St. George, South Carolina Sunday, October 25, 2026 Complimentary

County Line Confidential

Dispatches from Dorchester County, South Carolina. Filed weekly. Not all of it true. None of it made up.

St. Paul Camp Ground, Harleyville: The Third Week of October

St. Paul Camp Ground, at 940 St. Paul Road near Harleyville in Dorchester County, was organized about 1880 by African American members of St. Paul A.M.E. Church and has held a camp meeting there every October since. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 30, 1998 as a historic district of 43 contributing buildings on nine acres. The grounds are used one week a year, the week ending the third Sunday in October.

Who founded St. Paul Camp Ground?

Freedpeople. The two older campgrounds in the county, Cypress (1794) and Indian Field (1810), grew out of white Methodist churches in the era of Francis Asbury. St. Paul came a generation after Emancipation, when Black Methodists across the South were leaving the galleries and back benches of white churches to build their own. St. Paul A.M.E. Church near Harleyville was one of the African Methodist Episcopal congregations that took root in the upper county in those years.

Around 1880 the church’s members laid out a camp ground on the model they already knew: a tabernacle in the middle, cabins in a ring around it. Trustees of the church bought 113 acres for the purpose. Some of that land has since been sold, but the church still holds most of the original tract. The National Register nomination, prepared by Sarah Fick in 1997, lists its areas of significance as religion, social history, architecture and Black history, across three periods running from 1875 to 1949.

The SC Picture Project refers to the sponsoring church as St. Paul A.M.E. Zion; the National Register listing and the Roots and Recall entry call it St. Paul A.M.E. The two denominations are separate bodies, and sources differ on this point. We use the National Register’s name.

St. Paul is one of two freedmen-founded camp grounds in Dorchester County; the other is Shady Grove in St. George. Together with Cypress and Indian Field, that puts four working camp meeting grounds in a single rural county, which is more than most states can claim.

What does the camp ground look like?

The tabernacle is a one-story building sided in rough-sawn weatherboard with a gable-on-hip roof of V-crimp metal. It has no windows. There are two doorless openings evenly spaced on each side, so that air and sound move freely in and out. That is the whole design. Preaching happens inside, under the roof, and the sound carries to the tents.

Around it are 54 numbered tent sites. Twelve were vacant at the time of listing. The tents are frame cabins, most of them rebuilt over the years in the style of the ones they replaced: a main room with hay on the floor, a sleeping loft above, a cooking space. A few have added screened porches. Two one-story frame stores stand inside the ring, at sites 2 and 47, and are counted as part of the historic district. A gable-roofed storehouse, shaped like a tent, holds supplies.

The privies sit behind the tents, outside the paved ring road. Camp rules require it. They are small frame structures with metal shed roofs sloping to the rear and a door facing the tents, and they are replaced or moved often enough that the Register treats them as a type rather than as individual buildings.

When is camp meeting at St. Paul?

The week ending the third Sunday in October. Families move into their tents for the week, cook, visit and attend services in the tabernacle. Tents pass down through families, as they do at Cypress and Indian Field. The custom, by the SC Picture Project’s account, is to spend the day outdoors in the company of the camp and use the tent mainly for meals and sleep.

October is camp meeting season across the upper county. Indian Field, Cypress and Shady Grove all hold their weeks in the same stretch, and for a few weeks the back roads between Harleyville, St. George and Ridgeville carry more traffic at night than they do the rest of the year.

Can you visit St. Paul Camp Ground?

Address: 940 St. Paul Road, Harleyville, SC 29448. GPS 33.20472, -80.48250. About 50 miles northwest of Charleston, roughly an hour by I-26. Indian Field Campground is 6.2 miles away; St. George and its town clock about 9 miles.

  • The camp ground is private property of St. Paul A.M.E. Church. There are no posted public hours, no admission and no staff on site outside camp week.
  • Outside of October the tents are closed and the grounds are quiet. You can see the ring of cabins and the tabernacle from St. Paul Road. Do not enter tents or stores. An open gate is not an invitation.
  • During camp meeting, services in the tabernacle are worship, and visitors who come respectfully are generally received as such. Contact the church before you come. Dress plainly. The food is the families’.
  • If you find a churchyard or family graves on the church’s land nearby, treat them as what they are: the resting places of people whose descendants will be in the tents in October.
  • Wet weather makes the ring road and the ground around it soft. The land here drains toward Four Holes Swamp.

Where this fits in the county

The county’s religious history is usually told through the Anglican tower at Old Dorchester and the Congregationalist ruin on Dorchester Road. The longer-lasting institutions turned out to be the ones with dirt floors. St. Paul is the proof that the camp meeting form did not belong to one race or one century: fifteen years after the war, people who had been barred from owning themselves bought 113 acres and built a ring of cabins around a roofed room with no walls to speak of. The county history page covers the postwar churches; the county map marks all four camp grounds; and the dispatches, especially /the-grits-judge/, run through the same October.

The tabernacle has no windows because nothing happening inside is hidden. That has been the arrangement here since 1880, and no one has yet found a reason to change it.

Sources