Ellen Gould Harmon was born on 26 November 1827 in Gorham, Maine, one of eight children and twin to a sister, Elizabeth. At nine years old she was struck in the face by a stone thrown by a classmate, an injury that kept her out of school for good and that she later described as the turn toward her religious life. In 1840, at twelve, her family joined the movement gathered around the preacher William Miller, who calculated from biblical prophecy that Christ would return around 1843 and then, revised, in October 1844.
Christ did not return, and the failure became known among Miller's followers as the Great Disappointment. Weeks later, in December 1844, Ellen experienced the first of what she and her fellow believers took to be a series of visions, this one showing the scattered Adventist believers still making their way toward the New Jerusalem. The vision gave the disheartened movement a reason to keep going, and it set Ellen, still a teenager, on a path as a recognized voice within it.
She married James Springer White in 1846, and together with James and a fellow Adventist preacher, Joseph Bates, she spent the following two decades gathering the scattered Millerite remnant into a single organized body. That work reached a formal conclusion in 1863 with the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. She continued writing, traveling and shaping the young denomination, including several years establishing its work in Australia, until her death on 16 July 1915 at Elmshaven, her home in St. Helena, California.