The Primitive Methodist Church is a Methodist Christian denomination within the holiness movement. It began in England in the early 19th century, with the influence of American evangelist Lorenzo Dow (1777–1834). In the United States, the Primitive Methodist Church had eighty-three parishes and 8,487 members in 1996. In Great Britain and Australia, the Primitive Methodist Church merged with other denominations, to form the Methodist Church of Great Britain in 1932 and the Methodist Church of Australasia in 1901. The latter subsequently merged into the Uniting Church in Australia in 1977. History United Kingdom The leaders who originated Primitive Methodism were attempting to restore a spirit of revivalism as they felt was found in the ministry of John Wesley, with no intent of forming a new church. The leaders were Hugh Bourne (1772–1852) and William Clowes (1780–1851), preachers in the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Bourne had joined a Methodist society at Burslem, but business taking him at the close of 1800 to the colliery district of Harriseahead and Kidsgrove, he was so impressed by the prevailing ignorance that he began a religious revival of the district, and Clowes joined him in 1805. The two preachers heard from Lorenzo Dow of the results of American camp meetings, and held a fourteen-hour camp meeting on May 31, 1807, at Mow Cop on the Staffordshire and Cheshire border, which resulted in many converts. But the Wesleyan Church refused to admit these converts to the church, and reprimanded Bourne and Clowes. Refusing to cease holding open-air meetings, they were dismissed from the church. For a while they took separate paths, but after waiting two years for readmittance to the church, they founded the Primitive Methodists in the year of 1810. Clowes's personality drew a number of strong men after him, and a society meeting held in a kitchen and then in a warehouse became the nucleus of a circuit, a chapel being built at Tunstall in July 1811, and there in February 1812 they took the name The Society of the Primitive Methodists. The name is meant to indicate they were conducting themselves in the way of Wesley and the "original" Methodists, particularly in reference to open-air meetings and allowing female ministry. The last of the women roving preachers died in 1890. Primitive Methodist workers played an important role in the formative phase of the Trade Union movement in England. They were always the most working