Born on November 26, 1827, in Gorham, Maine, Ellen Harmon grew up there and, from about 1836, in Portland. A serious injury sustained at the age of nine left her facially disfigured and for some time unable to attend school. Her education ended with a brief period at the Westbrook Seminary and Female College of Portland in 1839. In 1840 she underwent a religious experience at a Methodist camp meeting, and she was baptized in that church in June 1842. A short time later she followed her family in becoming a follower of William Miller, the Adventist prophet who was preaching the return of Christ within a year or so. Undismayed by the failure of Miller╒s prophecy (finally fixed for October 22, 1844), Ellen Harmon retained the Adventist view.
In December 1844 Harmon experienced the first of what she would later claim were some 2,000 visions. She began an itinerant ministry to discouraged Millerites, bringing news of the future and messages of encouragement gained from her visions. In August 1846 she married the Reverend James S. White, an Adventist minister. They traveled together through New England and gradually moved farther afield, spreading the Adventist faith. In 1849, in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, Reverend White began publishing an Adventist organ, Present Truth, which he moved to Rochester, New York, in 1852 and then to Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1855, renaming it the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald along the way. In 1851 Ellen White published A Sketch of the Christian Experience and Views of Ellen G. White, and in 1854 a Supplement to the Experience and Views of Ellen C. White followed.
After their move to Battle Creek that city became the center of Adventist activity. A meeting of representatives of scattered Adventist congregations met there in 1860 and adopted the name Seventh-Day Adventists. A formal denominational structure was adopted by a General Conference held in that city in 1863. Throughout the work of organization and the establishment of an Adventist orthodoxy, the visions of Ellen White were the major contributing factor. The scriptural interpretations that came to her were promptly accepted. Much of the church program thus revealed was published in her Testimonies for the Church, which grew from 16 pages in its 1855 edition to an eventual 9 volumes. Her views on health, especially her opposition to the use of coffee, tea, meat, and drugs, were incorporated into Seventh-Day Adventist practice.
In 1866 she helped establish the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek; later, as the Battle Creek Sanitarium, headed by Dr. John H. Kellogg, it became famous for its work in the field of diet and health food and the model for many other sanatoriums. (It was also to become the birthplace of Kellogg╒s Corn Flakes, invented by Dr. Kellogg╒s brother Will K. Kellogg in the 1890s.) In 1874 she helped found Battle Creek College, an Adventist institution of which her husband was named president.
Under her influence the Adventist movement was actively abolitionist before the Civil War, and during the 1860s and 1870s she was a prominent temperance advocate. In 1880 she and her husband published Life Sketches ╔ of Elder James White and His Wife, Mrs. Ellen G. White.
After her husband╒s death in 1881 White lived for four years in Healdsburg, California. During 1885╨1888 she traveled and lectured in Europe, and from 1891 to 1900 she was an Adventist missionary in Australia. There she established a school that later became Avondale College. After her return to the United States she led a movement to remove Adventist institutions from Battle Creek. The college moved to Berrien Springs, Michigan, as Emmanuel Missionary College (from 1960 Andrews University), and in 1903 the church headquarters and newspaper relocated to Takoma Park, Maryland. From that year she lived mainly in St. Helena, California, where she died on July 16, 1915.
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