By Jerry Flook, Garland Historian
Published in the Garland-Rowlett Messenger, November 2012
Religious camp meetings in America began to gain popularity around 1800 and were largely a rural and frontier phenomenon. They were a response to a need for shared religious experience where the population was too sparse to support individual churches with their own buildings and regular ministers. In their earliest days the camp meetings met outdoors in a shady grove or under an arbor near a water source and those who attended arrived from far and wide in wagons and on horseback, bringing their own tents and supplies to camp out for several days. The same camp site was usually used year after year but the meeting date was communicated through the country simply by word of mouth. The congregation spent all day in prayer, the prayer groups often segregated by gender, singing and listening to sermons. Very rarely were the preachers ordained ministers but were laymen who felt the call to preach. These preachers might be of a variety of denominations, but usually, however, at least in this area, one or another denomination predominated at a particular meeting, the most common being either Methodist or Baptist.
A reminiscence written by A.H. Harris, of Ovilla, appeared in the Garland News, 14 Sep 1906:
This reminiscence would not be complete without telling of the great camp meetings we had in those days. The first one I attended was at the old White Rock camp ground, twelve miles beyond Dallas. I arrived in the afternoon, tied my horse, and went to the arbor. Being my first attendance at a camp meeting in Texas, I was at loss just how to proceed. In a few minutes Mr. Winn came to me and asked me to take my baggage to his tent and stake my horse out on the prairie and to make his tent my home while there.
I followed his instructions and when I got back to the camp found a crowd of young people sitting in the hallway between camps singing. I was always like a jaybird-couldn’t keep my mouth shut-so I joined in singing and was soon in the good graces of all the camp meeting folks. I needed no further introduction. When night came on I found they had a large crib of corn, donated by the people of the neighborhood for persons from a distance and a man was there to issue it out to them free of charge. Camp meetings were common all over the country and people attended them from quite a distance. I attended meetings at Rowlett Creek campground. That was a long way over beyond Garland.
The Rowlett Creek campground mentioned above was also known as the Cornstalk Meeting Ground and was located on the east side of Rowlett Creek near where Miller Road now crosses. It was attended primarily by Baptists. My grandfather got religion there, presumably sometime in the 1870s, joining the Baptist church. In later years, however, he converted to the Christian denomination.
Nelson (Uncle Nelse) Keen, a lay Methodist preacher, Confederate veteran, and resident of the Duck Creek area, was in demand to preach at camp meeting revivals for several decades after the Civil War, a period when camp meetings were in their heyday. The Kaufman Sun of 3 February 1899 reported a memorable incident of Keen’s preaching in the Pleasant Springs (Arkansaw) neighborhood north of Forney:
A meeting was under full headway under a big brush arbor in East Fork bottom, and all had met at “early candle lighting.” But after the wind whirled the leaves around and blew out the lights a couple of times, Nelse was appealed to as the Moses to lead them out of the wilderness. Bro. Nelse got down on his knees and asked God to please have the wind stopped. He arose and lit the candles and the meeting went on till 11 o’clock and not another light flickered.
The people of “Arkansaw” regarded him as possessing the same power as the Man who said to the angry waves of the deep Galilee, “Peace, be still.” Since fine churches have been built Bro. Nelse has lost out, as he is out of his element.
The best known campground of this area was the White Rock Campground, which was sponsored by the Methodists and was located on land which later became part of the Northwood Country Club in Dallas. It is believed to have begun sometime in the early 1850s and continued annually except for about three years during the Civil War until sometime in the 1920s.
In a history of the WHite Rock Camp Meeting printed in 1910 in the IHeraldI it was estimated that some 20,000 conversions had taken place there since its inception.
Eventually as some of the camps became established as annual venues, regular attendees erected shelters or even small cabins at the site. Before its demise the White Rock Campground had became quite commercialized, with a variety of food vendors and even a restaurant operating on the premises. The popularity of camp meetings diminished gradually as individual denominations constructed their own house of worship.