Richard McNemar

McNemar was born 20 November 1770 at Tuscarora, Pennsylvania. He was the youngest of the McNemar children and had several brothers and sisters. According to family records and an existing poem by McNemar his family name means "Nobody's Son." There are several variations on the name, but the two prominent ones are "McNemar" and "McNamer". He is of Scotch-Irish descent that populated Pennsylvania.[1]

The McNemar family moved when he was five years old to Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. They lived there for four years and then moved east about ten miles to a settlement on Shaner's Creek where they stayed for three years. The family moved again in the fall of 1783 south to the Kishacoqueller Valley. This was at the end of the Revolutionary War. McNemar worked on the family farm in the summers from 1783 and in the winters went to school. He was the last to leave the family, at the age of fifteen, since he was the youngest.[2]

In 1786 he became a schoolteacher and was in charge of a school in Stone Valley, Pennsylvania. In 1787 during the summer he worked at odd jobs for an income. In the fall of 1787 he taught school at Redstone Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In the fall of 1788 he taught school in Stone Valley and in the spring of 1789 he returned to Redstone to continue teaching. In the summer of 1789 McNemar went to Kentucky. He returned from there on the first day of January 1790 and began teaching at Ligonier, Pennsylvania in Westmoreland County, where he continued until April 1791. McNemar began teaching at New Salem, Pennsylvania, in May 1791. In October he traveled down the Ohio River and arrived in the beginning of November at Maysville, Kentucky.[2]

McNemar entered school and began to study Latin and theology in December 1791. He went to Cincinnati, Ohio, on 1 April 1792. He stayed in this city for three months and preached for the Presbyterian church. He delivered fifteen sermons in Cincinnati, Columbia, Round Bottom and Covalt's Station. Around the first of July in 1792 he returned to Elk Horn, Kentucky, where he continued his classical studies. McNemar moved to Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in December 1792 and lived with Robert Finley until May 1793.[2]

McNemar moved then and lived with John Luckes and stayed until the spring of 1795. He then moved to Madison County, Kentucky. He taught school there in the fall of 1796. Later in the year he returned to Cane Ridge and in January 1797 was licensed as a Presbyterian minister to preach. McNemar moved to Cabin Creek in the fall of 1797 and preached there at their church.[3][4]

The Kentucky Revival was a religious revival. It happened in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and parts of Vermont. It was a series of events of psychological phenomena that started around 1800. The spread of the revival in Kentucky began in Christian County and Logan County and in the Spring of 1801 had reached Mason County. The revival developed into the Cane Ridge Revival in August 1801 which drew several thousand people.[5]

McNemar was preaching "free will" spirit and encouraged unrestrained physical activity in his church congregation around this same time. There were charges brought against him as this was not the normal custom of the Presbyterian church. McNemar officially dissolved his pastoral relation with the Presbyterian church at Cabin Creek in Lewis County, Kentucky, formally in the middle of April 1801.[2] He went to a church in 1802 in Turtle Creek, that was near Lebanon, Ohio, where he preached part-time.[6]

A petition was signed by sixty members of the Turtle Creek Church that asked for McNemar to preach full-time. The Turtle Creek Church was near Lebanon, Ohio. Jonathan Tichenor and others disapproved of McNemar being made full-time pastor of the church. McNemar and four other Presbyterian ministers, Robert Marshall, John Dunlevy, Barton W. Stone and John Thompson withdrew and formed an independent church – the New Light Church. This was the beginning in the "West" of the "free will" movement. McNemar was a leader of the religious movement.[7]

McNemar's New Light members split from the traditional Presbyterian customs and Calvinist theology.[6] In time another separate faction called the schismatics broke away from the New Light members.[8] They became even more physically expressive in their worship. McNemar's church sessions became exhortations on the order of the Holy Rollers.[9] Church members had such shaking that their whole body vibrated.[10] McNemar embraced this open excitement and claimed to his church members that it was spiritual inspiration.[11] He interpreted New Light as an "inward light" that was above that of the Christian scriptures that the Presbyterians taught.[11][12] Members of his new church could do unrestricted dancing by those that wished to do so, as it was fully tolerated and encouraged.[13][14]

The Kentucky Revival book cover

There was so much excitement generated in the McNemar church congregation that it was anticipated Jesus was about to come.[15] Actually what happen instead was that three Shaker missionaries came from the New Lebanon Shaker community in New York for a visit in 1805 traveling by foot for over a thousand miles. They were Issachar Bates, Benjamin S. Youngs and John Meacham. They were bringing Shakerism to the "West."[16] The Shaker missionaries persuaded McNemar into their belief.[17]

McNemar, who embraced Shakerism, influenced this belief more than any other person to the local congregations and is the reason for the existence of the Shaker societies in the "West" – Ohio and Kentucky.[18][19] Eventually the New Light congregations that went for a little over a year and led by McNemar started the earliest Shaker colonies in the "West", Union Village Shaker settlement in Ohio and Shaker village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.[20]

McNemar wrote at the Union Village Shaker settlement The Kentucky Revival, a Short History, the Shakers first printed bound book. It gave details on this history of the Kentucky Revival that developed into Shakerism. It was printed in Cincinnati in 1807. [21][22][23][24]

McNemar was tall and thin and had an outgoing personality.[1] He read Latin, Greek and Hebrew.[1][25] He was known as a classical scholar.[25][26] He is considered by historians as the father of Shaker literature.[21][27] McNemar became known as the "Father of Shaker music" and is the most prolific composer of Shaker hymns and anthems.[28]

McNemar was married to Jane "Jennie" Luckey on 8 April 1793 in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Their children were: Levi, Benjamin, James, Vincy, Elisha, and Nancy McNemar.[16]

McNemar died 15 September 1839.[29]

• Boles, John B. (1996). The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0813170656.
• Burks, Jean M. (2008). Shaker design: out of this world. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300137286. 1807 Richard McNemar, an important leader of the frontier revival and one of the first western converts to the Shaker faith, writes the first bound volume, The Kentucky Revival
• Cleveland, Catharine Caroline (1916). The Great Revival in the West, 1797–1805. University of Chicago Press.
• Conkin, Paul Keith (1990). Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost. Univ of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0299127249.
• Davenport, Keith (2001). Azusa Revisited. Lulu.com. ISBN 1435757912.
• Foster, Lawrence (1981). Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252011198.
• Goodwillie, Christian (2009). Millennial Praises: A Shaker Hymnal. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-1558496392.
• Grant, Jerry V. (1989). Shaker Furniture Makers. Hancock Shaker Village. ISBN 0874514886. Brother Richard's account of the Kentucky Revival (1807) was the first bound book published by the Shakers
• Haskett, William J. (1828). Shakerism Unmasked, Or The History of the Shakers. E.H. Walkley.
• Howe, Henry (1896). Historical Collections of Ohio...: An Encyclopedia of the State: History Both General and Local, Geography... Sketches of Eminent and Interesting Characters, Etc., with Notes of a Tour Over it in 1886, Volume 2. Laning Printing Company.

• Hooper, James W. (2006). The Shaker Communities of Kentucky: Pleasant Hill and South Union. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 0738542679.
• MacLean, J.P. (1905). A Bibliography of Shaker Literature.
• MacLean, John Patterson (1907). Shakers of Ohio: Fugitive Papers Concerning the Shakers of Ohio, with Unpublished Manuscripts. F.J. Heer printing Company.
• MacLean, John Patterson (1905). A Sketch of the Life and Labors of Richard McNemar. John Patterson MacLean. It must be conceded that Richard McNemar was the father of Shaker literature. The first production made by the Shakers was a small tract, written by Joseph Meacham, entitled "A Concise Statement of the Principles of the Only true Church of Christ," to which was added a letter from James Whittaker. This was struck from a press at Bennington, Vt., in 1790. There was no other publication until the appearance of McNemar's "Kentucky Revival," which was the first bound volume.
• Morse, Flo (1987). The Shakers and the World's People. UPNE. ISBN 0874514266. The father of Shaker literature and journalism, he wrote a history of the Kentucky Revival with a description of the Shaker missions to the Shawnee Indians. This was the first bound book by the Shakers.
• Ramage, James (2011). Kentucky Rising: Democracy, Slavery, and Culture from the Early Republic to. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0813134413.

• The Kentucky Revival