Camp Meetings

The camp meeting is a form of Protestant Christian religious gathering that originated in Scotland before being brought to America by Scots-Irish settlers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the vast wilderness of the American frontier, there were few places of worship, making these outdoor gatherings vital for frontier communities.

Historians generally credit James McGready (c.1760–1817), a Presbyterian minister, with holding the first typical camp meetings in Kentucky in 1799, at the Red River church in Logan County. Families would travel up to 40 miles to attend, pitching tents around a forest clearing where log benches and a crude preaching platform formed an outdoor church.

The most famous early camp meeting took place at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky in August 1801, when Presbyterians and Methodists joined together. A Methodist lay preacher stood on a fallen tree before an estimated 15,000 people, taking his text from 2 Corinthians 5:10 — "We must all stand before the judgement seat of Christ to give an account of things done in the body whether good or bad." As he spoke, hundreds fell to the ground in religious ecstasy.

An engraving of a Methodist camp meeting in 1819 (US Library of Congress).

Camp meetings were a major component of the Second Great Awakening, an evangelical revival movement promoted by Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and other preachers in the early 19th century. So popular was this form of gathering that when word spread that a religious meeting was to be held, both believers and non-believers would attend — the latter glad of a break from routine, and many subsequently converted.

Services at camp meetings took place in a "brush arbor" — a cleared area surrounded by trees with overhanging limbs forming a natural shelter. Singing hymns, prayer meetings, weddings, baptisms and the taking of Communion were all regular features, and the Bible reading was usually a central focus of every session.

The Presbyterian church refused to officially participate in camp meetings after 1805, put off by the wild enthusiasm and hysteria they sometimes generated. However, the Methodist church embraced them fully and profited most from their popularity, gradually institutionalising them into its system of evangelism. By 1811, the Methodist bishop Francis Asbury reported in his journal that over 400 camp meetings were held annually along the frontier from Georgia to Michigan.

The banner year for camp meetings was 1811, when it is estimated that between 10 and 33 percent of the entire American population attended at least one. Most meetings lasted four days, beginning on Friday afternoon and ending on Monday noon. A popular proverb of the time said: "The good people go to camp meetings Friday, backsliders Saturday, rowdies Saturday night, and gentlemen and lady sinners Sunday."

The Rock Springs Camp Meeting near Denver, North Carolina, which dates to 1794, is considered by some historians to be the oldest camp meeting in the United States. The Hollow Rock Holiness Camp Meeting Association in Ohio, formed in 1875, claims to be the oldest Christian camp meeting in continuous existence, still operating today.

Camp meetings had a lasting cultural legacy beyond religion — they helped spread musical traditions across the American frontier, with communal singing at meetings influencing the development of American gospel and folk music. They also served as important social events in isolated frontier communities, functioning as informal markets, places of courtship, and opportunities for news to be shared across vast distances.