Frederick Wheeler
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Born in Acton, Massachusetts, March 12, 1811, Frederick Wheeler achieved the distinction of being the first of the pioneers to preach a sermon in favor of the Seventh-day Sabbath before the disappointment of 1844. Not much is known of his early life or experience except that in 1840 he was ordained by the Methodist Church and became a circuit rider, having the care of several churches in his district, as was the custom in the early days of Methodism.
The incident that connects him with Rachel Preston, the Seventh Day Baptist sister who brought the obligation of the Seventh-day Sabbath to the Adventists at Washington, New Hampshire, is quite well known. At a quarterly meeting of the church, while celebrating the Lord's Supper, Wheeler remarked that all persons confessing communion with Christ in such a service should be ready to follow Him all the way, willing to obey God and keep His commandments. Mrs. Preston was at the meeting and afterward reminded him of what he had said.
"I came near getting up in the meeting at that point," she said, "for I wanted to tell you that you would better set that communion table back and cover it with the cloth until you yourself were willing to keep all the commandments of God.
Elder Wheeler later said that those words cut him deeper than any that had ever been spoken to him. In fact, it was the turning point in his experience, for he began to study the evidences for true Sabbath-keeping in the Bible and became convinced of his obligation to keep the Sabbath of the fourth commandment, as set apart by God.
Elder Wheeler's acceptance of the Sabbath apparently did not deter him from associating with William Miller in the proclamation of the coming of Christ in 1844. Stirring stories are told of those great meetings, and one of them, told by George Wheeler, the eldest son, is worth recording, since it gives a picture of the Advent Movement just before the Disappointment:
"I remember they had a 'grove meeting' in Hillsboro in 1844. Washington Barnes planned to have it on his farm, and cleared the brush from some woods. But he was two miles from the main road, and the meeting was changed to a place near the 'Upper Village' of Hillsboro. There were no railroads, but there was a big stage line from the top of the Green Mountains through to Boston. A man by the name of Robinson, a fine singer, was there with a four-horse team with a good load of people from Sutton. Folks came by stage, by one-horse wagons, and by two- and four-horse wagons. Some said they walked over a hundred miles to get there. The Seats were made by stringing long tree trunks along the ground, out in the open, and putting rough hemlock boards across them. The speakers stand was built of hemlock boards, with a roof of the same. The singing was delightful. There was no organ. A few song leaders-eight, ten, twelve-sat near the speakers' stand and a man from near Washington would stand on a seat and beat the time for the singing. Then the congregation would sing to beat everything.
"There were probably 300 or 400 people present. They lived in tents of coarse sheeting. A man would cut two forked poles from the woods for the end supports; then a longer pole was set in the crotches for the ridgepole. The sheeting was stretched over, and the corners were staked down. A family would live in a tent, and fill it full of comers and goers. Washington Barnes had a place where he sold crackers [biscuits] and other things to the campers. He told them to go to his farm two miles away and get all the apples and potatoes they wanted. The horses were turned out on his farm. He was well to do. His wife and her sister, who was my mother [Mrs. Frederick Wheeler], did not go to the meetings, but baked all the while-wheat bread and rye and Indian meal [maize] bread. The campers paid if they had money; otherwise it was free. A farmer near the grounds sold them milk. The meeting lasted a week."
That was a camp meeting in 1844, very likely attended by some of our own first Sabbath-keepers. Though he had to look after a cultivation to earn a living, Elder Wheeler evidently went out preaching when he was able. His son gives us a paragraph on this:
"In the summer of 1845 my father took four of his children and a cow over to his wife's sister's husband, Reuben Spalding, and left them six or eight weeks, while he and mother labored among the people in Vermont. Then he returned and took the children and the cow back home on the Chamberlain farm. After they had picked the apples, there was a general meeting in Washington Barnes' woodshed. It was a big woodshed, very long and with sides open. They pitched a tent that would probably seat a hundred and fifty close up in front of the shed. The seats were rough hemlock boards. The meeting lasted a week. Barnes opened his house and took in all who could lie on the floor. Other Adventists did the same."
Incidentally, these glimpses of Mrs. Frederick Wheeler --spending all the time cooking for the "grove meeting," not getting a chance to attend meetings herself, and, again, leaving the children with neighbors to go out herself in field evangelistic work with her husband -- show that our first minister's wife took her share of the preacher's burden of work for the people, as thousands of others are doing to this day.
There was nothing romantic about the daily round, the common tasks, of the early days. The pioneers were of just the common clay that makes faithfulness and devotion to God of service today. As they wrought in the beginnings of this cause, so may we toil on enduringly in these times of finishing the work that pioneers began.
One other interesting picture of this early mother in Israel was preserved by one of the children's children. It pertains to the time of the first expectation of the coming of Christ, and the first disappointment in the spring of 1844. A granddaughter related the story:
"At planting time, in the spring of 1844, when some regarded it a denial of faith to put in any crops, Frederick Wheeler's wife, without success, had urged him to plant the garden. His time was occupied in pastoral work. One day, when he returned home, he was surprised that she and their ten-year-old son had harnessed the old gray horse, borrowed a plow, and were hard at work."
"Yes," added the granddaughter, answering the inevitable but unspoken question, "yes, he sent them into the house and plowed it himself."
So, farming and preaching, Frederick Wheeler continued in the regions round about, until 1851. Then, on the occasion of the first visit of James and Ellen White and J. N. Andrews, he was called to go to other parts farther afield. James White reported of Elder Wheeler in the Review: "We have been with him in a number of meetings, and are satisfied that he, with God's blessing, will exert a good influence and accomplish much in bringing out the hidden jewels of the Lord."
Elder White exhorted the brethren in the Washington church to stand by their representative in the field and to "inquire after his temporal wants, and the situation of his family at home." -- The Review and Herald, Nov. 25, 1851. Reporting a little late from Connecticut, Elder Wheeler wrote: "The gospel armor I will not put off, the contest I will not yield, until with all the ransomed host I shout the final victory." The same keynote was sounded in the ringing message he sent to the New York camp meeting in 1906, in his ninety-sixth year. He died in 1910, in his one-hundredth year. His tombstone, in West Monroe, New York, has this line: "A Pioneer Minister of Seventh-day Adventists."