Devereux Jarratt
1733-1801 Devereux Jarratt reached his widest fame as a leader of the Great Awakening in Virginia during the 1760s and 1770s. Surprisingly he participated in this revivalist movement as an Anglican and later an Episcopalian minister. Jarratt was born near Richmond, Virginia, on 17 January 1733 and raised in the Church of England.
Jarratt traveled to England in 1762 and was ordained in the Church of England even though he had been converted by Presbyterians. He returned to Virginia in 1763 and began preaching at the church in Bath, a town in the southern reaches of the colony. His powerful, musical voice together with his intensely emotional preaching brought large crowds to his church, and his ministry rapidly expanded.
He continued to preach into the 1800s, but to ever-smaller groups. The decline in his work mirrored the decline of Episcopalianism in the South. Jarratt died in Bath from cancer on 29 January 1801. After his death his work continued with the publication of his Autobiography in 1806, which he had written as a model for leading a Christian life and as a last effort to bring people to the true God.
