Cane Ridge, KY

For a week, during a hot and humid August in 1801, Cane Ridge, Ky., was the site of one of the most important events in American religious history. Kentucky was not even ten years old in 1801. It was granted statehood in 1792. The population of Bourbon County, where Cane Ridge is located, was twelve thousand people in 1800. Now, both of those statistics are important because of what happened in that week in August 1801. More than ten thousand people—almost the entire population of the county—attended a weeklong communion service, known as a camp meeting, in the hills of Kentucky. It is also worth noting that this was the frontier in American culture in the 1800s. Kentucky had just been granted statehood, and to the West were wide-open territories and mountains. So, in this frontier territory, this was a tremendous gathering of people. One witness who was there for this week of camp meetings put it this way: "For more than half a mile I could see people on their knees, before God."

What was happening in Cane Ridge, Ky.? It was led a man named Barton Stone, who would lend his name to a movement called the Stone-Campbell Movement, which sought to restore the church according to its New Testament foundations. It included a number of ministers from a number of churches. There were at least eighteen Presbyterian ministers there with many of their congregations. There were at least four Methodist pastors there and several Baptists—we are not sure how many—and they gathered at Cane Ridge for a weeklong camp meeting.

Now, the camp meeting was something that was a Scottish import. The church in Scotland had developed what was called the Holy Fair—they would do communion once a year. They would have a whole week of services and it would culminate in the Lord's Supper on a Sunday. Those Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who made their way into some of the Southern colonies and then into places such as Kentucky, brought that Holy Fair with them.

This is what happened at Cane Ridge. There was a makeshift pulpit set up on a platform, and folks gathered all across the hillsides. You can probably picture the scene in your mind—campfires here and there, wagons all around. All of the accounts tell us that the preaching went on almost nonstop. And as the preaching went on, more and more people heard about what was happening in Cane Ridge, and they got on their wagons and they showed up. One testimony tells us that the road was full of wagons and they were all going in one direction. They were all headed to Cane Ridge for these revival meetings.

Well, the preaching lasted for several days and was essentially nonstop—one minister would finish and another would hop right up there in the pulpit and keep on preaching—and all this culminated in the celebration of the Lord's Supper on Sunday. But the folks didn't want to leave. Monday morning rolled around and they were still there, and so they got up and started preaching again. This lasted for another two or three days until finally, folks started getting back in their wagons and heading back to their homes.

Cane Ridge was not only an important event for the American frontier; it was actually an important event for American religion in general. This was the first wave of what historians came to call the Second Great Awakening. Shortly after Cane Ridge, the evangelist Charles Finney would come onto the scene and hold revivals, and not out on the frontier—these revivals were held right in New York City and up and down the East Coast. And that period of time, starting with Cane Ridge in 1801 and running through the 1820s, is known as the Second Great Awakening.

This awakening was different from the First Great Awakening, which occurred back in the 1740s with figures such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. The Second Great Awakening placed greater emphasis on religious experience, it downplayed denominational differences, and it forever shaped American religious history. And it all started in Cane Ridge, in Bourbon County, Ky.