David Purviance, 1766–1847, was a member of the Kentucky legislature, a member of the Ohio legislature, and an important early leader in the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. He was also founder of Miami University of Oxford, Ohio and often served as its president pro tempore.
The religious fervor of the early 19th century U.S. western frontier found its strongest voice at Cane Ridge Meeting House in Bourbon County, Kentucky, site of a series of continual camp meetings from 1801-1804. In Kentucky, David Purviance, at first a farmer, engaged in significant debates with John C. Breckinridge over the proper relationship between church and state. After separating from the Presbyterian church and persuading numerous Presbyterians and Baptists to join the Christian Church movement, David Purviance removed from Bourbon County near Paris to "New Paris" in Preble County, Ohio, for two principal reasons, viz., to help spread the new Christian Church movement from its Kentucky base; and because he was an abolitionist in a time when slavery sentiment predominated in Kentucky.
David Purviance was a signatory of the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery formally dissolving the presbytery, which had previously withdrawn from the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky. The Last Will and Testament marked the birth of the Christian Church of the West and became a founding document of the Restoration Movement.
Born in Iredell County, North Carolina, an ending point for many colonial pioneers migrating from Pennsylvania down the Great Wagon Road of the 18th century, David Purviance's family had removed in 1791 to Sumner County in Middle Tennessee to help found the old Shiloh Presbyterian Church outside today's Gallatin, Tennessee. In 1792, the Purviance family including son David Purviance removed from Sumner County to farmland near Cane Ridge in the bluegrass near Paris, Kentucky, because David Purviance's brother John Purviance had been "scalped" by hostile native Americans in the year 1792. The murdered man's wife, Martha King (Mrs. John Purviance, later Mrs. William McCorkle) watched helplessly as her husband was slain and was forcibly restrained by family from running to aid the hapless John Purviance. After the "scalping" the Purviance family considered Sumner County temporarily unsafe for white pioneers at the time, although the parents of David Purviance returned to Sumner County, from which Wilson County, Tennessee, was to be carved in 1799.
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