Millerites in Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT Pennsylvania's Second Advent history offers a new perspective on the nineteenth-century religious phenomenon of the Millerites since members were drawn from the state's diverse ethnicities and nonconformist religious sects. Accounts of Pennsylvania Adventists, especially in the central portion of the state, provide further evidence that the movement allowed an active role for women, engaged in outreach to African Americans, targeted rural communities, and maintained connections with other nineteenth-century reform movements, including abolition, temperance, and eclectic medicine. Rather than disappearing after 1844, Millerites in Pennsylvania remained active into the twentieth century, providing an unbroken link to the new evangelical denominations that eventually replaced them.