Rachel
Oakes Preston
1809 – 1868 Photo
from: Jim Nix Collection
Rachel
(Harris) Oakes Preston (1809-1868),
had a great influence on the Sabbatarian movement. She was a Seventh Day Baptist who persuaded a group of Adventists
to accept the Sabbath and thus to become in that sense, the first Seventh-day
Adventists. Born in Vernon, Vermont, she joined the Methodist Church, then
joined the Seventh Day Baptist church of Verona, Oneida County, New York. Later
she moved to Washington, New Hampshire, to be near her daughter, Delight Oakes,
who taught school there. When Mrs. Oakes sought to introduce the Sabbath to the
company of Adventists in the Christian church there, she found them so
engrossed in preparation for the coming of the Lord that they paid little attention
to her Seventh Day Baptist literature.
She did eventually gain as a convert, Frederick Wheeler, a Methodist preacher. One
Sunday while conducting the communion service for the Christian congregation,
he remarked that all who confess communion with Christ in such a service as
this "should be ready to obey God and keep His commandments in all
things." Later Mrs. Oakes told him that she had almost risen in the service
to tell him that he had better push back the communion table and put the
communion cloth back over it until he was willing to keep all the commandments
of God, including the fourth. Knowing she was a Seventh Day Baptist, Wheeler
thus began serious thinking and earnest study, and not long after about March,
1844, as he later related, he began to observe the seventh-day Sabbath. After
the Great Disappointment in October, 1844, during a Sunday service in the Washington church, William Farnsworth stated publicly that he
was convinced that the seventh day of the week was the Sabbath and that he had
decided to keep it. He was immediately followed by his brother Cyrus and several others. And Mrs. Oakes, in
turn, soon embraced the Adventist teachings. Thus it was that the first little
Sabbatarian Adventist group came into being.
Mrs. Oakes later married Nathan T. Preston
and moved away. Not until the last year of her life did she join what had
meanwhile become the SDA Church.
Adapted
from the Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, Volume 10, page 1149, 1976.
Review and Herald Publishing Association.
For more
information, see
William
Farnsworth
Cyrus K. Farnsworth
History of the Millerite Movement
Frederick Wheeler
History of the Washington New Hampshire Seventh-day Adventist Church
Dare to Be a Daniel, Chapter Twelve