Billy Graham: The Dairy Farm Evangelist

On November seventh, nineteen eighteen, William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on a dairy farm in Mecklenburg County, about ten miles from what is now the center of Charlotte. His parents were Calvinist Presbyterians of Scottish descent. The farm was modest. The Depression years were hard. Billy, as everyone called him, grew up doing chores before dawn and reading everything he could find in the hayloft.

He was not particularly pious as a teenager. By his own account he was more interested in baseball than church. That changed in the fall of nineteen thirty-four when a traveling revival preacher named Mordecai Ham came to Charlotte for a series of meetings. Fifteen-year-old Billy Graham attended, was seized by what he later described as a profound emotional experience, and made a public commitment to Christianity. He was converted, in the idiom of his faith.

He left for Florida Bible Institute, then Wheaton College in Illinois, where he graduated in nineteen forty-three and married Ruth McCue Bell. Two years later he began preaching in earnest, and his combination of physical presence, carefully prepared language, and the enormous new medium of radio and then television made him something that had not quite existed before: a celebrity evangelist with a national audience.

Over a career spanning six decades, Graham preached in person to more than two hundred ten million people in more than one hundred eighty five countries. He counseled every United States president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. His crusades filled stadiums from Madison Square Garden to Sydney to Seoul.

The Billy Graham Library opened in Charlotte in two thousand seven. It sits near the farm where he grew up and is built to resemble a dairy barn. He died in February of twenty-eighteen at the age of ninety-nine, at his home in Montreat, North Carolina. He is buried on the library grounds, beside his wife.