George  Whitefield and the Bethesda Home, Savannah 

George Whitefield (1714-1770), the dynamic Calvinistic Methodist evangelist, followed the Wesley brothers to Savannah, Georgia, in 1738 as a missionary for the Church of England. The Bethesda Home (the “Orphan house” mentioned in this letter), the first orphanage in America, was established by a grant of 500 acres from the Colony of Georgia in 1739. The idea for the home originated with Charles Wesley and Georgia governer James Oglethorpe, but it was mainly through the efforts of Whitefield that the orphanage became a reality in March 1740. Savannah resident James Habersham (c. 1712-1775) became the orphanage’s first schoolmaster. Whitefield would cross the Atlantic thirteen times during his thirty-two years of ministry, primarily to raise funds for the orphanage. Just before his death, Whitefield willed the orphanage to the Countess of Huntingdon, his wealthy patron in England. She spent considerable funds to repair the buildings in 1773 and planned to build a Calvinistic Methodist college on the grounds patterned after her college at Trevecca, Wales, but the American War of Independence postponed her plans. The college finally opened in 1788, but after the death of the Countess in 1791, the property and control of the orphanage was assumed by the state of Georgia. The orphanage fell into a state of neglect and decay during the next ten years. Eventually the orphanage was taken over by the Union Society of Savannah and continues to this day on its original site. Whitefield married Elizabeth Burnell James (d. 1768), a widow ten years his senior, in 1741. They had one child, John, who died in 1744. See George Whitefield in Savannah to James Habersham in Charleston, 18 January 1747, John Rylands University Library of Manchester [hereafter JRULM], Eng. MS. 347, f. 185; see also Edward J. Cashin, Beloved Bethesda:  A History of George Whitefield’s Home for Boys, 1740-2000 (Macon GA: Mercer Press, 2001), 106ff; Savannah (Savannah GA: Review Print Co., 1937) 172.