Ellen G. White Dies at Elmshaven

On 16 July 1915, fourteen years after the 1901 General Conference reorganized Adventism into union conferences, already recorded here, and fifteen years before Soviet repression dissolved nearly all Adventist communities in 1930, also recorded here, Ellen G. White died at her home, Elmshaven, near St Helena, California, at the age of eighty seven. She had broken her hip in a fall at Elmshaven on 13 February 1915 and spent her final five months largely confined to bed, continuing to dictate correspondence and review her manuscripts until shortly before her death. White had co-founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and her prolific writings on doctrine, health and education had shaped nearly every institution the denomination built in the decades before her death, from its publishing houses to its medical and educational systems. Her death closed the church's founding generation and left the General Conference's institutional structure, formalized in 1901 and expanded through the following decades, to carry the movement forward without the guidance of the woman Adventists had regarded as a prophetic voice since the 1840s. The denomination continued to grow internationally in the years that followed, but her death marked the end of direct contact with any of the Millerite movement's original founding figures.