Indian Field Campground: 99 Tents and a Camp Meeting Since 1848

Indian Field Methodist Campground, about four miles north of St. George off U.S. 15, has held a camp meeting every fall since 1848, when 99 wooden cabins called tents were built around an open-air tabernacle on a ten-acre tract. The meeting runs the first week of October. The campground was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 30, 1973, and it is the largest Methodist campground in South Carolina.

The tents are described everywhere as a circle. Walk it and you will find they are an octagon. The record is forgiving on this point.

When was Indian Field founded?

The church came first. Indian Field Methodist Church dates from 1787, in the first wave of Methodist societies in what was then Colleton District. Francis Asbury, the circuit-riding bishop who organized American Methodism, wrote in his journal that he preached at “Indian Fields” on December 21, 1801 and again on January 13, 1803. The journal does not say whether he meant the church or a camp meeting on the farm nearby, and the state’s National Register record says instead that he preached at the original camp ground in 1810, by which year that ground, about two miles from the present one, was certainly in use. Sources differ on the first camp meeting; the church’s date is firm.

The camp moved to its present site in 1838, and the church moved about half a mile from its first location near Rosinville in the same period. In 1848 the trustees obtained a ten-acre tract just off what is now U.S. 15, with a condition on the deed that a meeting be held there at least every two years or the land would go back to the grantor’s family. That condition is why abbreviated meetings were held even during the Civil War, when the men were gone. Confederate soldiers camped on the ground at one point, and some who died in a smallpox outbreak are said to be buried there in unmarked graves.

What are the tents?

They are not tents. They are two-story cabins of rough pine weatherboard, 99 of them, set two or three feet apart in a ring roughly 690 feet across. The name survives from the first years, when families really did pitch canvas and preach under a brush arbor. J. Gavin Appleby’s history of the campground says the layout was taken from Leviticus, the tribes camped around the tabernacle.

Each tent has a shed-roofed front porch on three rough-hewn posts, two rooms about eight by ten feet on the ground floor joined by an open passage front to back, and one or more sleeping rooms upstairs. The ground floor has no doors, no furniture to speak of, and no flooring; it is dirt, covered each year with fresh straw. A rear shed holds a brick wood-burning stove, and sinks were added in recent decades. Each tent has its own tin-roofed outhouse, four feet square, across the paved road that circles the ground. Ninety-nine of those too. Water and electricity reached the tents in the twentieth century; the campground was restored in 1970 and historians describe it as essentially as it was built. The preacher’s tent is the only one that differs much. It has glass windows and wooden doors.

Tents pass down through families and are almost never sold. When one does change hands the reported price is in the tens of thousands. Each owner pays an annual assessment, which goes toward bringing in the preachers, who usually come from out of state.

The tabernacle

The tabernacle in the middle is an open wooden pavilion about 68 by 95 feet under a gabled roof, with a raised preacher’s stand at the north end and three sections of pews. It seats more than a thousand. Opening-night crowds in recent years have run close to 500 and grow through the weekend. In earlier generations a horn was blown to summon people to service; in earlier generations still, preachers spoke from stumps, five or six at once.

When is the Indian Field camp meeting?

The first week of October, every year. The timing was set by the harvest: crops in, hogs not yet killed, cane not yet cut. Services are held nightly with morning prayer and Bible study each day, and the closing service is Monday morning. Many tenters leave Sunday afternoon for work. Cypress Campground in Ridgeville, one of four historic campgrounds in Dorchester County, meets three weeks later. Families bring their own cooks, some of whom have worked the same tent for forty years, and the ground smells of hickory smoke and cornbread for a week.

The 1995 fire

On February 25, 1995, someone set fire to the campground and several structures burned. The arsonist was never caught. The tents were rebuilt on the same footprint, which is the only way anything has ever been rebuilt at Indian Field. Other Dorchester campgrounds have had the same trouble; Cypress lost tents to fire in 2008, and Cattle Creek over the Orangeburg line lost fifteen in a suspicious night fire more recently.

Visiting Indian Field

Location: Indian Field Circle, off S.C. S-18-73 (Highway 73) from U.S. 15, about four miles north of St. George (GPS 33.2228, -80.5461). Indian Field United Methodist Church is about two miles farther north on U.S. 15.
When: The grounds can be seen from the circling road year round. The camp meeting, the first week of October, is a working religious gathering; visitors are welcome at services but the tents are private.
Cost: None.
From Charleston: About 60 miles northwest, roughly an hour and ten minutes by I-26 and U.S. 15.

The county map on this site marks the campground, and the /history/ page sets it in the long line of Dorchester’s Methodist meetings. The dispatches are fiction and keep out of the tabernacle. There are 99 tents at Indian Field. There have always been 99, and no one has ever needed the hundredth.