1862–1940
Summary
Harry Emil Fenner is remembered chiefly for one quiet act done at the age of seventeen: with his fourteen-year-old friend Luther Warren he organized in the autumn of 1879 the first young people’s society of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, in the upstairs of his family’s new log house at Hazelton, Michigan. From that small beginning grew the Junior and Senior Missionary Volunteer Societies, the Pathfinder Club, the Adventurer Club, and the global Adventist youth ministry of the twentieth century. Fenner himself never entered denominational employment; he lived most of his life as a Michigan farmhand, carpenter, and farmer, and remained a faithful member of the Oxford, Michigan, Adventist church until his death on September 29, 1940. Luther Warren, his lifelong friend, died four months earlier on May 24 of the same year.
Hazelton, Michigan, and a Sabbatarian Adventist Family (1862–1879)
Per Michael W. Campbell’s article in the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, Harry Emil Fenner was born on June 1, 1862, at Oakland, Michigan, the third of thirteen children of Hiram Alden Fenner (1839–1916) and Charlotte Rathburn Fenner (b. 1832). Hiram had accepted the Sabbatarian Adventist message in 1850 and was an active local church leader; the Fenner home was a regular meeting place for Sabbath-keepers in the area. On one occasion Hiram personally fetched Joseph Bates from a neighboring station when the pioneer came to visit their company; in 1885 the General Conference granted Hiram ministerial credentials.
Harry grew up in this Adventist farming home — surrounded by his many siblings, the regular flow of Sabbath worshippers, and the same atmosphere of practical piety that produced his lifelong friend Luther Warren in nearby Disco.
The First Adventist Youth Society — Hazelton, 1879
Per ESDA, in 1879, while Harry Fenner was seventeen and Luther Warren fourteen, the two boys talked and prayed about forming a Christian boys’ society as they walked together along a country road. Some days later a small company of Adventist boys gathered in the upstairs room of the Fenner family’s new log house — Carrie Tichenor’s later account names eight charter members (Luther Warren, Harry and Isaiah Fenner, Charlie and James Burgess, George Harle, Eddie Van Horn, and later Dell Rathburn, who became the group’s first president). They opened with prayer and a song, drafted and signed a temperance pledge, and collected funds to buy religious literature. They went on to mail tracts, write encouraging letters, run errands for those who could not, and (when six girls joined a few months later) to expand into the wider social life of the Hazelton young people. Per Luther Warren’s later account in The Church Officers’ Gazette of November 1929, “none of us were singers, but we tried to make a ‘joyful noise.’ ” They sang the hymn “O Tell Me of Heaven, Sweet Heaven” at their first meeting.
Quiet Years (1879–1940)
Per ESDA, in contrast with Warren — who became the cyclone preacher of two generations of Adventist youth — Fenner remained at home. The U.S. Census records him as a farmhand working for various relatives, then as a carpenter and farmer. In 1919 he married a widow, Calista H. Glann Hamilton (1863–1942). Not much else is known about his personal life. He remained a faithful member of the Adventist Church at Oxford, Michigan, throughout his life. The Hazelton Church record books, preserved at the Center for Adventist Research at Andrews University, retain the small notations of his ongoing membership.
The earliest published mention of the Fenner name in Adventist literature is a Review and Herald notice of April 21, 1859, in which “H. Fenner” — almost certainly his father Hiram (Harry was not yet born) — paid a one-dollar subscription: “H. Fenner 1,00,xiii,20” (Review and Herald, April 21, 1859, p. 176, par. 26; refcode ARSH April 21, 1859, page 176.26).
The 1939 Sixtieth-Anniversary Celebration
Per ESDA, at the 1939 Michigan Camp Meeting the Adventist Church celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of its youth ministry — the small society Fenner and Warren had started at Hazelton in 1879. Alfred W. Peterson, the General Conference Youth Department director, reported that there were then 6,417 Missionary Volunteer Societies worldwide with 136,480 members, and that between the formal organization of the MV Department in 1907 and 1939 those societies had given $4,996,429 to mission and distributed 101,068,380 pieces of literature.
In October 1947, seven years after Fenner’s death, a monument was erected at the Hazelton Adventist Church in Juddville, Michigan, marking the spot where the two youth had inaugurated the work; Elfred Lee’s 1981 mural of Adventist history, Christ of the Narrow Way, includes both men.
Death (1940)
Per ESDA, Harry Emil Fenner died on September 29, 1940, at Oakland, Michigan, in his seventy-ninth year — four months after Luther Warren died at Loma Linda. His obituary appeared in the Review and Herald of December 12, 1940. He had outlived his old companion, but only by the briefest interval; the two pioneers of the first Adventist youth society passed within the same year.
