Virginia Baptists were “too well known to require description.” According to the historian Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Southern Methodist experience almost always involved convicted believers who would “shout aloud or fall.” “When God touched men and women,” Lyerly writes, “the experience could overwhelm the body and result in physical, emotional, and verbal outbursts.” See Isaac, Rhys, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists’ Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775,” William and Mary Quarterly 31, no. 3 (July 1974): 35 Google Scholar7; Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 38.

⁴⁷ Alexander Garden, Regeneration, and the Testimony of the Spirit: Being the Substance of Two Sermons Lately Preached in the Parish Church of St. Philip, Charles-Town, in South-Carolina (Charlestown, 1740), i, 2–3, emphasis in original.

⁴⁸ James Waddell to George Whitefield, August 5, 1766, CDC; “To the Irreverend Mr. James Waddell,” Virginia Gazette (hereafter VG), August 18, 1768. For further discussion of the Giberne–Waddell dispute, see Nelson, John K., A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 158.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Lovebury Travel Journal, 23, WVC, emphasis in original; Benjamin Lakin, commonplace book, n.d., box 4, folder 2, CDC.

⁵⁰ VG, March 21, 1755; TSCG, June 1, 1773; and Adkins, Tucker, “The ‘Infant City Knox’: James Weir’s Travel Journal, 1798,” Journal of East Tennessee History 93 (2021): 86.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Smith, Order and Ardor, 4, 9, 12–14; Edmund Botsford, diary, December 1, 1769, BFP.

⁵² Oliver Hart, journal, August 4 and 26, 1754, JDL; Brock, , ed., “Journal of William Black, 1744,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 1, no. 2 (1877): 121–22Google Scholar; and Oliver Hart to John Hart, September 1, 1755, Oliver Hart Papers, SCL. See also Oliver Hart, journal, August 28, September 1, 11, and 16, 1754, JDL, where Hart mentioned Charlestonians being “Melted down into Tears,” “Crying out,” and the like.

⁵³ For more on the growth of Southern born-again religion, see Heyrman, Southern Cross, 6, 11. Numerous primary source materials speak to these denominations’ Southern growth during the late colonial and early US period. In a 1772 report from Norfolk, Virginia, one anonymous observer asserted that “All the Ladies, and almost every Order of people here, are became Proselytes to Methodism.” See “Extract of a Letter from Norfolk,” VG, July 30, 1772.

⁵⁴ Devereux Jarratt, The Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt, Rector of Bath Parish, Dinwiddie County, Virginia (Baltimore, 1806), 95–6, emphasis in original; Devereux Jarratt, A Brief Narrative of the Revival of Religion in Virginia (London, 1778), 8, 10–3, 15, 22.

⁵⁵ Samuel Peyre, journal, “Direction” #577, 1715–1817, SCHS.

⁵⁶ Reuben Ellis to Edward Dromgoole, February 23, 1790, EDP; John Kobler to Stith Mead, November 27, 1793, December 15, c. 1790s, and January 30, 1795, SML. The first Kobler letter, with some small differences in transcription, was published in Quarterly Review of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South 14, no. 1 (January 1860): 309–10.

⁵⁷ Stith Mead to John Kobler, March 12, 1795 and April 15, 1795, SML.

⁵⁸ Jarratt, Life of Devereux Jarratt, 99.

⁵⁹ John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (London, 1624), 36, 45, 156.

⁶⁰ “Extract of a Letter from Frederick, Maryland,” Norwich Packet and the Country Journal, July 10, 1789; John Sevier to James McHenry, January 17, 1796, Governor John Sevier Papers, 1796–1801, TSLA.

⁶¹ Smith, Mark M., ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 13–17 Google Scholar.

⁶² A Complete Collection of All the Laws of Virginia (London, 1684), 272–73; Boston News-Letter, May 24, 1708; Boston Gazette, October 15, 1722. See also Boston Weekly Post-Boy, March 15, 1736.

⁶³ Extract of a Letter from Norfolk,” VG, July 30, 1772; William Ormond, journals, typescript, August 30 and November 8, 1795, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library (hereafter DRL), Duke University; Botsford, diary, June 25, 1769, BFP; and John Leland, The Virginia Chronicle (Fredericksburg, 1790), 34–36.

⁶⁴ VG, March 26, 1772.

⁶⁵ Numerous primary and secondary materials touch on the rural, “scattered” image of late eighteenth-century Southern Anglicanism. For a few examples in the historiography, see Wigger, John, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9–11 Google Scholar; Nelson, Blessed Company, 292–93; Mathews, Religion in the Old South, 7, 41–42; and Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt,” 349. As the Richmond County, Virginia native, and Methodist itinerant Thomas Lyell shows in his manuscript autobiography, many Southern circuit riders were often responsible for a “great extent of territory” with “stations being frequently very remote from each other.” See Lyell, autobiography, SHC.

⁶⁶ Thomas Thompson, letter, April 23, 1743 and William Langhorne, letter, March 18, 1751, in Florence Gambrill Geiger, ed., “St. Bartholomew’s Parish as Seen by Its Rectors, 1713–1761,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 50, no. 4 (October 1949), 180.

⁶⁷ As the historian Russell Richey has put it in his studies of open-air Methodism, it was common for American Methodists to assemble “in the shade of a stately forest or under an oak’s spreading branches.” “Relishing these natural cathedrals,” Richey argues, believers saw the “woods a place for solitude, prayer, and devotions.” See Richey, Russell, “Grove, Garden, and Wilderness: Methodism and the American Woodland,” Methodist History 51, no. 4 (July 2013): 258–59.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Botsford, diary, June 25, July 2, and August 13, 1769, BFP.

⁶⁹ Minton Thrift, ed., Memoir of the Rev. Jesse Lee with Extracts from His Journals (New York, 1823), 7–8; Edward Humphrey and Thomas Cleland, Memoirs of the Reverend Thomas Cleland, D.D. (Cincinnati, 1859), 32–33.

⁷⁰ For the biographical information above, see Chad Sandford’s excellent “Practicing Piety: Sarah Jones and Methodism in 1790s Virginia” (MA diss., College of William & Mary, 2004). For other works on Jones, see Hartweg, Rhonda D., “All in Raptures: The Spirituality of Sarah Anderson Jones,” Methodist History 45, no. 3 (April 2007): 166–79Google Scholar; Lyerly, “Tale of Two Patriarchs.” I also warmly acknowledge Sandford’s help in sharing his transcription of Jones’s nearly 300-page journal.

⁷¹ For an expanded discussion of Jones’s mysticism, see Hartweg, “All in Raptures.”

⁷² Sarah Jones, diary, April 5, March 5, and June 15, 1792, Swem Library, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA.

⁷³ Jones, diary, April 22 and 23, June 14, and September 18, 1792

⁷⁴ Hart, journal, December 17, 1769, SCL. From the 1740s to the 1770s, Southern newspapers routinely heard of born-again radicalism in new and old England—including, but not limited to, their outdoor worship. For just a few examples, see VG, January 18, 1740, September 13, 1770, and July 30, 1772; TSCG, September 19, 1740.

⁷⁵ For exceptional biographical information on Pilmore, see Lenton, John, “Joseph Pilmore’s Origins,” Methodist History 44, no. 4 (July 2006): 262–65Google Scholar. Pilmore’s Virginia revival in 1772, which I will discuss in more detail momentarily, was reported across the American eastern seaboard. Accounts appear in the pages of The Boston Post-Boy, The Providence Gazette, and The Boston News-Letter. For other published reports related to Pilmore, see TSCG, February 8, 1773; Pennsylvania Mercury and Universal Advertiser, September 27, 1788; and Columbian Herald, or the Patriotic Courier of North America, June 4, 1787.

⁷⁶ As one report from Charleston noted, “the Rev. Mr. Pilmor, a Methodist Divine, after the Manner of Mr. Wesley, … preaches at 6 o’Clock every Evening.” See TSCG, February 8, 1773.

⁷⁷ Frederick E. Maser and Howard T. Maag, eds., The Journal of Joseph Pilmore: Methodist Itinerant (Philadelphia: Historical Society of the United Methodist Church, 1969), 147; VG, July 30, 1772, emphasis in original.

⁷⁸ Newton, diaries, May 21, 1787. Despite its clear hagiographical approach, see Moore, Matthew H., Sketches of the Pioneers of Methodism in North Carolina and Virginia (Nashville, TN: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1884), 248–53.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Ormond, journals, September 1, 1791 and February 5, 1796, DRL.

⁸⁰ Ormond, journals, August 30, September 26, and November 8 and 22, 1795.

⁸¹ Jonathan Boucher to William Knox, November 27, 1775, Jonathan Boucher Papers, 1759–1803, Swem Library, William & Mary.

⁸² Stith Mead to his father, June 12, 1793, SML; Philip Cox to Thomas Coke, July 1787, in Arminian Magazine: Consisting of Extracts and Original Treatises on General Redemption (Philadelphia, February 1790), 92.