George Whitefield Scranton

George Whitefield Scranton 1811-61, American manufacturer, b. Madison, Conn. With his brother Selden he bought (1839) the lease and stock of the ironworks of Oxford Furnace, near Washington, N.J. The next year, with several other businessmen, Scranton formed a company to obtain large tracts of coal-bearing lands in the Lackawanna valley, including the site of Scranton , Pa., which he laid out. By 1842 he had developed the use of anthracite for smelting ore. Later he organized and was president of the Northumberland division of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western RR and was a Republican Congressman from 1859 until his death.

Whitefield, George (1714–70), Methodist evangelist. At Oxford he came under the influence of John and Charles Wesley. In 1738 he followed them to Georgia, returning later that year to obtain priest's orders and collect money for an orphanage. His spectacular preaching (especially at open air meetings from 1739) attracted a remarkable response, despite opposition from the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1741 his Calvinist theology led him to break with the Wesleys and build a ‘Tabernacle’ in Moorfields, London. His loose Calvinistic Methodist Connexion was overseen mostly by others, as Whitefield was determined to act as an ‘Awakener’ to all the Churches. Under the patronage of Lady Huntingdon, he gained a hearing from the aristocracy. He was the most striking orator of the Evangelical Revival; in America he helped to stimulate the Great Awakening.

Whitefield, George (1714–70). Evangelist. Born at the Bell Inn, Gloucester, which his father kept, Whitefield entered Pembroke College, Oxford, as a servitor in 1732. Attracted by the Oxford methodists, he openly joined them in 1735. Ordained deacon and then priest (January 1739), he went to America for the first of seven visits in 1738. If his first sermon reputedly drove fifteen hearers mad, his breakthrough as an evangelist came in February 1739 when he preached in the open air to 200 Kingswood colliers. This daring irregularity made his name and soon he was preaching to thousands. He first used extempore prayer in 1738, giving up the surplice in America, where he also exchanged pulpits with dissenters. His championship of predestination interrupted his friendship with Wesley in the late 1740s and the breach between calvinist and arminian methodists remained unhealed. From 1741 Whitefield's London base was Moorfields tabernacle, with other tabernacles at Norwich (1751), Bristol (1756), and elsewhere. In 1744 he met Lady Huntingdon, proving no match for her ‘tip-top gentility’. He is said to have delivered 18,000 sermons, preaching 40–60 hours a week. He visited Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as well as America, where he died, worn out, at Newbury Port, New Hampshire, in September 1770. Fair, stout, irritable, orderly, and punctual, with an inimitable voice, his weakness as an organizer has obscured his lasting influence as the evangelical revival's greatest preacher.

Clyde Binfield