Philip Embury

Philip Embury (Ballingrane, County Limerick, Ireland, 21 September 1729 - Camden, New York, August 1775) was a Methodist preacher, a leader of one of the earliest Methodist congregations in the United States.

Embury's parents were members of the colony of Germans that emigrated from the Palatinate to Ireland early in the eighteenth century, and in which Wesley labored with great success. The colony had formed from refugees from the War of the Spanish Succession. Embury was educated at a school near Ballingrane, County Limerick, Ireland, and learned the carpenter's trade. He was converted on Christmas day, 1752, became a local preacher at Court-Matrix in 1758, and married Margaret Switzer that fall.

In 1760, due to rising rents and scarce land, he came to New York City and worked as a school teacher. In common with his fellow emigrants, he began to lose interest in religious matters, and did not preach in New York till 1766, when, moved by the reproaches of Barbara Heck, sometimes called the “foundress of American Methodism,” he began to hold services first in his own house on Barrack Street, now Park Place, and then in a rigging loft on what is now William Street. The congregation thus formed was probably the first Methodist congregation in the United States, though it is a disputed question whether precedence should not be given to Robert Strawbridge, who began laboring in Maryland about this time. Before this, he and his cousin Barbara Heck had worshiped along with other Irish Palatines at Trinity Lutheran Church where three of his children had been baptized.

...
Wikipedia