John Stark Ravenscroft (1772–1830) was born in Prince George County but soon moved with his family first to England and shortly afterward to Scotland, returning to Virginia about fifteen years later to manage his deceased father’s extensive property. He attended the College of William and Mary for an indeterminate period about 1790. Ravenscroft considered a legal career but instead purchased and settled on a Lunenburg County plantation. About 1810 he experienced a religious conversion, and after a period as a Methodist, in 1817 he was ordained an Episcopalian priest. Ravenscroft served as rector at Saint James Church in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, until 1823. In that year he became the first consecrated bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina. Ravenscroft also served successively as rector of parishes in Raleigh and, from 1828, in Williamsboro. In the following year he presided at the organization of the Diocese of Tennessee (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography [1979–96], 5:179–80; The Works of the Right Reverend John Stark Ravenscroft, … to which is prefixed a Memoir of His Life, 2 vols., 2d ed. [1856]; John N. Norton, The Life of Bishop Ravenscroft [1858]; Marshall DeLancey Haywood, Lives of the Bishops of North Carolina [1910], 37–88; Raleigh Register, and North-Carolina Gazette, 11 Mar. 1830).

Ravenscroft engaged about two years previously to sell textile machinery made by John George Baxter, of Philadelphia County, who marketed his spinning & carding machines to American “planters, farmers and heads of families,” with the carding engine said “to card six pounds of cotton per day” and priced at 60. dollars (Washington National Intelligencer, 14 May 1810; Ravenscroft to TJ, 21 July 1812; Baxter to TJ, 1 Aug. 1815).