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Camp meetings set frontier ablaze with fervor

By Bill Kemp
Archivist/Librarian
McLean County Museum of History

Religious revivals helped shape the spiritual and social landscape of the Illinois frontier. These rollicking, rambunctious outdoor meetings were led by rough-hewn preachers dispensing fire and brimstone before hundreds — and at times thousands — of willing, wayward pioneers desperate for salvation.

According to early settler John Berry Orendorff, the first camp meeting in McLean County was held in 1829 in Blooming Grove, at a site just southeast of present-day Bloomington.

During the fiery sermonizing, repentant sinners — referred to as “mourners”— would gather in front of the preacher’s raised platform. Once there, they were often overcome with revelatory ecstasy, exhibiting otherworldly behavior such as maniacal laughter and uncontrolled, sometimes violent spasms known as “the jerks.” Some mourners would even start barking like dogs.

“I have witnessed as many as 20 to 25 all shouting at once,” Orendorff recalled of these mourners. “Occasionally this exercise was kept up until three or four o’clock next morning. They would keep singing and praying until they became exhausted. A few, while shouting, would fall to the earth as though they were struck by death. In some cases they remained in that condition for hours. They seemed to be in a trance.”

Such a scene appears in Francis Grierson’s “The Valley of Shadows,” a fictional — though artistically faithful — account of his boyhood years in Central Illinois. “The night of nights had come!” he wrote in his hauntingly beautiful description of a camp meeting. “It seemed as if hundreds were in the throes of death and would never rise.”

These revivals were held in the latter half of August and into September, and usually lasted two weeks or more. Ideally, the campgrounds were located in well-shaded groves, close to a good spring.

From 1829 to 1850, Orendorff attended eight camp meetings in McLean County, including those in Randolph’s Grove, north of present-day Heyworth, and Cheney’s Grove in the Saybrook area. Another campground was in Buckles’ Grove, 1.5 miles southeast of LeRoy along Salt Creek.

Sylvester Peasley, who was 11 years old when his family arrived in McLean County in 1834, remembered the Methodists, Cumberland Presbyterians, Baptists and “Christians” (also known as Campbellites) holding revivals in this part of the state.

Camp meetings were born of the hardships and isolation of frontier life. As such, they allowed preachers, who were few and far between, to reach congregants numbering in the thousands.

Settlers, like preachers, were scattered hither and yon, especially before the coming of the railroad. As a result, reaching a revival often demanded considerable travel time via wagon, carriage or horseback. Some even walked. Once at the campground, families slept under the stars, in canvas tents or in wagons.

Perhaps the most celebrated revivalist was Peter Cartwright, a Methodist circuit rider from Kentucky who came to Illinois in 1824, settling northwest of Springfield.

Amasa C. Washburn, a New Englander who arrived in Blooming Grove during the summer of 1831, remembered Cartwright preaching at a Methodist camp meeting in Randolph’s Grove.

Cartwright was proud of his self-made life as a “saddleback” preacher, and at this particular meeting he assailed “Eastern men” who believed themselves superior to “Western intellect and Western character.” Washburn remembered Cartwright declaring: “(Easterners) represent this country as being a vast waste, and people as being very ignorant, but if I was going to shoot a fool I would not take aim at a Western man, but would go down to the seashore and cock my fuse at the imps who live on oysters!”

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Take a look

The caption can read something long these lines: Central Illinois camp meetings resembled this 1801 lithograph by P.S. Duval titled �Sacramental Scene in a Western Forest. (Courtesy of the Library of Congres)

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