Pioneering spirit – Brian Maye on Limerick-born Philip Embury, the ‘founder of American Methodism’

The man described as “the founder of American Methodism” was Co Limerick-born Philip Embury, who died 250 years ago this month (the exact date is unknown). He was the main driving force behind the building of the first Wesleyan church in North America.

He was one of at least five children of Andreas Imberger, who was a German Palatine immigrant into Limerick in 1709 (Sir Thomas Southwell settled substantial numbers of German Protestants from the German Palatinate on his Limerick estates), and was baptised on September 29th, 1728, into the Church of Ireland in Ballingrane, Co Limerick. He was educated in German in the Palatine community there and afterwards probably attended an English school in Rathkeale town, eventually becoming a carpenter by trade.

Philip Guier, the burgomaster (mayor) of Ballingrane, established a Methodist society there in 1749, which might have been Embury’s introduction to the teachings of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. In any event, he converted to that religion on Christmas Day 1752 and became a Methodist lay preacher in 1758. By then a Methodist chapel had been built in the centre of Courtmatrix village, one of the three original Southwell Palatine settlements near Rathkeale, and Embury most likely did the carpentry work for this building.

He married Margaret Switzer at Halloween, 1758, when he was 30 and she 16 (her parents were Palatine tenant farmers at Courtmatrix). They were to have six children, only two of whom survived into adulthood: Samuel and Catherine.

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Various reasons have been given for the Emburys’ decision to emigrate to America, such as rising rents and land scarcity, but the most plausible seems to be that they were part of a group of young Palatines who decided to establish a linen company there.

In June 1760, they sailed for New York on board the Pery, a voyage that took nine weeks. It’s said that Philip had to be carried ashore on arrival, due to illness, and there’s a chair in John Street Methodist Church in New York that tradition says was the one he was carried ashore on.

At first, he worked as a teacher while the group petitioned for land on which to build a factory for their linen and hempen business, and he and Margaret worshipped at Lutheran Church, Rector Street (now Cliff Street), where three of their children were baptised between 1761 and 1765.

He doesn’t seem to have preached during his early years in New York until, prompted by his cousin Barbara Heck (often called “the foundress of American Methodism”), he resumed preaching around 1766 and over time his congregation grew. Gradually he and other Irish and English Methodists raised subscriptions and bought a piece of land on John Street, where they built a chapel. It’s said to have been designed by Barbara Heck; Embury is reputed to have constructed the pulpit and he and Barbara’s brother Paul did the other interior woodwork. This was probably the first Methodist church in North America and was the first chapel in the world to be named after John Wesley, according to Vivien Hick, who wrote the entry on Embury in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Embury preached in the chapel and he and his wife and their two remaining children lived in a house on the property until April 1770 when they and their compatriots moved to Camden Valley, Charlotte County, New York, where they’d leased land. There, probably living in tents, they undertook the arduous work of clearing, tilling and erecting buildings. The provincial governor appointed Embury justice of the peace (JP) for Albany County and when Charlotte County came into existence in 1772, he became JP there, as well as one of the commissioners of roads for the new county.

He and fellow-Methodist Thomas Ashton formed a Methodist society at Ashgrove and a class at West Camden in 1770, where Embury was preacher and class leader, and in this way formed the beginnings of the first Methodist chapel north of New York. He continued to preach over the next three years, sometimes travelling long distances to do so.

While working in his fields, he was stricken with pleurisy, and following a few days’ illness, he died in August 1773, leaving a wife and four young children, ranging in age from 16 months to eight years. Originally buried in Camden Valley, his remains were moved to Woodlands Cemetery, Cambridge, New York. His widow and two remaining children eventually made their way to Canada, where Margaret died in 1807 in Ontario. Their eldest son, Samuel, became a Methodist preacher in Upper Canada.

Portraits of Philip and Margaret Embury, dated 1773, can be found at John Street United Methodist Church in New York.