The Cane Ridge Camp Meeting

Kentucky in 1800 was raw country. Something like two hundred thousand settlers had poured over the mountains into a state barely nine years old, and there were nowhere near enough churches or ministers to go around. Travelers wrote home about drinking, dueling, and lawlessness; one district was known as Rogues' Harbor. Preachers rode circuits of a hundred miles and more, reaching a settlement every few weeks if they were lucky.

The praying started in Logan County, in the southwest corner of the state. James McGready, a plain-spoken Presbyterian with three small congregations at Red River, Gasper River, and Muddy River, had his people sign a covenant in 1797 binding themselves to pray for revival every Saturday evening and Sunday morning and to set apart the third Saturday of each month for it. They kept that up for three years with nothing much to show for it.

It broke in the summer of 1800. At a sacramental meeting at Red River in June, a Methodist named John McGee exhorted at the end of the service and the congregation came apart weeping; people would not leave. When McGready called another meeting at Gasper River in July, families came from forty and a hundred miles away and brought wagons, tents, and food, because there was nowhere to stay. That is where the American camp meeting was born — not from a plan, but from the distances.

Barton W. Stone, a young Presbyterian minister serving the congregations at Cane Ridge and Concord in Bourbon County, rode south in the spring of 1801 to see it with his own eyes. He wrote that he went as a doubter and came back convinced, though he admitted he could not explain much of what he had watched. He rode home, told his congregation, and announced a sacramental meeting at Cane Ridge for August.

They came in numbers nobody was ready for. The meeting began on Friday, August 6, 1801, at the log meeting house built in 1791, and ran about six days — ending in part because the ground was fouled and the food ran out. Contemporary estimates of the crowd run from ten thousand to twenty-five thousand people; Lexington, the largest town in the state, held fewer than two thousand. No one counted heads. Those numbers came from observers counting wagons and guessing, and they should be read that way.

Several meetings ran at once in different parts of the ground. Preachers stood on stumps, on wagon beds, and on a fallen tree, and a listener could walk from a Presbyterian sermon to a Methodist exhortation to a Baptist appeal in a few minutes. Black preachers preached there too, and enslaved and free Black people were in the crowd — in a slave state, at a meeting where the seating was still divided. Communion tokens were handed out and hundreds came to the tables set up in the open. At night the ground was lit by candles and torches in the trees.

What the eyewitnesses described is worth reporting the way they wrote it. People fell as if shot and lay still for hours, then rose speaking of Christ. Others had what they called the jerks — the head snapping back and forth so fast that a witness said the features could not be made out — and the dancing, running, and laughing exercises, and a singing that seemed to some to come from the chest rather than the mouth. Stone names all of these in his own account and says he watched them. He also said, plainly, that some who fell rose changed and some who fell showed nothing afterward, and that he never treated the falling itself as proof of anything.

Sober ministers were alarmed, including sympathetic ones. Some objected to the noise, the night meetings, and the impossibility of pastoral care in a crowd that size. Critics also passed around the taunt that more souls were begotten than saved at camp meetings; it was a jibe, it has never been substantiated, and it is repeated here only so a reader who meets it elsewhere knows what it is. Stone defended the work as genuine while conceding openly that the excesses were real and that some of what happened was human, not divine.

The immediate fruit was enormous and the wreckage was real. Church rolls in Kentucky and Tennessee rose steeply in the following years, and the camp meeting became the standard tool of frontier religion for the next fifty years — the Methodists especially turned it into a system, with a calendar, a layout, and circuit riders trained to run it. But the revival also broke things. Stone and four other ministers formed the Springfield Presbytery in 1803 and dissolved it a year later with a document called The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, asking to be known simply as Christians; that stream eventually joined Alexander Campbell's and became the Stone-Campbell movement. Richard McNemar, who had preached at Cane Ridge, went over to the Shakers in 1805 and carried congregations with him. The Cumberland Presbyterian Church formed in 1810 out of the same fights over ordaining revival preachers who had no college behind them.

The log meeting house is still there, in Bourbon County, sheltered since 1957 inside a stone building put up to protect it. It is small — the kind of room that seats a few hundred at most, which is the point. Barton Stone is buried on the grounds. Everything the American frontier came to mean by revival happened in a field outside a building that size.