Camp Meeting
Every August in North Carolina, when the stifling, wet heat of summer days give way to chilled nights, the songs of crickets and cicadas signify the last days of the growing season. For generations, families have spent these final weeks of summer at camp meeting, taking time to rest, commiserate, reflect, and show gratitude before the harvest begins. I grew up spending the precious last weeks of summer each year at Mott’s Grove Campground in Sherrills Ford in Catawba county, North Carolina, where my family has lived for millennia.
Camp meeting is a two-week outdoor religious revival, based on the Scottish protestant holy fair, a weeklong celebration of Jesus’ last days. Camp meetings spread across the United colonies in the mid-1700’s. Traveling evangelists drew local believers to the woods to pray and praise under moonlit skies. The movement continued to gain steam as part of the religious revival of the early 1800’s and permanent camp meeting grounds began to sprout up in southern Atlantic states. Early campgrounds featured a central simple amphitheater for revival services, encircled by families in tents who spent the entire revival period at the campground. The tents evolved to small houses with modest furnishings that wait patiently every year for the end of summer.
Mott’s Grove Campground is one of several campgrounds included in a local historic designation, legally protected from the threat of suburban sprawl. Like most remaining revival campgrounds, Mott’s Grove is organized and maintained by an eponymous church. Roughly 30 campground houses, still called tents, surround the campground’s open canopy church sanctuary. Known as the Arbor, this outdoor sanctuary has all the trappings of an indoor one, and, despite its weather-worn lectern and gray, splitting solid wood pews, commands the same respect.
As a kid, I spent my time at Mott’s Grove Campground playing tag and hide and seek between the tents (but never under the Arbor), attempting to avoid church services, and indulging in all the cotton candy and soda I could convince my uncles to buy. As the years passed, I exchanged chasing friends and sugar highs for leisurely walks around the campground with my friends, looking out for cute boys and exaggerating my ‘back home’ social influence. The campground teamed with life then; thousands of people visited each year in a whirlwind of ‘do-you-remember-when,’ delicious food, skinned knees, and church hats.
Mott’s Grove Methodist Church and its campground were established by Black Americans in 1870, five years after the abolition of slavery in North Carolina. The church was named after Dr. John J. Mott, a local physician who donated the land to the group of worshipers who gathered there for revival. Over 150 years old, Mott’s Grove Campground stands as a testament to the perseverance of family, faith, and community.
As one of the area’s smallest campgrounds, camp meeting at Mott’s Grove feels like a big family reunion. Every year there are new babies to hold, bigger kids to fuss at about their untied shoes, new stories to tell, and new memories to make. My family shares a deep love for camp meeting, often spending time together at our tent in the offseason, repainting and repairing. This love was passed down from my grandparents, who, along with their nine children, often spent the entire summer between their home a few miles away and their dirt-floor tent at the campground, resulting in multiple camp meeting babies. My dad is named after the preacher who drove my grandmother from the campground to the hospital for his birth.
Camp meeting is a sacred event. Its steady, unchanging metronome offers stability beneath a cacophony of life’s uncertainties. Despite the constant changes of the world around us, camp meeting provides an opportunity for communion and rest. Though my family no longer spends our time at camp meeting waiting for summer crops to ripen, we still use this time to come together and pause for gratitude before the season changes. For two weeks, at the end of every blazing summer, camp meeting invites friends and family from every corner of the world to celebrate, grieve, eat, and share the generations of abundant love surrounding the Arbor.
Photo: Jessica Connor, M.Ed., MS
