Summary
Stephen Nelson Haskell exerted leadership in almost every aspect of the early Seventh-day Adventist Church, including publishing ministry, world missions, urban evangelism, and conference administration. Self-educated, he helped found several colleges and authored widely-circulated books on doctrine and Bible prophecy. He was the father of the Tract and Missionary Society — the forerunner of today’s Adventist Book Centers — and one of the most traveled early Adventist leaders, surveying mission fields on nearly every continent. Ellen White wrote him more letters than anyone outside her immediate family, and their decades-long correspondence shaped the direction of the young denomination.
Early Life and Education
Haskell claimed to have been born on April 22, 1833, in Oakham, Massachusetts, though town records list his birth in 1834. As was the case with most children in nineteenth-century America, he began work at an early age. Despite the fact that he lived in the more educationally progressive region of New England, he received little or no formal schooling. In a mood of reminiscence, he once wrote to Ellen G. White that he had “been in all sorts of businesses from a horse Jockey, Mastic roofer, Soap maker, Pickler, both honest and dishonest business.”
In the course of these varied experiences, Haskell developed skills and insights that later proved valuable in his service for the denomination. The kind of perspectives he gained became increasingly scarce as the Adventist ministry standardized educational and professional qualifications. His New England cultural background strongly shaped his leadership in the emerging Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Marriage
During his middle teens, Haskell worked as a farmhand for Calvin Howe who was dying from a terminal disease. Howe asked Haskell to take care of his invalid sister, Mary E. Howe, after his death. Unable to think of any other way to fulfill the request, Haskell decided to marry her even though many considered her a helpless invalid. She accepted his proposal and they were married April 10, 1851. He was seventeen years of age while she was about thirty-eight. Even with the age gap between them, the marriage endured for more than forty years.
Mary Haskell helped Stephen overcome his lack of formal schooling. Possessing teaching experience and a personal library, she used both to educate her young husband, teaching him how to write and speak well — though he continued to struggle with grammar and retained his strong New England accent. Haskell believed that studying algebra especially helped him learn to think logically and would later recommend it to young, would-be preachers. He became a voracious reader.
Despite his otherwise frugal habits, Haskell, over a period of fifteen to twenty years, personally collected a library, primarily on biblical topics, that he estimated to be worth about $2,000 — an amount many times that in today’s dollars. But his main reading matter was always the Bible itself. Near the end of his life, he reported that he had read through it seventy-six times. He collected all the English Bible versions he could find — about twenty by 1914 — and he made use of them. Because of his total lack of training in Hebrew and Greek, he considered them a way of discovering the nuances and depths of the biblical text, observing, “These I found to be the best commentary, as the texts are put in different words to convey the same thought.”
Conversion and Faith Journey
As a child, Haskell attended the Congregational church so prominent in New England, but soon joined the Methodist movement that was exploding across young America. Unlike older denominations that restricted clergy to those with a formal theological education, Methodism allowed those who felt a spiritual call to become “exhorters” and evangelists. Haskell took advantage of this new openness after he encountered the Second Coming doctrine trumpeted by the Millerite movement.
After hearing his first sermon about the Second Coming in 1852, Haskell talked about it so incessantly that a friend suggested in desperation that he preach on the subject himself. Haskell replied that he would if the person would get him an audience. To his surprise, the individual assembled a roomful of people, compelling him to repeat the sermon that he had heard.
Haskell kept on preaching, first in Canada, where he conducted a ten-day evangelistic series that resulted in the baptism of twenty-five individuals. The next year, 1853, he headed back to Canada to visit the little group of Adventists he had started, accompanied by two or three other neophyte preachers. After attending a first-day Adventist camp meeting in Winsted, Connecticut, the group stopped in Springfield, Massachusetts, on their way to Canada. There, Haskell asked William Saxby, a tinsmith who worked for the local railroad and was a seventh-day Sabbath observer, if he could leave his trunk with him until he returned.
While they were in Saxby’s presence, Haskell’s companions began discussing among themselves the topic of Sunday observance. Haskell quickly concluded that they had no biblical support. Overhearing the conversation, Saxby attempted to broach the topic with Haskell, but Haskell rebuffed him. That evening though, Haskell accepted an invitation to Saxby’s home, where Saxby hung up a chart and began explaining Sabbatarian Adventist doctrines. Although Haskell did not believe anything Saxby said, he did decide that he would look into the Sabbath issue.
On his way to Canada, Haskell read and re-read a Seventh Day Baptist tract that Saxby had given him entitled The Sabbath, comparing its contents with the Bible. To study the question without distractions, he interrupted his trip and hiked into the woods by himself. There he spent the day reading his Bible and praying for guidance. “Finally, before night,” he wrote later, “I came to the conclusion that, according to the best light I had, the seventh day was the Sabbath.”
During the winter of 1854-1855, Saxby asked Joseph Bates to visit the Haskells. “Brother Bates preached to us (there were only two of us) from morning until noon, and from noon until night, and then in the evening until the time we went to bed. He did that for ten successive days, and I have been a Seventh-day Adventist ever since.”
Lay Ministry
Although only a lay member, Haskell threw himself into Sabbatarian Adventist activities. Starting in the late 1850s, he later recalled that he “preached, organized churches and Sabbath schools, ordained elders, paying my own expenses, etc., but I was not even licensed.” He added that he “did not know it was necessary to have a license to preach.” He recalled the early believers as being “like an old bag of buttons, of all shapes and sizes. There were more different beliefs among them than heads or horns on any of the beasts in the Bible. But I was good to them all, so all were friends to me.”
In 1864, the Haskells moved to South Lancaster, Massachusetts, and joined a small group of Seventh-day Adventists that J. N. Loughborough soon organized into a church of eight members. The tiny group chose Stephen Haskell as its leader, and when attendance outgrew the space in its previous meeting place, he fixed up a room in his own home in which they could worship. South Lancaster seemed to be the place to which he would always eventually return.
Attitude Toward Ellen White’s Testimonies
While Haskell’s involvement with the work of the emerging Adventist church in New England grew to the point that it soon overshadowed his business affairs, his relationship with the Whites was not always smooth. In the late 1850s, he began to side with those hostile to James and Ellen White. Ellen White regarded his strong-willed behavior as disturbing and believed that if he had kept himself busy earning a decent living instead of traveling around, his influence among the believers during this period would have been more constructive.
Haskell struggled with how to relate to Ellen White’s testimonies. Looking back in 1910 he wrote her, “I know what it is to drink at the cup of despair 50 years ago or more. It was over your first testimony to me. I had to work my way out. I had no one to help me but my wife. But God set me free.” He also acknowledged that at the time he had felt “enmity” toward James White and anyone else who had tried to confront him about his attitude, but he believed that God had touched his heart and erased the hostility, a transformation that would last the rest of his life.
In 1860, alluding to his previous attitude, he publicly expressed in the pages of the Review that he now supported her visions. While Ellen White would again have occasion to warn him about a dictatorial attitude, their correspondence became mutually supportive as the years passed. She wrote him more letters than anyone outside her immediate family. When Haskell married Hetty Hurd, his second wife, Ellen White addressed her letters to both of them. Her last letter to the couple was dated June 27, 1912.
Administrative Leadership
Despite his faults, Haskell, especially as he took seriously Ellen White’s counsels, would begin making positive contributions to Adventism. He created a report blank for New England churches to fill out that collected such information as the number of the region’s congregations and Sabbath Schools, the members who were making regular contributions to the Systematic Benevolence Fund, and various other data. This achievement would place Haskell among the top leadership of the new denomination.
When Adventist church leaders convened a meeting in South Lancaster in December 1868 to consider the denomination’s increasing growth in New England, Haskell passed around copies of his form. It greatly impressed James White. A recommendation that emerged from the meeting to organize the New England Conference also designated Haskell for ordination to ministry and for the office of conference president.
Haskell’s service as president began when the New England Conference was organized in 1870. It was the beginning of a long, if intermittent, career of conference leadership. Besides the New England Conference (1870-1876, 1877-1887), he served as president of the Maine Conference (1884-1886) and the California Conference (1879-1886, 1908-1911). Not only did he simultaneously head conferences on opposite coasts, he would also be sent on extensive trips out of the country during his various terms.
In 1873, Haskell became a member of the General Conference executive committee and the influential publishing committee. He would serve on the GC committee almost forty-eight years. His name seems to appear everywhere in the minutes and reports of the various church organizations during those years. Whatever was happening in the denomination, Haskell was almost certainly in the midst of it.
The Tract and Missionary Society
Haskell developed a novel and efficient system for disseminating Adventist literature in conjunction with the emergence of a new organization to involve women in Christian work. Nineteenth-century society restricted what women could do outside the home, including the arena of religion. But gradually women’s volunteer organizations began to emerge in the exploding evangelistic religious circles. One such group developed in the South Lancaster Adventist church. Stephen Haskell encouraged his wife, Mary, and several women to form the Vigilant Missionary Society, the first Adventist lay-organized ministry. The 10 women members, at their own expense, began sending out hundreds of tracts and booklets across New England and then to foreign countries. They donated Adventist books to local libraries. In addition, they wrote letters to people interested in Adventism. Some of the women even taught themselves other languages so that they could correspond with non-English speakers.
Impressed by what they were doing and expanding on the concept, Stephen persuaded the women to establish the first conference-wide Tract and Missionary Society on November 6, 1870 in the recently-organized New England Conference. When James White heard about the program, he came to South Lancaster to study it. The tract society as well as Haskell himself greatly impressed James White and he convinced Haskell to accompany him to Battle Creek to improve and develop the system and then implement it church-wide.
In March of 1872, Haskell established the New York Tract and Missionary Society before presenting the concept to that year’s General Conference session. Liking the idea, the delegates appointed him as its representative to encourage the formation of such societies in all the state conferences. The next year the General Conference again asked Haskell to visit all the state conferences to organize such bodies. For the next decade and a half, even while serving as president of as many as three conferences simultaneously, Haskell would visit individual churches promoting his beloved tract and missionary societies. Eventually, they would spread around the world, often becoming the basis of what would later grow into a publishing house.
Haskell also made another major if more indirect contribution to the church’s publishing enterprise when he popularized a Bible study format among Adventists that was already circulating among American Protestants. When the downpour from a thunderstorm drumming on a camp meeting tent drowned out Haskell’s voice during the 1883 California assembly, he took a position by the tent center pole and began asking questions and then answering them with scriptural passages, a form of catechism. When Ellen White learned what he had done, she expressed her approval, later declaring that it harmonized with her belief that he should spend more time teaching than preaching.
Haskell taught a 10-day course on the method at Battle Creek before the next General Conference, followed by courses outlining it at Healdsburg College and South Lancaster Academy. The General Conference endorsed the question-and-answer approach by authorizing a monthly magazine that employed it, The Bible-Reading Gazette. The success of the project encouraged the publishing house to prepare another series of Bible studies, which it released under the title Bible Readings for the Home Circle. Widely sold, it went through a series of revisions and has sold countless copies.
International Pioneer
On May 7, 1882, Haskell began the first of a long series of international journeys that would make him perhaps the most traveled early Adventist leader at a time when, apart from sailors and merchants, few but the wealthy traveled. He first went to Great Britain, then Europe. Later journeys took him to Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Ultimately, he would spend 1889-1891 on a global survey of potential sites for future denominational mission activities, accompanied by a young Percy T. Magan, then a Battle Creek College student, as his assistant. The itinerary included India, China, and Japan, and visiting these Asian lands made Haskell clearly aware of the difficulty of taking Adventism to non-Christian cultures.
Haskell kept his fellow leaders informed about what he learned, filling his letters with detailed information and statistics. His correspondence and articles for the Youth’s Instructor during the trip read like travelogues and encyclopedia entries. At the March 1891 General Conference session, he gave a talk on “The Education of Missionaries” stressing that they must be willing to look at things from the perspective of the cultures that the church sought to evangelize. “In such fields as India, China, et cetera, we find customs which appear to us as nonsense, but not so,” he pointed out, “to those of that particular country or people. And when they see in the foreigner a disposition to conform to their ways, it disarms prejudice, and awakens a feeling of friendliness in their hearts.”
Haskell’s time in Asia made him realize the need not only to evangelize the people in their homelands, but also Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants elsewhere. In 1907, he urged that the church begin work among Asians in California and start a school for the Japanese. This was in an era when white Americans were passing laws against such immigrants and calling for their complete expulsion.
Development of Educational Institutions
Despite his own lack of formal education, Haskell participated in the founding or early stages of developing several educational institutions including Battle Creek College (now Andrews University), South Lancaster Academy (later Atlantic Union College), Healdsburg College (now Pacific Union College), Avondale School for Christian Workers (now Avondale College of Higher Education) in Australia, and Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute (later Madison College).
Perhaps Haskell’s greatest love for a specific educational institution was the one that church members at the time referred to as “that New England school,” later Atlantic Union College. In 1882, at a time when conflicts over the purpose of Adventist schools led to the temporary closure of the denomination’s first educational institution, Battle Creek College, Haskell announced at the quarterly meeting of the New England Tract and Missionary Society his desire to establish a Seventh-day Adventist school in the northeast region. The delegates supported the idea and the committee appointed to establish the school chose South Lancaster, Massachusetts, as the location.
Loss of Mary Haskell and Search for a New Spouse
Haskell’s constant travel kept him away from his wife, Mary, for long periods of time. In later years Ellen White encouraged him to spend more time with Mary as she became increasingly feeble. Finally, he was able to move near him in California. Then, after more than forty years of marriage, she died from a stroke January 29, 1894, at age 81.
Perhaps to help distract Haskell from his grief, the General Conference leadership asked him to attend camp meetings that summer in Europe. From there he went to Africa. Two years later, in 1896, Ellen White invited Haskell to assist her in Australia. Church leadership then officially requested that he conduct evangelism and teach at the new Avondale school that Ellen White was then establishing.
As Haskell worked closely with Ellen White, he began to develop a romantic interest in her. They would often take carriage rides together around the countryside. Eventually he proposed. She declined his offer and instead encouraged him to marry Hetty Hurd, whom he had already met in Great Britain and South Africa and worked with in weeks. He did propose to Hetty, and they were married on February 24, 1897. They spent the first few weeks of their marriage in Ellen G. White’s personal camp meeting tent near her home, Sunnyside, at Cooranbong, New South Wales. Hetty would be even more active in Haskell’s work for the church than his first wife, Mary, had been.
Urban Evangelism
As the United States increasingly urbanized, Ellen White urged the church to expand its evangelism from its traditional targets of small towns and villages to the nation’s major cities, particularly New York. In response, the 1901 General Conference session officially asked the Haskells to work in the New York metropolis. At the time, the large city had only four Adventist churches, two in Manhattan and two in Brooklyn. Two were ethnic (German and Scandinavian) and the other two English-speaking.
Vowing to “work among all classes of people” in the highly diverse city, the couple rented a sixth-floor suite of rooms at 400 West 57th St., a few blocks from the southwest corner of Central Park. Assembling a team of seven, they conducted a Bible instructor training school and began giving Bible studies to their apartment-house neighbors. Eventually the staff grew to twenty that included home-care nurses, Bible and cooking school instructors, and young people who sold books and magazines on the streets. The program combined instruction in health and nutrition with doctrinal teaching. Completely self-supporting (it only cost the local conference $60, the first month’s rent on the apartment headquarters), the project was the closest example of the kind of urban evangelism that Ellen White had been calling upon the church to conduct for many years.
Because of prejudice from white people who would stay away from the meetings if blacks attended, Haskell began holding separate sessions for the latter. In late 1902, he organized the first black Adventist church in New York City.
Books and Publications
Although Haskell struggled throughout his life with the intricacies of grammar, he became a prolific author, producing hundreds of periodical articles and news notes for the Review and Herald and other publications, as well as several books: The Story of Daniel the Prophet (1901); The Seer of Patmos (1905); The Cross and Its Shadow (1914); and Bible Handbook (1919). The books are still in print today. In addition, he published a periodical, Bible Training School, operated a small publishing house, and produced a number of Adventist books in braille.
The “Daily” Controversy and the Role of Ellen White
Haskell had accomplished much for the church and had often been an innovator. As is often the case, though, in later years he became more conservative, particularly in certain areas of theology and how he viewed the role of Ellen G. White. He also became uncomfortable with the ideas of younger leaders such as W. W. Prescott. Reflecting the growing influence of fundamentalism and its emphasis on verbal inspiration that was spreading through American Protestantism in the first decades of the twentieth century, he resisted new understandings of certain theological points, and encouraged others to do the same.
Although Haskell believed that he was defending Ellen White’s prophetic role, her son and other church leaders did not see it that way. William C. White told Haskell that some denominational leaders “feel that one of the most serious difficulties in holding their brethren loyal to the Testimonies is the fact that a few men of age and experience insist upon pressing on them the theory of verbal inspiration which Mother does not stand for, which the General Conference does not stand for.”
With Ellen White’s death in 1915, Haskell’s close and decades-long relationship with her came to an end. Haskell preached at her funeral service in Battle Creek, Michigan. Mingling comfort for fellow church members and evangelism for the many non-Adventists present, he emphasized a resurrection that was more than the return of a vague spirit. Her works in life would not only live on after her, but she would be restored to those who loved and knew her in all her true and unique individuality.
Final Years and Death
Despite the fact that Hetty Haskell was nearly a quarter century younger than Stephen, he still outlived her. She died, apparently of cancer, on October 21, 1919. Besides their shared involvement in evangelism, she had particularly aided him in his publishing activities. Not long after her death he abandoned them.
As the 1922 General Conference session honored Haskell along with several other surviving denominational pioneers, the fundamentalist forces that he had encouraged during the “daily” controversy were working to remove A. G. Daniells as General Conference president, and the denomination increasingly reflected the fundamentalist mind-set seen in contemporary American Protestantism.
After the 1922 General Conference, Haskell’s health rapidly declined, forcing him to enter Paradise Valley Sanitarium. He died in National City, California, on October 9, 1922.
Legacy
Haskell’s broad and practical background enabled him to institute programs and administrative approaches that greatly expanded and strengthened the denomination during its first century, especially in the areas of missions, publishing, education, and personal ministries. Many of his contributions continue to aid the church. His Tract and Missionary Societies evolved into the worldwide Adventist Book Centers. The educational institutions he helped establish continue to train young people for service. His model of urban evangelism in New York City remains a template for city ministry. And the Bible study format he popularized became the basis for Bible Readings for the Home Circle, one of Adventism’s most widely circulated publications.
The obituary by E. L. Farnsworth in the Review and Herald noted that “for sixteen years” Haskell “labored as a self-supporting worker, organizing churches and helping to establish the work in New England” before receiving official denominational employment. His was a life of tireless, self-sacrificing service that spanned the formative decades of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
