George Whitefield

George Whitefield, an innkeeper's son converted at Oxford alongside the Wesleys, took to preaching in the open fields when church pulpits closed to him — first to the coal miners of Kingswood, who wept white channels through the coal dust on their faces. For thirty years he preached daily, sometimes hourly, on both sides of the Atlantic; contemporary estimates put his largest crowds in the tens of thousands, and the skeptical Benjamin Franklin, pacing off the distance at Philadelphia, calculated the voice could genuinely reach thirty thousand ears. He was the human hinge of the Great Awakening, binding the colonial revivals into one movement. He preached his last sermon standing on a barrel in Exeter, New Hampshire, and died the next morning at Newburyport, where he is buried beneath the pulpit.