A meeting for preaching, exhorting, &c., held in the forest. These meetings were originated by the Presbyterians, but abandoned by them, and taken up vigorously by the Methodists and Baptists.
1801. The first Presbyterian camp-meeting held in North Carolina, in October of this year, is described in W. H. Foote’s ‘Sketches of N. C.,’ chap. xxvii. (N.Y., 1846).
1809. Methodism is even more obstreperous there than it is with us. Our fanatics, though their name is legion, have not yet ventured to hold camp-meetings.—Quarterly Rev., ii. 336 (Nov.). (N.E.D.)
1814. See Quarterly Rev., x. 510–1 (Jan.).
1819. A camp-meeting [was] held near Franklin in the Missouri Territory, in May or June last…. A few days after, a camp-meeting was held about four miles from my place of residence.—Letter from Edwardsville, Ill., Sept. 13: Mass. Spy, Nov. 3.
1829. Presbyterian camp meetings have been held in Ohio, and at Versailles, Ky.—Id., July 22.
1829. Mrs. Mason had been accustomed to think of a camp-meeting with unpleasant associations of every sort.—T. Flint, ‘George Mason,’ p. 103 (Boston).
1835. In the vicinity of this settlement [fifty miles from Natchez] the Presbyterians annually hold a camp meeting. A Presbyterian camp meeting is at least a novelty at the north.—Ingraham, ‘The South-West,’ ii. 66.
1835. Intrigue, dissipation, electioneering, chaffering, and cheating, hold their festival at the modern Camp-meeting.—C. J. Latrobe, ‘The Rambler in North America,’ i. 82 (N.Y.).
1843. A graphic description of one of these meetings occurs in ‘The New Purchase,’ B. R. Hall (‘Robert Carlton’), chap. xlviii. (ii. 130).
