Nothing can stop camp meetings

RIDGEVILLE—The new wooden cabin tents give Lynn Hoover a chill every time she goes by them. It's Camp Meeting time, still.

Only a few vacant spaces remain with dark cinder scars. The 'tents' around them have been rebuilt and the fresh wood seems to shine in the sun. Little more than a year ago, in April 2008, a late-night suspected arson fire at the secluded Cypress Campground burned five cabins to ashes and damaged a sixth. Then a month later, a fire started where the first one was stopped and destroyed another eight tents.

The blazes left a gaping blackened hole in the circle of 53 tents, or cabins, at the two-century-old religious retreat in the countryside along Dorchester and Berkeley county lines.

By the October camp meeting, two tents had been rebuilt. This year, despite the economic collapse that crippled incomes in the rural counties, another eight cabins are rebuilt. No, Hoover shook her head, there's not going to be any lapse in interest in this year's camp meeting.

In fact, the first state historic marker recognizing the upper county Camp Meeting heritage will be unveiled Oct. 20 at the Cypress meeting. The meetings were popularized by Francis Asbury and other Methodist circuit riders preaching through the semi-wilderness of Colonial times; the Cypress meeting, the oldest of the four Dorchester County meetings, is said to have started with a visit by Asbury in the 1700s. The marker is part of a project by the Upper Dorchester County Historical Society.

Camp Meeting is the rural region's distinctive heritage — weeklong retreats among congregation families who have known each other since those first churches opened their doors as log cabins. The meetings began as an autumn religious revival for farm families coming in their wagons after the harvest, to 'camp' for the week in the primitive dirt-floored cabins with wood stoves.

Few campgrounds remain outside the county. The Cypress meeting takes place the last week of October. The Indian Field meeting near St. George took place last week. The St. Paul meeting outside Harleyville starts Sunday

. The Shady Grove meeting outside Rosinville takes place the third week of October.

St. Paul and Shady Grove meetings have their own singular heritage; they were founded in the 1800s by freed slaves. A fifth meeting, Cattle Creek, takes place in Orangeburg County.

Preaching is the meetings' centerpiece, figuratively and literally, with morning and night services in the open-air tabernacle in the field in the middle of the ring of cabins. Today, as in old times, the week also is a festive indulgence of homespun cooking amid a reunion of kith and kin separated by the miles.

It says a lot of what you need to know about Camp Meeting that it's always been and still is a place of courtship. The meetings are open to the public. An invitation into a family tent is considered a cachet.

On Friday, some 10 miles away from the Cypress Campground, Willie Smalls stacked wood behind his family's tent at St. Paul Campground, prepping for the meeting. Wood will heat the tent and go into the stove his family will be cooking on.

'Turkey, chicken, deer meat, pork, catfish stew on Friday, and all this good stuff, collard greens, sweet potatoes, sweet potato pie,' Smalls said. The economy hasn't turned anyone away from the St. Paul meeting, he said. If anything, more people will come. 'I think everybody's ready.'

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Bo Petersen

at 937-5744 or bpetersen@post andcourier.com.