Minuette Floyd, art, and McKissick Museum folklorists Saddler Taylor and Jay Williams are exploring the rural gatherings known as camp meetings that date back to the 1700s in South Carolina and continue today as part spiritual revival, part family reunion. Their projects are funded separately by the S.C. Arts Commission and Humanities Council.

"Camp meetings have been flying under the radar for a very long time," Williams said. "The tradition remains very strong, but many people have never seen them or even heard of them because of their rural nature."

Floyd is preparing a black-and-white photography exhibit entitled "Generations: African-American Camp Meeting Traditions in South Carolina" for the Richland County Library on Assembly Street that will be on display from June 4 through July 20. The McKissick Museum team is planning to produce an hour-long TV documentary that will initially screen at the museum and a possible exhibit.

"There are at least five active camp meetings in the lower part of the state with deep historical roots," said Williams, project coordinator for McKissick Museum. "Most started out with an affiliation to the Methodist church although camp meetings also were popular among Presbyterians and Baptists in the early 1800s."

Camp meetings began as a "laying off" time after the harvest was gathered. Families came in wagons and brought livestock to be slaughtered and cooked during the week-long gathering, which included preaching, worship, and prayer. Camp meetings today are often held in the same early fall timeframe but have become more secular in nature.

"The family reunion aspect is more compelling than it once was," said Floyd, who grew up going to camp meetings near Mooresville, N.C.

It's possible that the camp meeting tradition extends much farther back to when ancient Hebrews celebrated the Festival of Sukkot, a fall harvest observance in which participants camped out in three-sided shelters.

Modern camp meetings still congregate tents or shelters around a central structure called the tabernacle, which typically faces east. At the Indian Field and Shady Grove camps meetings near St. George, an individual blows through a custom-made copper horn to signal the gathering time.

Indian Field Camp Meeting is a predominantly white gathering; about two miles away is the Shady Grove Camp Meeting that is predominantly African American. Oral tradition suggests that land for the Shady Grove site was donated by a white landowner after blacks helped harvest a rice crop there just before a large storm would have ruined it.

For their documentary, the McKissick Museum researchers hope to get additional funding to invite John Wesley scholars from England. Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and other Methodist disciples such as Francis Asbury are believed to have started the camp meeting tradition during revival meetings throughout the South. The tricentennial of Wesley's birth will be observed this year.

The McKissick documentary already has attracted sociologists, folklorists, religious studies scholars, and social geographers from USC, Furman University, Claflin College, Coastal Carolina University, and the University of Illinois.

Floyd's photography exhibit in June won't mark the end of her camp meeting interest. She's undertaking ethnographic studies of camp meeting participants at several sites in South Carolina and North Carolina to include information about food, music, and camp meeting traditions. Those interviews might later become the basis for a book, she said.

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