Cane Ridge Meeting House and the 1801 camp meeting

Enslaved worshippers sat in a gallery reached by an outside ladder at the west end until an 1829 renovation removed it. Barton W. Stone began preaching at Cane Ridge in 1796.

In August 1801 the congregation invited neighboring Presbyterian and Methodist churches to its annual communion, and from Aug. 6 to Aug. 12 or 13 the crowds kept coming. Estimates run from 10,000 to 20,000 or more; The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement figures that 20,000 could have come at some point during the week, nearly a tenth of Kentucky’s 1800 population, though probably no more than 10,000 at once. Eighteen Presbyterian ministers and numerous Methodists and Baptists preached, often at the same time in different parts of the camp, from the meeting house, outdoor platforms, stumps, wagons, and fallen trees, and 800 to 1,100 people took communion.

It was the largest and most famous camp meeting of the Second Great Awakening and set off a wave of smaller camp meetings across the frontier. In 1804 Stone and other Presbyterian ministers signed “The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery” at Cane Ridge (the state marker dates the new “Christian Church” to June 28, 1804), starting a movement that joined Thomas and Alexander Campbell’s followers in 1832.

In the 1930s a stone building was put up around the original log meeting house, which still stands inside it. The map pin marks the meeting house.