Barton Stone Barton W. Stone (1772-1844) was an evangelist and the founder of the Christian Church. He was born near Port Tobacco, Maryland to a farming family with Episcopalian traditions. However, when the family relocated to Virginia, Stone enrolled in an academy run by a Presbyterian pastor in Guilford, North Carolina and underwent religious conversion. From that time forward, the church became his life.
During the late 1790s Stone moved to Tennessee and was serving as a Presbyterian pastor for a pair of churches in Bourbon County, Kentucky. After witnessing a revival, Stone attempted to recreate one like he had witnessed. His effort became the Cane Ridge camp meeting where he and a group of mostly Presbyterian ministers preached to more than 20,000 people.
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Because of these divisions, Stone and his associates decided to abolish their presbyteries and form an independent one in 1804. They referred to themselves as Christians and questioned some precepts of traditional Christianity.
In 1824 Stone met Alexander Campbell and over the next few years the two wrote to one another regarding their religious ideology, similarities, and differences. Campbell himself had reently distanced himself from the traditional Baptists and gained a following. In 1829, Stoen suggested that his group and Campbells group join together. Thus, about 15,000 of their followers throughout the Ohio Valley, merged together to form a new Christian tradition. In his latter years Stone became a critic of slavery and advocate of the American Colonization Society’s plans to resettle slaves in