Author: Pitts, William
Biography:
PITTS, William (1774-1862: ancestry.com)
He was born in Chatham NY but his parentage and early life are not reliably documented. At some point he married Lity Lewis, twelve years younger than himself; it is unclear whether or not they had children, but the 1855 state census records them as a household of only two. A working man and a Methodist, he was living in Grenville NY in 1814 when he was caught up in the movement, begun the same year in Vermont, that led to the formation of the breakaway Reformed Methodist Church. He became an itinerant preacher for the movement, working a circuit that included New York State, Massachusetts, and Vermont: his Gospel Witness includes passages from the diary he kept on the road in the early years. By 1844 the Church had grown from six founding members to cover five districts including Canada, with a complement of 50 ordained preachers or elders and 25 licensed preachers. Pitts and his wife settled in Petersburg NY; his gravestone in the cemetery there gives him the title of Elder. (ancestry.com 26 June 2020; Wesley Bailey, "History of the Reformed Methodist Church," An Original History of the Religious Denominations . . . ed. I. Daniel Rupp [1844] 466-77) HJ