When Betty Kincaid’s first husband asked her to marry him, she had one question:
Would he go to the Salem Camp Meeting with her every year?
When he said yes, she said yes.
“I would have married him anyway,” said the 85-year-old retired teacher from Covington. “I just wanted to make sure he knew how much the camp meetings meant to me.”
This year’s 186th camp meeting, which runs July 11-18, will be Kincaid’s 85th. Her mother brought Kincaid — diapers and all — to her first Salem Camp Meeting just a few months after she was born.
Five generations of her family have attended the Salem Camp Meeting in Covington since it began in 1828. The only time the meetings have ever been interrupted was two years during the Civil War (although since some people showed up anyway, they generally count this as the 186th).
“It’s a very religious experience,” Kincaid said. “It’s a family reunion and a homecoming with all your friends at the same time. I wouldn’t miss a camp meeting for anything.”
Couples have met at Salem. They’ve raised families and each summer set aside one week to come to Salem. People have become ministers after visiting Salem.
They come back year after year for the preaching, praying, singing and fellowship. Services, which attract more than 1,300 a day, are open to all.
A teary-eyed Marvin Franklin, a Methodist bishop from Mississippi, was at the campground when the Japanese surrendered, said Sam Ramsey, chairman of the Salem board of trustees. When he was governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter once led the morning prayer, Ramsey added. And, according to Ramsey, it was at one camp meeting that Carter privately asked Ramsey to pray for him because he had “just about decided” to run for president.
Over the next few days, Kincaid’s clan, some coming from as far away as California, will stay in the family cabin — or tent. Like other tenters — as they’re called — several generations of a family may stay in the semicircle of cabins, which bear the family name. Some of the “tents” date back to the 1800s.
“It’s one of the oldest, distinctly American family religious traditions,” said Bradd Shore, a professor of cultural anthropology at Emory University and the maker of a documentary about the Salem Camp Meeting. “I don’t know of any other tradition in the United States that has such a long history of binding families. There are plenty of other religious revival traditions, but they don’t have the aspect of residency for a week or so in a tent or cabin.”
The tradition goes back to the late 1700s when people would gather for a religious revival after the harvest. They would come with enough food to last a week, sometimes bringing their horses, mules, cows and chickens and sleeping in tents or under their wagons.
Although started by the Methodist church, Salem is not officially connected to the Methodist church, but run independently by a board of trustees, according to Ramsey and the camp meeting’s website.
The website said Salem hosts a Methodist preacher each year, and a Baptist or Presbyterian on alternating years.
The Salem Camp Ground feels almost like a step back in time. The sound of a trumpet is heard first thing in the morning and as people go to bed at night. Every service begins with the hymn “Sweet, Sweet Spirit.” Wood shavings cover the floor of the tabernacle. Its sturdy beams still bear the ax marks.
“There’s just a spirit to the camp meeting,” said Becky Ramsey, 68, who has been attending Salem for 43 years. She met her husband, Sam, there and plays the piano during the services along with her twin, Alice Walker.
“We have a saying that when you get sawdust in your shoes, you keep coming back. … You just sense God’s presence here.”
“This place never dies out,” said Sam Ramsey, 75, a sixth-generation tenter and former Covington mayor. “It’s ingrained in you.”
The rustic, deep green Cunningham Ramsey tent was built in 1840 by George Cunningham, an ancestor and one of the first settlers of Newton County. Even today, it still doesn’t have air conditioning, although some tents do.
Ed Stetzer, author, pastor and executive director of LifeWay Research, said it’s unusual that such camp meetings are still going strong more than a century after their founding.
“At one time, almost every denomination in the revivalist tradition had camp meetings where thousands of people would attend,” he said. “Many of the services were held in places with sawdust floors. When people said you walked the sawdust trail, it means you left your chair and walked forward to make a procession of faith.” Later, though, people began to drift away from long camp meetings. “The camp meeting movement mostly came and went when things like electricity, radio and television came along. Rather than camp meetings, I can get weeks’ works of teachings on my iPod. Technology changed everything.”
Salem, though, is not the only camp meeting still running strong in Georgia.
This is the 176th year for the camp meeting at the Holbrook Campground, which runs July 11-20 in Alpharetta. The Baptist minister will be the Rev. John Lay from North Lanier Baptist in Cumming, and the Methodist preacher is the Rev. Jim McRae from Canton First United Methodist Church in Canton. The campground has more than 70 tents — or cottages — and as many as 500 people attend nightly services.
And just a few weeks ago, the Smyrna Presbyterian Campmeeting, which is older than Salem by a year or two, held its 187th camp meeting in Conyers on the campus of Smyrna Presbyterian Church.
A few minutes before the evening services begin, tenters began to leave their cabins and meander toward the tabernacle in the center of the campground.
A.C. Young Jr., 87, of Conyers, was there for his 86th camp meeting. The retired building contractor missed only one camp meeting — in 1945 — when he was in the U.S. Air Force and couldn’t get home.
“It’s been a family thing,” he said. “I hope I’m getting some Christian education. If I’m physically able, I’ll be there.”
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