This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Samaritan's Purse was founded in 1970 by Bob Pierce, the same Baptist pastor and evangelist whose earlier relief work in postwar Korea had already produced World Vision two decades before. Pierce had already left World Vision's own leadership by the time he established the new organization in Hollywood, California, under a name drawn from the New Testament Parable of the Good Samaritan, as a smaller and more direct vehicle for the kind of urgent, hands-on relief work that had defined his earliest missionary trips. He would not live to see the scale it eventually reached: Pierce died in 1978, and leadership passed the following year to Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist Billy Graham, who moved the organization's headquarters to Boone, North Carolina in 1980 and has led it ever since.
Under Graham, Samaritan's Purse built an operational profile distinct from the federated model World Vision had grown into: rather than a network of interdependent national offices, it runs centrally from its Boone, North Carolina headquarters, operates its own DC-8 disaster response aircraft and deployable field hospitals, and describes its relief work explicitly as an expression of Christian missionary calling rather than framing the two as separate. It is also, through its Operation Christmas Child shoebox gift program, one of the most publicly recognizable Christian charities in the United States, a visibility built on a program far smaller in dollar terms than its disaster response work.