Hugh Bourne

 

Hugh Bourne was born April 3, 1772, in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, the son of Joseph and Ellen Bourne. As a youth, he was apprenticed to his uncle as a wheelwright, and eventually pursued this trade being principally concerned with windmill and watermill wheels. From his childhood he sought an inner conviction of salvation and he spent, as he put it, "twenty sorrowful years" in this pursuit. In 1799, at the age of twenty-seven, he achieved this goal. From that point on, he began to
seek a way to be a preacher of the gospel, although by necessity he continued in his trade. Bourne joined the Methodist movement, but his support of the "camp meeting" type of open-air evangelism did not endear him to many fellow Methodists. Bourne learned much about the camp meeting when the American evangelist Lorenzo Dow (1777-1834) visited England,
and on May 31, 1807, he put his knowledge into practice by organizing the first English camp meeting at Mow Cop, on the border of Cheshire and Staffordshire. The Methodist authorities condemned the proceedings as "highly improper in England,"
and excluded Bourne from the circuit in 1808. Bourne and his followers organized under the name Camp Meeting Methodists.

In 1810, William Clowes (1780-1851) was also excluded from the Methodist circuit for much the same reasons as Bourne's exclusion. On February 12, 1812, the Camp Meeting Methodists and the Clowesites coalesced into one body, taking
the name Primitive Methodists. Emphasis on the camp meeting as a channel of evangelism was unquestioned. For the next
forty years, Bourne travelled widely, founding Primitive Methodist societies, which by the time of his death numbered one
hundred ten thousand persons with five hundred and more circuit-riding pastors. In 1829, a mission field was opened in
America, with stations in New York, Philadelphia, and Upper Canada. In 1840, the United States churches became
independent of the English conference. Bourne, at the age of seventy-two, in 1844 undertook a journey to Upper Canada to oversee the mission there. After being there for a year, he accepted an invitation to visit the United States societies of the "Primitive Methodist connexion," as he called it, en route back to England. He sailed from New York for Liverpool in the
spring of 1846. Hugh Bourne died at Bemersley, Staffordshire, England, on October 11, 1852. .