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In 1802, 26-year-old Jacob Young began a new Methodist preaching circuit along the Green River, a vast and growing region of central Kentucky. Knowing he could count on little help from his supervising elder (a millwright who divided his time between his craft and itinerant preaching), Young devised his own strategy for evangelizing the region:

“I concluded to travel five miles, as nearly as I could guess, then stop, reconnoiter the neighborhood, and find some kind person who would let me preach in his log cabin, and so on till I had performed the entire round.”

Near the end of one dreary day, Young came upon a solitary cabin in the woods. He spotted a woman in the doorway and asked for lodging, but the woman refused. Desperate, Young exclaimed, “I am a Methodist preacher, sent by Bishop Asbury to try to form a circuit.”

“This information appeared to electrify her,” recalled Young. “Her countenance changed, and her eyes fairly sparkled. She stood for some time without speaking, and then exclaimed, ‘La, me! Has a Methodist preacher come at last?’”

The family were North Carolina Methodists recently migrated to Kentucky. Their home soon became a regular preaching appointment on Young’s circuit.

This eager reception of a Methodist circuit rider was repeated over and over again in the late 1700s and early 1800s, so much so that Methodism experienced remarkable growth.

Early circuit riders were a different kind of clergy than had ever been seen in America, serving a rapidly expanding and spiritually hungry nation. They pursued their calling with remarkable zeal, forever changing the style and tone of American religion.

What was a circuit rider’s life like? And what was their collective impact?

Along with the Baptists, the Methodists were among the fastest growing churches in post-Revolutionary America. Between 1770 and 1820, American Methodists achieved a virtual miracle of growth, rising from fewer than 1,000 members to more than 250,000. In 1775, fewer than one out of every 800 Americans was a Methodist; by 1812, Methodists numbered one out of every 36 Americans. At mid-century, American Methodism was almost ten times the size of the Congregationalists, America’s largest denomination in 1776.

Key to the Methodist success was a dedicated contingent of itinerant preachers, or circuit riders. In this era, most Americans lived on widely scattered farms or in tiny, often remote villages. In 1795, 95 percent of Americans lived in places with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants; by 1830 this proportion was still 91 percent. Itinerant ministry provided preaching, the sacraments, and church structure to communities that would not otherwise have been able to attract or afford a minister.

In 1790, the Methodist preacher Freeborn Garrettson noted that in New York, thousands “in the back settlements, who were not able to give an hundred [pounds] a year to a minister … may now hear a sermon at least once in two weeks; sometimes oftener”—thanks to the presence of Methodist circuit riders.

In many areas, the pace of settlement simply outran the resources of the older denominations. In 1770, the territories that would eventually become Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee contained only about 40,000 people of European or African descent. By 1810, the combined population of these same regions was over 1 million. In many of these rapidly growing regions, the Methodists held the only religious services for miles around.

In contrast to the mobility of the Methodist itinerants, New England clergy traditionally held lifetime tenure in a single parish. Of the 550 graduates of Yale College who entered the Congregationalist ministry between 1702 and 1794, a remarkable 71 percent ministered for their entire career in only one church. In colonial New England, both pastor and people saw ordination as a long-term commitment to a single congregation. Nothing could have been more foreign to the Methodist concept of an itinerant ministry.

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