Shady Grove Campground St. George SC: History & Visiting

Shady Grove Methodist Campground sits off US Highway 178 north of St. George, South Carolina, hard against the Orangeburg County line. It was founded in 1870 by people who had been enslaved five years earlier, and it still holds a week-long camp meeting every October, the third week of the month, run by their descendants. It is the largest of Dorchester County’s four Methodist campgrounds and one of two in the county founded by freedpeople, the other being St. Paul Camp Ground near Harleyville.

How did Shady Grove Campground begin?

The founding story is oral history, carried by the congregation and repeated by the state’s own historians, and it goes like this. Soon after the war, a group of newly freed people led by a man named Caesar Wolfe took shelter under a grove of trees during a storm. A rice planter named S. M. Knight asked them to help bring in his harvest. In return he gave them the ground where they had sheltered, to use for worship. They called it Shady Grove and met at first under the trees, then under a brush arbor, and then in the rough wooden cabins that every Lowcountry campground calls tents.

Camp meetings were not new in 1870. White Methodists had been holding them in this county since at least 1794 at Cypress, near Ridgeville, and since 1810 at Indian Field, a few miles east of St. George. Enslaved people had attended those meetings, in the places assigned to them. After Emancipation, Black Methodists built their own grounds and kept their own calendar, gathering at harvest time when the fields were done. Shady Grove is what that looked like in upper Dorchester County.

The campground gave rise to a church. Shady Grove United Methodist Church, nearby on the same road, was founded by campground members some time after 1870 on land donated by two local Black residents, Jim Smith and Susie Jones. The church holds weekly services. Headstones in its graveyard date to the early twentieth century, which is to say the children and grandchildren of the founders are buried there within sight of the ground their parents were given.

What does the campground look like?

Like the others in the county, and unlike almost anything else. The tents stand in a ring around a central open-sided tabernacle where the preaching happens, with a second row behind the circle for the overflow. Each tent is a family’s property and passes down through the family. Inside there is a kitchen, a sleeping loft, and a floor that used to be dirt covered with hay and is now concrete. Outhouses stand around the outside of the ring. A large brick Family Life Center, built in 2004 at the entrance on 178, serves as a community development center for rural Dorchester and Orangeburg counties and as a fallback for services when the weather turns.

Not much of what you see is original, and that is the point. Fire took the first tents in 1958. They were rebuilt. Fire came again in 1969 and in 1976. Much of the campground was rebuilt once more in 1991. Each time the families came back and put up new boards on the same lots.

When is camp meeting at Shady Grove?

The third week of October. The SC Picture Project gives that date, and the state’s historic-churches record says the meeting closes on the fourth Sunday of the month. People who attend have described it as running from the Monday after the third Sunday through the following Sunday, opening with a joint prayer circle on the first night. The record also notes that the meeting is opened by a call on a ceremonial horn, a trumpet. If you are reading this in October, the exact dates for this year are something to confirm with the church, because nobody online keeps them current.

Shady Grove, St. Paul, Cypress and Indian Field all meet in October, within a few weeks of one another, which makes upper Dorchester County about as busy a camp-meeting ground as South Carolina has left, for one month a year.

Can you visit Shady Grove Campground?

The grounds are at Ballfield Road off US 178, St. George, SC 29477, about ten miles north of the town of St. George and roughly 65 miles from Charleston, an hour and a quarter by I-26 and US 178. The state record describes the turn as St. Mark Bowen Road, between Shady Grove UMC and the Orangeburg County line. Bowman is under three miles away.

This is private property owned by a church, and the tents are people’s homes for one week a year. Outside camp meeting the ring is quiet and there is nothing open. During camp meeting the public has long been welcome at services, and visitors over the years have described being shown through a family’s tent and fed. Come as a guest, not a tourist. Park where you are told. Do not photograph people without asking. Do not walk into a tent uninvited. Security is present and expects the ground to be treated as what it is.

Stan Woodward’s 2007 documentary, Shady Grove Camp Ground, runs seventy-one minutes and is free to watch at Folkstreams. It was funded in part by the Dorchester County Historical Society and is the best preparation for a first visit.

Why Shady Grove belongs on the county map

The campground sits on the county line in fact, not figure. The Orangeburg line runs just past the last tents. People who were given a grove to pray in because they had brought in another man’s rice built a place that has outlasted the plantation, the planter, three fires and a century and a half, and they still fill it every October. Charleston has the carriage tours. This is where the thing they are selling actually came from.

The dispatches touch this country from the other side of town: the barbershop in /almost-here/, the clock in /whatever-hour-it-strikes/, the Edisto in /the-edisto-keeps-its-own/. The county history page sets the campgrounds in order, and the county map puts all four in their places. On the fourth Sunday in October the horn sounds once at Shady Grove and the week is over. The grove, for its part, has never been recorded as going anywhere.

Shady Grove Methodist Campground, St. George: Founded by Freedpeople in 1870