This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In the spring of 1706, seven Presbyterian ministers gathered to organize the Presbytery of Philadelphia, the first presbytery formed in what would become the United States. They chose Francis Makemie, an Irish born and Scottish educated missionary, as the new presbytery's first moderator.
The presbytery's work reached beyond organization alone. It conducted the first Presbyterian ordination performed in America, and in its earliest years it served scattered congregations spread across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, a colonial Presbyterian community that had until then had no governing body of its own.
Growth followed quickly. By 1716, ten years after the Presbytery of Philadelphia's founding, seventeen Presbyterian ministers were active across the colonies. The original presbytery split that same year into four separate presbyteries, with a General Synod created above them to govern the whole.
What Makemie's 1706 presbytery changed for Presbyterianism's spread in America was the difference between scattered congregations and an organized church. A handful of ministers with no shared structure became, within a decade, a denomination with its own courts, its own ordinations and its own capacity to keep multiplying on its own terms.