Indian Field Camp Meeting: Dates, Tents, and How to Visit

Indian Field Camp Meeting is held every year during the first week of October and ends with a Sunday morning service on the first Sunday of the month. In 2026 that closing Sunday is October 4, so the week runs roughly September 27 through October 4. The campground is about three to five miles north of St. George, South Carolina, just off US 15, at the address listed on local records as 2030 Highway 15. Sources differ on the distance from town. The services are open to anyone, there is no admission, and the whole thing empties out within hours of the final hymn.

Understand what you are walking into. This is a week of Methodist worship held by families who have been doing it on this ground since 1848. It is not a festival and there is nothing for sale except, by one account, orange sherbet from a stand once a year.

When is Indian Field Camp Meeting?

First week of October, ending the first Sunday. South Carolina Living, the electric cooperative magazine, reported in a long feature that the week-long meeting ends on the first Sunday in October and that the Sunday morning service is the high point. The News and Press and the Folkstreams film archive both put it in the first week of October. The timing was set two centuries ago to fall after the harvest, when farm families could leave the fields.

Services run three times a day during the week: morning, midday, and evening after supper. A horn said to be about 200 years old is blown from each corner of the tabernacle to call people in. Sermons are broadcast on loudspeakers, and a good number of people listen from folding chairs in front of their tents rather than from the pews.

What are the 99 tents?

They are not tents. They are two-story wooden cabins with metal roofs, 99 of them owned by families plus one larger preacher’s tent, arranged in a ring about 690 feet across around an open-air tabernacle. The ring is often called a circle. Wikipedia says it is closer to an octagon. South Carolina Living says twelve-sided, for the twelve tribes of Israel. Pick your geometry. The layout, according to a history by J. Gavin Appleby, follows Leviticus, where the dwellings are tents and the meeting house is the tabernacle.

Each tent has two small rooms downstairs, sleeping space upstairs, a dirt floor covered with fresh straw or hay every year, and a cook shed out back with a brick wood-fired stove. Behind that, across the paved ring road, is the tent’s privy. There is electricity and running water during camp meeting but no indoor plumbing, and the trustees require that the buildings keep a rustic, frontier appearance. Tents pass down through wills. They are almost never sold.

The tabernacle is a wooden pavilion with a gabled roof and exposed rafters, a raised preacher’s stand at the north end, and cypress pews that seat something over a thousand.

Can visitors attend?

Yes. South Carolina Living reports that churches around St. George often cancel their own Sunday services during camp meeting so their members can drive out and worship at Indian Field. The Sunday morning service is the one most outsiders attend. If you want to see the place full, that is the hour.

Some etiquette, since nobody will hand you a brochure:

It is a worship service. Dress the way you would for a small-town Methodist church. Fewer people wear Sunday best than they used to, but shorts and a tank top will mark you.
Do not walk into a tent uninvited. They are private homes for the week. If someone invites you to supper, that is a real invitation and a real honor, and you should say yes.
Photograph the tabernacle and the ring from the outside. Ask before you point a camera at people, their porches, or their kitchens.
Services are not performances. Sit, stand, and sing with everyone else.
The ground inside the ring is a courtyard where people visit between services. Walking it is fine. Setting up a picnic is not.

Where do you park?

None of the sources I read publishes parking instructions, and the campground has no website. The paved ring road circling the tents serves the tent families. Expect to park on grass along the approach from US 15 and walk in, follow whoever is directing cars, and do not block the ring road. On the closing Sunday, come early.

Directions

From St. George, drive north on US 15 (Parler Avenue becomes US 15 as it leaves town). The campground is a few miles out on the left, reached by a short county road. The brick Indian Field United Methodist Church, which the campground is tied to, stands about two miles farther up US 15 near US 178. From I-26, take exit 172 onto US 15 South toward St. George. The campground is on the way into town. From I-95, take exit 77, follow US 78 East about two miles into St. George, then turn north on US 15.

A short history

The Indian Field Methodist Church dates to 1787. Bishop Francis Asbury wrote in his journal that he preached at Indian Fields on December 21, 1801, and again on January 13, 1803. Camp meetings were being held on a nearby farm by about 1810. The meeting moved to the present ten-acre tract in 1838, and the tents and tabernacle that stand now were built in 1848, with a restoration in 1970. The 1848 land deal reportedly required a meeting at least every two years. There has not been a gap since, though services were cut short during the Civil War to keep the title from reverting. An arsonist burned several tents on February 25, 1995 and was never caught. The families rebuilt. The campground was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 30, 1973.

It is the largest of a handful of old camp meetings still held in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Cypress, Cattle Creek, and Shady Grove are the others people name.

I have stood in that field on a Sunday morning when the horn went. The dispatches have more to say about what happens on the ground around St. George the other 51 weeks of the year. Start with the county history or the county map. The ring is on it.