Fairy Habitations O

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “FAIRY HABITATIONS OF THE MIMIC CITY”:

SACRED VICTORIAN COTTAGES AT CHESTER HEIGHTS CAMP MEETING

Melissa D. Buchanan

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts with a major in Early American Culture.

Spring 2005

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “FAIRY HABITATIONS OF THE MIMIC CITY”:

SACRED VICTORIAN COTTAGES AT CHESTER HEIGHTS CAMP MEETING

Melissa D. Buchanan

Approved: ( Gretfjiien T. Buggeln, Ph.D. Professor in charge of thesis on behalf of the Advisory Committee

Approved: ______J.(Ritchie Garrison, Ph.D. Director of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture

Approved: Conrado M. Gempesaw II, Ph.D. Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Approved: A. Conrado M. Gempesaw II, Ph.D. Vice-Provost for Academic and International Programs

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1900

iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis is indebted to my advisor Gretchen Buggeln for thoughtful discussion

and careful attention to manuscript detail, to Camille Fife for opening my eyes to the

beauty of ruinous architecture, to Professors Ritchie Garrison and Brock Jobe for a two

years’ education that changed the way I view objects around me, and to the terrific

curators and library staff at the Winterthur Museum.

A special thanks to Pat Smith for allowing me into her home and cottage to

endlessly photograph. Thanks to Rev. Jimmy Montgomery and Shirley Allen of the

Chester Heights Camp Meeting Association and Mary Tylecki Dickson of the Anna

Hazzard Museum for so freely sharing your camp meeting knowledge and resources.

Without financial support from generous strangers, through scholarships that

allowed me an incredible undergraduate education at Yale University and the Lois F.

McNeil Fellowship that allowed me to pursue graduate study in the Winterthur Program

in Early American Culture, I could not have undertaken this thesis.

Finally, thanks to David for reading these pages countless times, to my parents for

providing a digital camera and loving support, and to my Winterthur classmates for

enriching the past two years with your insight, intelligence, and humor.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES...... vi

ABSTRACT...... ix

“FAIRY HABITATIONS OF THE MIMIC CITY”: SACRED VICTORIAN COTTAGES AT CHESTER HEIGHTS CAMP MEETING...... 1

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 63

FIGURES...... 70

APPENDIX: PHOTOGRAPHIC SURVEY OF CHESTER HEIGHTS CAMP MEETING...... 108

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF FIGURES

1 Speaker addressing the crowd at Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1940 ...... 70

2 Layout of Chester Heights Camp Meeting grounds, 2004...... 71

3 Tent and cottage at Chester Heights, c. 1890/1900 ...... 72

4 “United States Tent Depot” advertisement, The Rehoboth Beacon,1873 ...... 73

5 Philadelphia Baltimore Central Railroad at Chester Heights, c. 1905...... 74

6 Chester Heights Camp Meeting tabernacle, 2004 ...... 75

7 70, 69, and 68 W. Second Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004 ...... 76

8 70 W. Second Avenue, Chester Heights, c. 1908 ...... 77

9 70 W. Second Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 77

10 “Religious Camp Meeting,” J. Maze Burbank, 1839 Collection of The New Bedford Whaling Museum...... 78

11 Sketch of an American camp meeting, Jean Baptiste Gaspard Roux de Rochelle,Etas-Unis d ’Ameriques, 1837 Courtesy, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware...... 79

12 Frontispiece from B. W. Gorham’sCamp Meeting Manual, 1854 Courtesy, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware...... 80

13 Certificate for a share in “The Phila. Camp Meeting and Excursion Association,” 1898...... 81

14 Women with Japanesque parasols, Chester Heights, c. 1908...... 82

15 Children with Japanese “flag of the rising sun,” Chester Heights, c. 1900...... 83

16 Home Holiness Camp Meeting Association, Indiana, 1914...... 84

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17 Southeast comer of Auditorium Circle, Chester Heights, 2004...... 85

18 Tent erected in Auditorium Circle, Chester Heights, c. 1940...... 86

19 Tent erected in Auditorium Circle, Chester Heights, c. 1908...... 87

20 Proposed plan for Rehoboth Camp Meeting, The Rehoboth Beacon, 1873 ...... 88

21 19 Central Avenue, Chester Heights, 2005...... 89

22 First floor sketch plan, 19 Central Avenue, Chester Heights...... 90

23 20 Central Avenue, Chester Heights, 2005...... 91

24 First floor sketch plan, 20 Central Avenue, Chester Heights...... 92

25 Roof stmctural system, 2 Summit Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 93

26 Central Avenue, Chester Heights, c. 1900...... 94

27 Central Avenue, Chester Heights, 2005...... 94

28 St. John’s Avenue, Chester Heights, c. 1900...... 95

29 St. John’s Avenue, Chester Heights, 2005...... 95

30 72. W. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 96

31 Fa9ade of 64 W. Asbury Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 97

32 Porches along W. Second Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 98

33 Architectural details on 46 E. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004.... 99

34 Architectural details on 46 E. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004.... 99

35 Fa9ade of 28 E. Asbury Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 100

36 Eaves bracket on 10 St. John’s Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 101

37 Eaves bracket on 7 Summit Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 101

38 Eaves bracket on 62 W. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 101

vii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39 Eaves bracket on 49 E. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 101

40 Plate No. 35 from William Comstock’s Detail, Cottage and Constructive Architecture, 1886. Courtesy, Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Collection 102

41 Porch detail of 36 S. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 103

42 Porch detail of 38 S. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 103

43 Porch detail o f 15 St. John’s Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 103

44 Porch detail of 39 S. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 103

45 Gable windows on 35 and 34 S. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 104

46 Screen door ornament on 2 Summit Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 105

47 Shutter latch on 2 Summit Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 105

48 Flag holder on 18 St. John’s Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 105

49 Shutter latch on 9 St. John’s Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 105

50 Bargeboard on 9 St. John’s Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 106

51 Bargeboard on 11 St. John’s Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 106

52 Bargeboard on 76 W. Auditorium Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 106

53 Rear shed-roof additions on 68, 69, and 70 W. Second Avenue, Chester Heights, 2004...... 107

viii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT

To walk among the grove of cottages at Chester Heights Camp Meeting is to

experience the surroundings of a Victorian religious resort. Its sixty-five cottages,

imposing tabernacle, and wooded landscape comprise the quintessential vernacular camp

meeting. Similar to today’s “megachurches” that offer basketball courts and nurseries,

Victorian camp meetings prospered by fulfilling the spiritual, recreational, and social

needs of their constituents. Using historic photographs and fragmentary written

documents to supplement what is primarily an interpretation of extant buildings, this

study finds Pennsylvania’s 1872 Chester Heights Camp Meeting to be representative in

layout and history but exceptional in survival. There, uniform layout, scale, and

ornament foster a feeling of community and playful escapism, while the creation of

individual family cottages asserts the primacy of the nuclear family unit.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. When a group of Philadelphia Methodists decided to build a camp meeting in

1872, they needed more than an escape from the city during the humid summer. In the

prosperous times after the Civil War, this group of middle class ministers and

businessmen had the resources to deliver their families to nearby popular resorts, but

those areas teemed with unseemliness. Could these church-going men properly bring

their wives and children to places with drinking? With dancing? By building their own

recreational grounds and holding a “camp meeting” for ten days there each summer, the

men of “The Philadelphia Camp Meeting and Excursion Association of the Methodist

Episcopal Church” would give their families the healthy benefits of fresh country air,

allow them to congregate with other Christian families, and add a wholesome dose of

spirituality to summer vacation.

The sacred resort these Methodists built during the late nineteenth century still

stands at Chester Heights Camp Meeting in Pennsylvania. Their camp meeting is

representative in its formation as a Victorian religious resort, but exceptional in survival.

Though activities varied and usage changed throughout the years, the camp is still

operated by the Chester Heights Camp Meeting Association, still hosts summer religious

events, and still has its collection of residential cottages. In its hilly landscape of two

story decorative Victorian cottages and a central tabernacle, Chester Heights offers a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. unique look into the material world of the distinctly American form of religious

celebration: the camp meeting.

Usually a lonely landscape of empty buildings today, Chester Heights retains

sixty-five phenomenal late nineteenth-century camp meeting buildings. A tree-lined lane

leads into the camp, opening up into the dense grove of cottages, the tabernacle, an

octagonal pavilion, and a dining hall. There are negligible modem encroachments upon

the land—just two concrete bathhouses that cottagers added in the 1980s. Though the

large tent is no longer erected in the central circle each summer and the tabernacle’s glass

windows are mostly broken, when one stands at the base of the hill looking up into the

circle of cottages one is instantly transported into the days when enthusiastic congregants

met at this spot to worship.

A wonderful 1940s photograph, taken from the perspective of a speaker at

Chester Heights Camp Meeting, records the central religious gathering. [Figure 1] In

that photograph, a woman in a Sunday suit and hat reads before a crowd of several

hundred. The land sweeps up before her, forming a natural theater. The tent rises high

above her head, blocking the sun’s rays. She is surrounded by the forest and the fanciful

camp meeting cottages. In this sylvan landscape made sacred by group praise, the non

ordained woman leads a hymn sing, reads from the Bible, or testifies to her personal

religious conviction. Her experience is at the core of the camp meeting experience.

Unlike the formal worship of a traditional church, camp meeting worship encouraged

personal spiritual expression. Campers socialized with one another, listened to one

another, and learned from one another at both the worship services and informal cottage

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. visits. Through her words at the podium, the woman shares her religious beliefs.

Through her cottage, she shares her domestic values.

At the Victorian-era camp meeting, the wooded landscape dotted with domestic

cottages became an integrated sacred space with recreational and spiritual offerings.

Through the construction, rental, and inhabitation of single-family cottages, acts of

domesticity were sanctified and celebrated. Camp meeting grounds like Chester Heights

once existed in large numbers across the Midwest and eastern seaboard, originating in the

early 1800s and flowering in post-Civil War Victorian years. Chester Heights’ survival

affords an opportunity to explore firsthand a rare extant landscape that preserves the

complexity of Victorian-American religious and secular environments. Spiritual and

recreational, public and private, and rural and urban worlds intersected freely at the camp

meeting ground. This examination strives to explore the Chester Heights Camp Meeting

ground as a vernacular sacred space, built by middle-class Philadelphians as a proper

recreational alternative, imbued with spiritual purpose.

To borrow an eloquent observation about American camp meetings from their

foremost historian, Ellen Weiss, at camp meetings there existed a “creative

tension.. .between materialism and spiritual fervor, human density and nature, community

and privacy, and intentional design and accident.”1 Chester Heights Camp Meeting

displays these unique contradictions in its building fabric, layout, and rich history of

worship and recreation. Camp meeting grounds are direct evidence of the Methodist

1 Ellen Weiss, City in the Woods: Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha’s Vineyard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 141.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Church’s value system, and are all the more enlightening for their evident contradictions.

Roger Robins argues that the Methodist camp meeting “was a self-portraying and self-

fulfilling organization of space and time, and so it constitutes a vital record of

Methodists’ evolving self-image. The analysis of that record will show how the material

culture of a camp meeting can illuminate not only the history of Methodism but also a

complicated transitional period of American cultural history.”2 Indeed, the complexities

of the Chester Heights environment between 1872 and 1940 evidence fascinating changes

in such varied arenas as Methodist theology, domestic patterns, building construction,

and America’s views of international cultures.

Many scholars look to these idiosyncratic camp meeting environments for insight

into the social and spiritual aspects of domestic and church life during the nineteenth

century. This thesis builds on previous work, relying on existing camp meeting,

Victorian era, and Methodist church research to situate my specific case study of Chester

Heights within a larger cultural context. Ellen Weiss’s benchmark camp meeting study,

City in the Woods: The Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha’s

Vineyard, details the evolution of Wesleyan Grove, a very early permanent-built camp

meeting ground founded in 1835. She argues that the distinct dwelling form found at

camp meetings across the United States, those narrow two-story cottages of an odd

2 Roger Robins, “Vernacular American Landscape: Methodists, Camp Meetings, and Social Respectability,” Religion and American Culture 4, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 166.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. proportion and scale which create “an hallucinatory sense of otherworldliness,” was

■y probably invented at Wesleyan Grove by island carpenters.

Classic texts on American camp meetings are Charles Johnson’sThe Frontier

Camp Meeting and Dickson Bruce’sAnd they all Sang Hallelujah. 4 Johnson and Bruce

were concerned primarily with early nineteenth-century camp meetings, but provided

interpretive framework for viewing the camp meeting in the context of American frontier

life and the spreading evangelistic influence of the eighteenth century’s “Great

Awakening.” Several thoughtful texts explore the camp meeting’s transition from

frontier camp into its residential Victorian manifestation, inspiring this research to look to

the interplay of spiritual and secular environments at camp meeting grounds.5

3 Weiss, City in the Wood, xi. Wesleyan Grove was a large and prosperous camp meeting, and was heavily-recorded by the Victorians. As it remains prosperous and intact (300 of its 500 cottages are extant,) camp meeting scholars use it often today. Weiss’s book on the site’s architecture and history serves as a resource that is cited time and again for comparison in other articles, dissertations, books, and theses on camp meetings, and it will likewise be gratefully used in this analysis of Chester Heights Camp Meeting.

4 Dickson Bruce,And they all Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion 1800-45 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1974). Charles Johnson, The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion’s Harvest Time (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955).

5 Steven D. Cooley, “Manna and the Manual: Sacramental and Instrumental Constructions of the Victorian Methodist Camp Meeting during the Mid-Nineteenth Century,”Religion and American Culture 8 (Summer 1996), 131-159. Charles H. Lippy, “The Camp Meeting in Transition: The Character and Legacy of the Late Nineteenth Century,”Methodist History 34 (October 1995), 3-17. Charles A. Parker, “The Camp Meeting on the Frontier and the Methodist Religious Resort in the East—Before 1900,” Methodist History 18 (April 1980), 179-192. Robins, “Vernacular American Landscape.” This thesis is also indebted to two excellent unpublished works by Anna Andrzej ewski and Laura Suszkowski; each incorporates a material culture approach into her discussion of the physical setting of late nineteenth-century camp meeting architecture. Suszkowski

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. With this thesis, I hope to contribute to Victorian-era scholarship both a factual

record of Chester Heights’ history as well as an interpretive analysis of the camp

meeting’s material environment. I will include a discussion of the religious and social

history of Victorian camp meetings and the development of Chester Heights, but I hope

to concentrate my efforts on the question, why do things look the way they do? Engaging

the extant cottages as primary material evidence will illustrate how their unique form and

decoration specifically relate to the ideals and activities of the people attending the camp

meeting during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through these cottages’

layout and orientation, we will see how campers sought to be part of a community, but

maintained the importance of the individual family unit.

The 1872 beginning of the Chester Heights Camp Meeting was unexceptional; its

foundation by urban Methodists in search of a wholesome resort is similar to many other

analyzes Ocean Grove, New Jersey’s 1870 camp meeting ground, paying special attention to the construction of its cottages as detailed through original building contracts. Andrzejewski discusses God’s Holiness Grove in central Pennsylvania, exploring the multiple ways that surveillance—defined as a means through which power was asserted, challenged, and negotiated—was incorporated into the built environment between 1850 and 1950. Andrzejewski guided the interpretive goals of this thesis by pointing to gaps in current camp meeting scholarship. She praises Weiss’sCity in the Woods, but like Bernard Herman in his Winterthur Portfolio review of the book, notes that Weiss does not answer her own intriguing questions, and therefore misses the opportunity to interpret the built camp meeting environment. Anna Andrzejewski, “Architecture and the Ideology of Surveillance in Modem America, 1850-1950,” PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 2000. Laura Marie Suszkowski, “Proper, Convenient, and Desirable:’ Building Cottages in a Victorian Methodist Camp-Meeting Resort, Ocean Grove, NJ, 1870-1879,” Master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1997. Bernard Herman, review of City in the Woods: The Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha's Vineyard, by Ellen Weiss, Winterthur Portfolio 25 (Spring 1990), 97.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. post-Civil War camp meetings.6 Within the region, several other camp meetings

paralleled Chester Heights’ development—Ocean Grove, New Jersey and Rehoboth

Beach, Delaware to name a few. These camp meetings were also associated closely with

the Methodist Church and developed in conjunction with new metropolitan transportation

routes. The Philadelphia Baltimore Central Railroad linked Chester Heights to

Philadelphia; in that way Chester Heights was similar to several sea side meetings in New

Jersey that also drew campers from urban Philadelphia.

The current layout of Chester Heights is diagrammed in Figure 2. The sketch

plan notes the curvilinear and grid system of paths, the arrangement of the cottages in

relation to the roads and tabernacle, and the placement of all major buildings on the site.

A landscape including both romantic curves and a rational grid was popular in Victorian

suburban and camp meeting plans. This plan at Chester Heights, along with its pattern-

book “gingerbread” cottages and foundation by middle-class urbanites, situates it as an

archetypal camp meeting of the late Victorian era. Chester Heights Camp Meeting is

6 Although this thesis will not specifically discuss the impact of the Civil War on these camp meetings’ development, nothing in the late nineteenth century escaped the psychological aftermath of that great destruction. Was there special significance to camping in peace? Was there renewed interest in religion after such tragedy? Likely all these things were true. An 1871 account of Denville Camp Meeting in New Jersey noted that the tents used were similar to those in the War, and “in those unhappy days have held poor wretches maimed and agonized, with shorn limbs and gaping wounds. Now they seemed the very emblems of peace, and rest, and purity.” “Methodist Camp Meeting,” New York Times, August 25, 1871. On a pragmatic level, there was an economic upswing in the 1870s, and one of the results of the prosperity was the construction of recreational facilities—camp meetings included.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. typical in its development, but is atypical and significant in that today, in 2005, you can

still enter into the material environment of the Victorian-era camp meeting.

Chester Heights Camp Meeting, officially the Chester Heights Camp Meeting

Historic District, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. Its

thirty acres are located in the Chester Heights Borough of Delaware County,

Pennsylvania, one half mile south of the Baltimore Pike (Route 1) at 320 Valleybrook

Road. It is held privately by the Chester Heights Camp Meeting Association, individual

members of which own the cottages. The Association, a 501 (c) 3, designates itself “a

non-profit, parachurch, interdenominational, religious organization dedicated to the

evangelical ministry of proclaiming Christianity to the world.”7 The Association remains

from its foundation not associated with a specific congregation (parachurch) though it

had close ties with the Methodist Church in early years. This distinction reveals the

inherently democratic nature of camp meetings; like the woman speaking to the crowd in

the 1940s photograph, there is a greater opportunity for lay participation in camp meeting

worship.

The Association sponsors an annual series of summer concerts and events at

Chester Heights, keeping the tradition alive. Currently, the grounds are endangered by

natural deterioration from lack of maintenance and by court actions by the Borough of

Chester Heights that locked the gates due to safety concerns. Borough mandates closed

the camp entirely for the summers of 2000 and 2001, but the injunction was modified so

7 Chester Heights Camp Meeting, http://www.ch-campmeeting.org/chcm who.html. March 14, 2005.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. that the camp may now be occupied, though no oneis permitted to inhabit a cottage

overnight. Hope remains for the Chester Heights Camp Meeting Association, however,

and small steps bring its members closer to protecting their site. In addition to the

National Register designation of 2001, in 2000 the National Trust for Historic

Preservation designated Chester Heights’ tabernacle, dormitory, and Gray Memorial

(Dining) Hall “Official Projects of Save America’s Treasures.”

The sense of urgency to preserve Chester Heights arises in recognition of its

increasingly rare and precious environment. A majority of the distinctive camp meeting

cottages stand, the tabernacle dominates the center of the forested grounds, and on

summer nights you can join “the cottagers” to hear Christian gospel groups perform

under the 1908 octagonal pavilion. The cultural environments of many late nineteenth-

century camp meetings were lost to prosperity by re-development or neglect, but Chester

Heights Camp Meeting ground was saved by an uncanny combination of the two. The

property remained in the custody of the Chester Heights Camp Meeting Association, a

group with enough monetary resources to preclude selling to developers, but so

financially modest that they did not invest in capital improvements. In addition, the

Chester Heights Association treasures its history, and so honors the preservation of its

historic grounds.

When it formed in 1872, the first act of business for “The Philadelphia Camp

Meeting and Excursion Association” was to secure by purchase 148 acres in Aston

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.8 The deed to the plot of forest land was

dated April 1, 1872 and signed by sellers Joshua, James J. and Mary Jane Williamson.

After paying the sum $23,804 for the land, archives indicate that an additional $30,000

afforded the construction of a preaching platform, dormitories, an excursion pavilion, a

restaurant, a store, and a consistent water supply via reservoir. A newly erected seven-

foot board fence surrounded the grounds, “having gates located at convenient points for

the admission of those attending the meetings.”9 The camp was ready for occupation by

nearly five hundred people for a June 4, 1872 excursion, when the Association rented the

grounds to the “Ladies Aid Society” for an outing to benefit the “Old Folk’s Home.”10

The first Chester Heights summer camp meeting held in 1872 ran for ten days, and drew

8 This history of Chester Heights Camp Meeting comes from a variety of sources. Primary resources include the original charter from the Pennsylvania legislature, the land deed, several stocks in the association, and photographs. There is a two paragraph description of the camp in Henry Graham Ashmead’s 1884 History o f Delaware County and several short unpublished, informal histories including John Pedlow’s history of the camp written after his 1917-1945 Board Presidency, a transcript of a speech Rev. Craig Schultz gave to the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference Historical Society in 1984, a May 1970 history written by David Correll published in the Historic Delaware County Day and an October 1998 article published in the Delaware County Daily Times by Loretta Rodgers. This work also refers to the United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register o f Historic Places Registration Form: Chester Heights Camp Meeting Historic District, NPS form 10-900 (March 16, 2001), section 8, 2. Many of these resources are kept in the homes of Association members, and will be referenced as the “Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives.”

9 Henry Graham Ashmead, History of Delaware County (1884), chapter 24.

10 John Pedlow, “Seventy-Five Years at a Glance,” [Chester Heights, Pennsylvania]: c. 1950.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from five hundred to five thousand people daily. In its first year, Chester Heights had

17,915 paid visitors at its encampment of nearly two hundred tents.11

During the first decade of the Chester Heights Camp Meeting, all campers stayed

in tents. The majority of the cottages were constructed during the 1880s, 1890s, and the

first decade of the twentieth century. A picture taken around the tum-of-the-century

shows a cottage on the Chester Heights tabernacle circle (likely 45 East Auditorium) next

to a remaining tent. [Figure 3] This tent sat upon a wooden frame, with wooden stakes

supporting a sturdy canvas that shielded the lighter-weight material below. Period

newspapers advertised the sale and rental of such tents, as the “United States Tent Depot”

advertisement in the 1873 Rehoboth Beacon. [Figure 4] Campers rented lots on which to

construct their seasonal tents, and the Association carefully regulated the transfer and

lease of the property to insure that select campers adhered to their stated behavioral

policies. Chester Height Association’s Cottage Department mandated that one must own

six shares of the Association in order to qualify to lease a lot, and later held right of

approval on all cottage construction.12

In addition to controlling the development and leasing of their land, the

Association took a very active role in regulating activity upon the grounds.The Record

announced in a 1905 article an edict from the Chester Heights Association that there was

to be “no spooning by young couples in the grove after the evening services have

11 National Register, section 8, 3. Correll, “Chester Heights.”

12 National Register, section 8, 4.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. closed.”13 The Record reports that one “indignant young woman” accused that the “mean

old things forget when they were young” and the minister regrets that if “the young men

would pay as much attention [to religion] as to the young ladies, this camp would have

the greatest revival ever heard.”14 Organizational associations at late Victorian camp

meetings regulated all aspects of behavior on their grounds, from outlawing rummage

sales and liquor, to the requirement that lights remain on and cottage doors open during

evening services.15

Both ministers and laymen comprised the camp meeting associations, but they

were rarely specifically tied with a single church congregation. Associations operated as

a business and real estate venture, many coming to control valuable land in popular resort

and coastal areas. They formed powerful business connections with large companies and

delineated contracts with purveyors on their grounds. Their business savvy allowed

resources such as the United States Postal Office that once sat at Chester Heights’ gate.16

The Chester Heights Association also formed a symbiotic relationship with the

Philadelphia Baltimore Central Railroad. The railroad rewarded the camp meeting’s

13 “Spooning After Worship: Camp-Meeting Edict Against Moonlight Courting,”The Record, 1905.

14 Ibid.

15 Chester Heights outlawed rummage sales as an “insult to the lord” in the same edict of 1905 that prohibited moonlight courting. The prohibition of liquor is unanimous at all church-related camp meeting grounds of the Victorian era. The rule mandating that lights remain on and doors open during services is recorded in theBy-laws, Rules and Regulations o f the Crystal Spring Campmeeting Association (Everett, Pa: John C. Chamberlain’s Book and Job Office, 1889), 12.

16 Ashmead, Delaware County, chapter 24.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. traffic by paying an annual salary of $500 to the camp pastor, as well as donating to them

ten cents for every adult ticket sold.17 Railroads offered package deals for camp meeting•

excursions; Chester Heights advertised that a special $.60 “excursion ticket” includes fare

roundtrip from Philadelphia and the price of admission to the camp ground.1 8 In another

arrangement of this type at the Landisville Camp Meeting in Lancaster County, PA, the

Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads would make special stops during their

encampment. 19

Access to railroad transportation was crucial to the success of the Chester Heights

Camp Meeting in its early years. On July 20, 1883, the West Chester Local News

reported that “the crowd of worshipers at Chester Heights on Sunday was the largest that

has been there for years.. .The beautiful day had the effect of bringing the country people

out in large numbers and by ten o’clock all roads heading toward Chester Heights were

crowded. The early morning train from Philadelphia brought fifteen car loads, with not

17 The Philadelphia Baltimore Central Railroad was incorporated in March of 1853. Ashmead, Delaware County, chapter 24. Correll’s “Chester Heights” reports that ten cents of every adult ticket sold and live cents of every child’s ticket was given to the camp by the railroad, Shultz’s “Chester Heights Camp Meeting” states same. Pedlow’s “Seventy-Five Years at a Glance” notes that when the camp was incorporated “Bishop Ames [was to be] pastor with a salary of one thousand dollars, one half of which was to be paid by the Railroad Company.”

18 The Sunday-School Assembly, At Chester Heights, Pa., July 7-16, 1880. Pennsylvania: 1880.

19Landisville Camp Meeting Association o f the M. E. Church (Landisville, PA: Landisville Camp Meeting Association of the M. E. Church, 1901), 1. Judy Giuriceo explores resorts on Staten Island built after the Staten Island Rapid Transit Railroad opened a steam train connection in 1886. Judy Giuriceo, “The City by the Sea: Recreation and Re-creation at South Beach, Staten Island, 1886-1898,” (Master’s thesis, University o f Delaware, 1994).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. even standing room left.”20 A circa 1905 photograph celebrates the relationship between

Chester Heights and its railroad stop, as hundreds of people posed for a photograph at the

Chester Heights railroad track. [Figure 5]

Chester Heights added to its building stock during its first decades. In 1878, the

Association constructed the tabernacle on the circle, creating the focal point of the

cottages at the center of the landscape. Though severely compromised in integrity after a

1958 total collapse, the tabernacle still dominates the landscape through its prominent

location on the circle.21 [Figure 6] The tabernacle that Henry Ashmead described in his

1884 history is similar to what is there today; he also noted that “in front [of the

tabernacle] are three or four hundred settees, capable of seating between three and four

thousand persons, so arranged that all in attendance can have an uninterrupted view of the

speakers.”22 Histories mention the construction of 300 feet of stables, a roller-skating

rink, a large restaurant, and boardwalks, none of which survive today. A 1981 history

of the camp by Rev. Craig Shultz even makes mention that “up until 1940 there was a

tower on the top of the hill which everyone could climb by stairs and you could see City

Hall in Philadelphia.”24

20 National Register, section 8, 5. Pedlow, “Seventy-Five Years.”

21 “Chester Heights Camp Meeting Auditorium Collapses,”The Evening Bulletin: Delaware County News, April 16, 1958.

22 Ashmead, Delaware County, chapter 24.

23 Correll, “Chester Heights.”

24 G. Craig Schultz, “Chester Heights Camp Meeting” (Chester Heights, Pennsylvania: Chester Heights Camp Meeting Association, 1984.)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The majority of Chester Heights’ cottages built during the late nineteenth century

were two-story balloon frame buildings, rectangular in plan, with a three bay facade.

Most have a two-story front porch that is shaded by an extension of the roof. This

building type is the quintessential so-called American camp meeting cottage form of

Victorian architecture. The cottages’ style is a creative pastiche of decorative elements

adorning what is essentially a simple stud-frame box. One sees polychromatic elements

from Gothic Revival, ftalianate, and Queen Anne styles applied to the gables and

porches.

Figure 7 pictures Chester Heights’ cottages at 70, 69, and 68 W. Second Avenue.

The three buildings are typical of the condition and style found today at the camp; they

retain a high degree of integrity but are in need of repair. To further illustrate that the

physical environment at Chester Heights has remained fairly unmodified through the

years, one can compare in Figures 8 and 9 a circa 1908 photograph of 70 W. Second

Avenue with a photo of the cottage today. The building retains its entire structural

framing, siding, roofing, doors, windows, shutters, most of its porch, and some of its

decorative elements, losing its screen door, the lower portion of the porch, and its canvas

awning. Like many of the cottages at Chester Heights, 70 W. Second Avenue is

endangered, but its integrity preserves the original camp meeting landscape and the

domestic patterns enacted at a religious resort.

Through the cottages’ integrity, we can interpret the surviving material at Chester

Heights to better understand the cultural context of the camp meeting environment of the

late nineteenth century. The peculiar construction of these elaborately decorated

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cottages, built instead of dormitories, speaks to the increasing focus of American

Protestantism on the nuclear family’s domestic sphere and the subsequent growth of

women’s role in leading religious practice.25 Each cottage developed its own kitchen,

unlike the practice at earlier camp meetings of group meal preparation. Each cottage had

a porch for socialization, indicating that part of the camp meeting ritual involved

socialization in the transplanted domestic world. At the same time that the culture of the

camp meeting in the late nineteenth century turned inward to celebrate individual family

units—manifested in the construction of the single family cottages—we will see it also

looked outward to celebrate the world’s cultures, as expressed through teaching middle-

eastern geography and ancient languages in the camp meeting curriculum.

Methodist camp meetings like Chester Heights are fascinating gauges of

widespread nineteenth-century cultural changes. The camp meeting has a rich history in

America; like the Methodist Church, it grew from a grassroots frontier expression of

spirituality to a cultural institution of the Victorian bourgeois. “Methodism, which began

the nineteenth century outside of America’s religious and cultural establishments, ended

the century among those establishment’s best representatives.”26 The camp meeting was

crucial to the development of the Methodist faith and both grew in tandem as distinctly

25 Colleen McDannell’s The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) explores the feminization of religion in American during the nineteenth century. McDannell discusses how religious practices, such as reading the Bible and hymn sings, became acts primarily associated with the mother, placing her in the role of spiritual guide in the domestic setting.

9 (\ Robins, “Vernacular American Landscape,” 165.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. American forms of religion. A camp meeting is defined as a meeting conducted usually

by an evangelical denomination in the open air (as in a field or a grove) or in a tent and

attended by families who bring provisions and often stay more than one day to hear

preaching and exhortation and to participate in worship service. The Methodist Church

embraced the camp meeting during its formative years as a way to encourage the spiritual

life of the rugged settlers of the American frontier, comprised of regions that are now

Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and western Pennsylvania.

Methodism began as a populist version of Anglican Christianity, so the outdoors

meeting was a fittingly unsettled and emotional event used to spread the burgeoning

religion in areas without an otherwise established church presence. As the Methodist

Church grew in numbers and organization, its congregations became wealthier and built

urban structures in fashionable styles during the middle and latter decades of the

nineteenth century. The camp meeting tradition found popularity in settled regions of the

East Coast, and its form came to reflect the church’s increased wealth and

institutionalization. Camp meetings became well-planned and stylish camps in the

woods, more akin to fashionable resorts than their wilderness cousin of the early part of

the century. The activities at the camps changed as well, as they included more

recreational, social, and educational opportunities and a lessened emphasis on converting

newcomers to the Methodist Church.

The New York Times declared in 1870 that “the camp meeting fever rages so

violently.”27 Wesleyan Grove on Martha’s Vineyard, discussed in Weiss’s City in the

27 “The Camp-Meeting at Denville, N.J.,” New York Times, August 16, 1870.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Woods, is a standard example of a successful and prosperous Victorian camp. Wealthy

Bostonians founded the meeting in 1835; between 1859 and 1864 they constructed high-

style family cottages, a booming hotel, a boardwalk, and, in 1879, a great iron

tabernacle.28 Ocean Grove and Pitman Grove, New Jersey and Rehoboth Beach,

Delaware are a few of the many beach resorts that were founded as camp meetings along

the Atlantic coast during the Victorian era. These religious resorts included fashionable

residential structures like the cottages at Chester Heights, connected to cities with new

transportation systems, and found coverage as newsworthy social events in publications

like Godey ’s Lady’s Book, the Methodist Home Journal, and the New York Times.29

The Victorian camp meeting tradition had roots in the religious “Great

Awakening,” a period of spiritual revivalism in England during the late 1700s. In simple

ideological terms, the leaders of the Great Awakening insisted that the heart of religion is

in a personal relationship with God, or pietism.30 They encouraged Biblical devotion and

methodical study (hence, the term “Methodism” was used for the movement) to

-3 1 understand the tenants of the Church of England. Church of England clergymen John

28 Weiss, City in the Woods.

29 The New York Times reported on many camp meetings, including Sing Sing, New York, and Merrick, Long Island. For hundreds of camps, newspapers described physical layout and accommodation, listed attending ministers, outlined train schedules, and offered such anecdotal information as “the ladies have handsomely ornamented the preachers’ stand with appropriate mottoes wrought in evergreens,” “The Camp-Meeting at Denville, N.J.,” New York Times, August 16, 1870.

30 Stanley J. Menking, 200 Years o f United Methodism: An Illustrated History (Madison, New Jersey: Drew University, 1984), 5.

31 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., s. v. “Wesley Family.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Wesley and George Whitefield became de facto leaders of the Methodist movement,

which was during their lifetime a society within the established Church of England.

Wesley and Whitefield ministered to the unchurched people of poverty-stricken England

through outdoor preaching in vernacular language during the mid 1700s, a violation of

ancient Christian prohibitions on outdoor worship. Wesley and Whitefield’s actions had

historic precedence in the Presbyterian Church’s evangelical festivals in post-

Reformation Scotland, during which lengthy outdoor events celebrated religious

communion and mixed piety with sociability.32 Scholars of religion acknowledge those

earlier precedents by referring to the emergence of outdoor preaching in the late

eighteenth century as a “Revival of Revivals.”

In 1784 the Methodists and the Church of England officially split. After the

American Revolution, many ordained Church of England ministers returned to Europe,

and the Church was reluctant to send more to the newly independent nation. As a result,

the Methodist Church formed in Baltimore and ordained its own ministers to ride circuits

and administer religious sacraments like baptism and marriage. For both practical and

ideological reasons, the new Methodist Church continued to rely heavily on laymen to

conduct other services. Camp meetings evolved as a useful way to congregate crowds to

32 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3.

33 Sydney Ahlstrom frames the early nineteenth-century western revivals this way in his authoritativeA Religious History o f the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. receive sacraments from the circuit-riding ministers, but they also retained a democratic

format so that the non-ordained could minister spiritually to their peers.

There is an inherently democratic nature to an outdoor service, where all meet on

a basis of social and spiritual equality.34 Dickson Bruce argues that camp meetings were

successful because they fulfilled a social need among the “plain-folk,” and unlike older

European traditions, the religion formed at camp meetings through prayer and song took

the people’s rather than the church leader’s stand on social issues. Camp meetings and

the personalized religious tenants of the new Methodist Church, as critical parts of

religious history in America, embody a unique evangelical spirit that has always found

popularity in the United States.

Evangelicalism is the school of Protestants which maintains that the essence of

spiritual salvation is in faith in the atoning death of Christ, denying that either good

works or the sacraments of church have any saving efficacy. In other words:

evangelicalism is about personal accountability of spirit. Religious historian Randall

Balmer notes that evangelicalism is “consistent with the American ethos... [It] offers a

kind of spiritual upward mobility, a chance to improve your lot in the next world and

34 William H. Williams discusses the attraction of Methodism to varied residents of the Delmarva Peninsula (southern Delaware and the eastern shore of Maryland), noting that “its central message, calling for a moral revolution and promising salvation, simultaneously appealed to the needs of all classes, both races and sexes” in his case study, “The Attraction of Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula as a Case Study, 1769- 1802,” Rethinking Methodist History: A Bicentennial Historical Consultation, ed. Russell Richey and Kenneth Rowe (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1985), 108. Parker, “The Camp Meeting—Before 1900,” 181.

35 Bruce,And they all Sang Hallelujah, 5.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (according to the promises of some preachers) in this world as well.”36 Sydney Ahlstrom

argues that evangelical Protestantism is well adapted to the popular ideals and patterns of

American life, “Patriotism, manifest destiny, Anglo-Saxon self-confidence, the common

man’s social and economic aspirations, peaceful community life, the Declaration of

Independence, and the Constitution—all were accommodated and supported in its

capacious system of beliefs.”37 In encouraging an independence—personal

accountability—in the context of spiritual salvation, and through this a break from

authoritative Anglican control, the Methodist Church and their camp meetings reached

into the frontier and resonated with early nineteenth-century Americans. Whether

interpreted as tools of mass communications or as political rallies, wilderness camp

meetings formed a clear predecessor to today’s televised ministries and entanglement of

1 0 religious and political values.

Denominations other than the Methodists, including Baptists and Presbyterians,

used the camp meeting to convert settlers on the American frontier during the early

1800s. Most churches soon withdrew their official support of camp meetings to distance

their organizations from growing criticism of the emotional frenzy and drunken

36 Randall Balmer, Blessed Assurance: A History o f Evangelicalism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 11.

37 Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 805. Ahlstrom makes this claim to assert that by the end of the nineteenth century, these patterns fell apart as parties looked to socialism, free religion, fundamentalism and disestablishment.

38 These ideas are arguments in Balmer’s Blessed Assurance; his book frames the argument that the religious disestablishment in America has helped ensure political stability by siphoning social discontent into the religious sphere and away from the political arena.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. impropriety at some meeting sites. Methodists, in comparison, embraced the exuberance

and emotionalism at camp meetings as an essential ingredient for spiritual conversion,

and the church grew rapidly. Whereas at the beginning of the 1800s Methodism was a

small but growing sect associated sometimes negatively with religious hysteria, cultural

poverty, and a sense of social dispossession, by 1840 one in twenty Americans claimed

the Methodist’s religion. To chart the startling continued success of the church’s growth,

by 1850 the statistic was one in fifteen.

The arrival of the camp meeting in America is generally attributed to the

infamous Cane Ridge Revival of 1801. Regarding Cane Ridge and other early century

meetings, contemporary writers described multitudes gathered before a minister perched

under a makeshift tabernacle and either gave praise for the purity of unfettered religious

salvation or scathing criticism that condemns the camp meeting as a hilarious hoax. The

gathering at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, an event Sydney Ahlstrom calls a

“watershed in American church history,” was a certain tipping point in the popularity and

influence of the camp meeting in America.40

Rev. Barton Warren Stone, to fight what he saw as prevailing religious apathy in

the southern back country, held a revival meeting on Cane Ridge which was met with

great success. Contemporary reports claim that ten to twenty-five thousand people

39 Robins, “Vernacular American Landscape,” 166.

40 Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 433.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. attended the six-day, seven-night revival in the Kentucky wilderness.41 Firsthand

observer James P. Finley recorded:

The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human being seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. I counted seven ministers, all preaching at one time, some on stumps, others in wagons.. .Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy in the most piteous accents, while others were shouting most vociferously.42

To attend a camp meeting, many thousands of people traveled hundreds of miles

by foot or wagon, abandoning their farms, bringing livestock with them, and carrying

food to last a week. Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835Democracy in America argued the

camp meetings mitigated the miseries of solitude in the American frontier. Tocqueville

wrote that the “noise of [camp meeting’s] arrival spreads with unbelievable rapidity from

cabin to cabin: it’s the great news of the day.”43 An environment that could renew both

religious and social spirits welcomed woodsmen and their families, usually accustomed

to extreme loneliness on the American frontier.44 For a few days, rural woodsmen visited

a densely populated urban world, where all brushed shoulders regardless of race, sex, and

41 Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 433.

42 Johnson,The Frontier Camp Meeting, 64.

43 George Wilson Pierson,Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1996), 249.

44 Further details about camp meetings and loneliness on the American western frontier are in Louis Fairchild,The Lonesome Plains: Death and Revival on the American Frontier (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2002).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. class.45 Planned in the ripe days just after harvest, the camp meeting was a place to meet

a potential spouse, trade a cow, sell land, and visit with far-away relatives. Like the

Scottish post-Reformation holy fairs, “in them religion and culture, communion and

community, piety and sociability commingled.. .they were the high days of the year.”46

In stated purpose, however, the camp meeting was ultimately an effort to induce

the ecstasy of religious conversion or salvation, an experience that was often marked by

shouting, dancing, singing, jerking, and barking.47 Rev. Barton Stone, organizer of the

Cane Ridge revival, noted that “falling to the ground was very common among all

classes, the saints and sinners of every age and of every grade, from the philosopher to

the clown.”48 This type of emotional frenzy drew onlookers and scoffers to the camp

meetings and was the cause of much contemporary criticism.

During his travels, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe and his family visited a

camp meeting just outside Washington DC in 1809. Latrobe wrote that he reluctantly

made the visit after having “always endeavored to prevent [his] wife from being led by

45 There are many references to African-Americans at camp meetings, it seems that slaves and free blacks usually had separate services, but all races joined into one large group meeting on the final day of camp. Latrobe notes that blacks and whites met at the same camp meeting in his journals.

46 Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 3.

47 Among other early nineteenth century sources, Benjamin Henry Latrobe,The Journals o f Benjamin Henry Latrobe 1799-1820, ed. Edward C. Carter, John C. Van Home, and Lee W. Formwalt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 107.

48 Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 434.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. her curiosity to attend the meetingsof the Methodists.”49 The meeting that Latrobe

described was a carefully planned ritual, showing that meeting organizers adapted their

zealous camps to include provisions for the needs of crowds, including constables to

insure safety. Latrobe’s site was “well chosen.. .on the descent of a narrow ridge at the

foot of which ran a small stream.. .which furnished the necessary convenience of

water.”50 The site formed a natural amphitheater in front of the preaching pulpit, or

“stage” in Latrobe’s words.51 Before crowds arrived, volunteers felled trees and

underbrush, constructed benches and the stage, and cleared a road to the chosen site.

Sleeping tents in Latrobe’s sketch plan were arranged in a semicircle before the stage,

and the entire encampment was surrounded by a wattle fence.

“Some very good citizens,” “parties of well dressed blacks of both sexes” and “ill-

dressed white boys” were all part of the crowds that filled the two hundred tents at

Latrobe’s camp meeting. His sketch plan diagrammed that the crowd was divided by

race and sex into worship and sleeping areas, with “negro tents” behind the pulpit and

women’s and men’s benches designated before the preaching stage. As a measure of

accommodation for those in the frenzy of conversion, Latrobe noted that immediately

before the stage there was “a boarded enclosure filled with straw, into which the

[converted] were thrown that they might kick about without •injuring * themselves.”52

49 Latrobe, Journals, 108.

50 Latrobe, Journals, 110.

51 Latrobe, Journals, 110.

52 Latrobe, Journals, 109.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Latrobe ultimately embraced the enthusiasm he witnesses at camp meetings,

unlike most cultural commentators of his day. He adeptly perceived that camp meetings

were more than a passing phase, a tool imposed by a church, or a means of social

encounter. Because they responded to a spiritual need in Americans, they continued in

popularity for more than one hundred years, and found resurrection in another form in the

late twentieth century. Like the “megachurch” of today, the camp meeting offered a

comfortable yet inspiring environment for the pursuit of spirituality.53 In offering a

sanctuary away from daily life, a chance to commune with family and strangers, and

democratic access to religion without the formality of an imposing church building and

ancient rituals, the camp meeting met the diverse spiritual needs of a wide variety of

people.

Latrobe admitted that despite their apparent popularity and success, camp

meetings were the subject of “ridicule.”54 Treatises, poems, and sketches about activities

at camp meetings abound, and it seems for every one that showed the meetings in a

sympathetic or celebratory light, there is one that ridiculed them. One can often decipher

from a period sketch of a camp meeting more than the general setting of benches, stage,

and encircling tents, as they often carry an undertone of the artist’s feelings toward camp

meetings.

53 The term “megachurch” will be used to refer to the modem development of exceptionally large (two thousand members or more) church congregations with varied recreational and social offerings. Though they did not coin the term, the concept is explored in Anne C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler, From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003).

54 Latrobe, Journals, 113.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figures 10 and 11 are representations of an 1837 and 1839 camp meeting. One is

a watercolor painting by J. Maze Burbank, the other is a sketch from French traveler Jean

Baptiste Gaspard Roux de Rochelle’sEtas-Unis d ’Ameriques. Each artist shows a crowd

gathered under a canopy of trees, seated and standing before a frame preacher’s stand

with tents visible in the background. In de Rochelle’s camp meeting scene, well-dressed

respectable people gather around to calmly hear a minister speak. Ladies carry parasols,

speaking to their propriety. In contrast, Burbank’s camp meeting is a scene of emotional

frenzy. Bodies writhe about, some in a state of partial undress, cowering before the

words of the minister. The two artists represent two discordant, but not necessarily

contradictory, views of early nineteenth-century wilderness camp meetings. What some

saw as a tool of grace to bring spirituality to the unchurched masses, others saw as an a-

religious orgy of liquor, lewd behavior, and evangelical hucksters.

Camp meetings were called “pernicious to the welfare of society;” critics pointed

out the preponderance of liquor and love in the wilderness.55 A humorous 1810 poem

rhymes, “Come pay down your chink/ Boys, and take a good drink, and then you’ll have

spirit within.”56 Though it seems fair to assume that at any social gathering where young

adults may meet will lead to love and matches, the camp meeting, to critics, offered a

unique circumstance for finding a suitor. A scathing camp meeting critic wrote that

“Young maids who knew well / how to manage the spell, / Kneel’d down, and soon

55 A Poetical Description o f a Methodist Camp Meeting (Philadelphia: Printed for the Purchaser, 1819), iii.

56 Druid of the Lakes [pseudo.],The Camp Meeting ([United States: s. n.,] 1810), 5.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fainted away; / ‘Twas a glorious fine chance, / Thus to lie in a trance, / All their charms

and their zeal to display.”57 That same poem, summarizing its general mockery ofthe

camp meeting, ends,

Now if Christians like these, Can meet thus under trees, Why need we build houses for God? Henceforth, pious people! Quit the church and the steeple, co And join the saints’ camp in the wood.

The early nineteenth-century period of camp meetings was likely neither the

Bacchanalian festival that critics decried, nor was every event and every salvation as pure

as some ministers may have hoped. Camp meetings were ever-evolving and ultimately

shaped by the prevailing mood of place and time. They were at any given time “orderly

CQ and mature in one area, primitive and disorganized in another.” Disregarding

controversy, Americans held thousands of camp meetings; their popularity was huge.

The camp meeting acted as a social outlet for the frontiersman as well as a way for the

new Methodist religion to spread its doctrine to the otherwise unchurched. The forest

clearings, log benches, and tent circles of the early worshipers are a clear ancestor to the

later development of elaborate recreational facilities and family cottages built under a

cathedral of trees. Victorians would later sentimentally recall the early camp meetings at

57 Druid,The Camp Meeting, 6.

58 Druid, The Camp Meeting, 12.

59 Fairchild, The Lonesome Plains, 135.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cane Ridge and the like as events where religion was pure and untainted by the changing

modem world.

Camp meetings faced a transition in both their purpose to the Methodist Church

and their physical environs during the middle of the nineteenth century.60 Along with the

church, camp meetings became institutionalized, finding roots in permanent built camp

meetings and adopting planned recreational activities and educational curricula. As with

Chester Heights, groups purchased rather than borrowed land. They constmcted

dormitories and preaching pavilions to replace the earlier cmde log preaching stands.

Camps provided wooden platforms upon which families could build their tents, and these

platforms soon became the foundations for balloon-framed cottages. Groups wishing to

hold a camp meeting could refer to advice manuals, including Rev. B. W. Gorham’s 1854

Camp Meeting Manual, A Practical Book for The Camp Ground.

Gorham penned his camp meeting manual “to contribute something toward [camp

meeting’s] greater efficacy, and to aid other churches and individuals attending them.”61

He outlined the history and benefit of camp meetings in America, provided guidelines for

their organization, and published an image of his recommended camp meeting setting.

[Figure 12] During the same period, M. Emory Wright wrote “Is the Modem Camp-

60 It is difficult to pinpoint an exact date when the transition of residential structures happens. Wooden cabins appear at some camps in the 1840s and 1850s, but Gorham’s 1854 manual advises for tents. Wesleyan Grove at Martha’s Vineyard erected their cottages (thought to be the earliest) between 1859 and 1860, and other camp meetings follow suit through the century into the twentieth. Ellen Weiss lays out this history nicely in City in the Woods.

61 B. W. Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual: A Practical Book for the Campground (Boston: H. V. Deegan, 1854), vii.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Meeting a Failure?”62 Gorham and Wright in their essays make clear to us the

Victorians’ perception of the changing nature of the camp meeting environment. While

they shared concern over some aspects of the modem camp ground, like the introduction

of commercial enterprises to what was primarily a religious institution, Gorham and

Wright admired the addition of modem facilities and organization. On the whole, both

were entirely positive about the camp meeting institution, should it be properly

conducted.

Gorham’s Camp Meeting Manual advised many factors in choosing a site: a

bountiful water supply, sympathetic neighbors, adequate pastures, a canopy of shade,

transportation, availability of lumber, a level surface, and a forest to screen from the

wind. He advised on the time of year (late summer) and the length of meetings (five to

eight days).63 He included instructions for the preparation of the grounds: create a

circular layout for the tents, clear the grounds of stumps, trim trees to the height of twelve

feet, grade the ground level, and place the stand on the northern side to avoid sun glare.

The stand should be twelve- by sixteen-feet with stairs, not a ladder. The altar before the

stand should be twenty-five-feet square with a thick covering of straw. Gorham called

for plank benches of sixteen-foot length. He gave specific advice to the constmction of

tents, “use sail cloth.. .lest they give the spectator the idea of a huddle of Irish rail-road

62 M. Emory Wright, “Is the Modem Camp Meeting a Failure?,”Methodist Quarterly Review 43 (October 1861).

63 Gorham, Manual, 125.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. shanties than of a worshipping people dwelling in the goodly tents of Jacob.”64 Rev.

Gorham extended his advice to include a recommended schedule for camp meetings.

As to the order of exercises and of domestic arrangements, I have generally noticed that the following work well:

Rise at five, or half-past five in the morning Family prayer and breakfast from half past six to half past seven General prayer meeting at the altar, led by several ministers appointed by the presiding elder at half past eight AM Preaching at half past ten, followed by prayer meeting to twelve. Dine at half past twelve Preaching at two, or half past two, followed by prayer at the altar until five Tea at 6 pm Preaching at half past seven, followed by prayer meeting at the altar until nine or ten All strangers to leave the ground and the people to retire at ten, or immediately thereafter.65

While Gorham and Wright encouraged the continuation of the camp meeting

tradition, believing meetings to be “unparalleled facilities for the dissemination of

religious truths,” both advised that special care must be taken so that the camp meeting

institution was not spiritually eroded by the secular world.66 Concerned with the

introduction of too many modem conveniences at meetings, Wright listed “book agents,

newsboys, dentists, doctors, daguerrean artists, barbers.. .within a stone’s throw of the

64 Gorham, Manual, 136.

65 Gorham, Manual, 155.

66 Wright, “Failure?” 582.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. preacher’s stand.”67 Gorham suggested a way to retain sanctity during camp meeting—

“No huckstering shouldby anymeans be allowed about a camp ground.”68

Gorham and Wright’s camp meeting was no longer a church’s utilitarian

gathering to spread a new religion, nor was it a method to gather large numbers of people

around circuit ministers. The modem camp meeting removed people from urban home

churches purposefully into the wilderness for spiritual revival, and the detailed planning

by Gorham evidences the decisiveness of the escape. In the words of Wright, “the quiet

forest is undisturbed by the noise of labor. No secular enterprise can invade its hallowed

precincts.. .Every day becomes Sabbath, the grove itself a consecrated temple.”69 Even

by midcentury, the camp meeting, a “tented grove, with its wealth of memories, so dear

and sacred to the hearts of thousands,” contained a nostalgic memory of its idealized

ancestor, an earlier version of spirituality uncomplicated by the modem world.70 The

camp meeting of the Victorian era kept alive the memory of the early days of the

Methodist religion. Those modem camp meetings became an escape from industrial

cities and secular cares, much like the romantic suburbs of the period promised respite

67 Wright, “Failure?,” 600.

68 Gorham,Manual, 143.

69 Wright, “Failure?,” 586.

70 Wright, “Failure?,” 582.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from the crime and pollution of urban areas.71 Gorham celebrated the camp meeting as a

salubrious retreat into nature, writing,

Lungs get a freer, larger exercise there than elsewhere.. .there is something in the novelty of the scenery and the occasion well adapted to banish ennui and hypochondria, and to produce a healthful flow of the animal spirits; while the purest and most elevated aspirations of the soul evoked by the services of the occasion, react powerfully and happily upon the body.72

A healthful respite with a “wealth of memories,” camp meetings carried an

unmistakable air of nostalgia by the late nineteenth century.73 Gorham and Wright

recalled fondly Christians camping both in Biblical days and in the early years of the

Methodist religion. In contemporary sources, camp meetings represented an old-

fashioned courting technique. InGodey’s Lady’s Book romantic fiction, women often

recalled a past lover with whom she “went to camp meeting.” In one camp meeting tale,

“Earning a Minister,” a simple country family boards a visiting camp meeting minister.

Their daughter Lilly charms this man and his orphaned child; they marry happily in the

end. The language used in these tales present a visit to the camp meeting as something

not necessarily fashionable to Victorians, but proper and with a sweet sense of

71 There is much good analysis of late nineteenth-century suburbs, including John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) and Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization o f the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

72 Gorham, Manual, 85.

73 Wright, “Failure?,” 582.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nostalgia.74 Camp meetings cannot be examined as avant-garde, and they are all the more

telling for being slightly passe. In Chester Heights photographs from the tum-of-the-

century there are many upper-middle aged women, that group most likely to retain styles

from an earlier era. On the Chester Heights cottages, many of the revival style trims

applied in the 1880s and 1890s were on the eve of becoming out-of-date.

Too often we view history as the anecdotes of wealthy high-style trendsetters

peppered with military conflicts. By looking to vernacular spaces, the most vulnerable

cultural environments, we find record of the majority rather than the privileged minority.

Part of Chester Heights’ significance to us is its demonstrated continuation of a Victorian

tradition through the twentieth century. Though very popular in its opening years,

Chester Heights could never be considered truly fashionable; it was created in part as a

retreat from fashionable leisure of the modem world. The camp meeting tradition is not

unlike certain decorative styles, such as Victorian eclecticism, that remained popular

among middle class groups in the twentieth century despite high-style changes to

modernism or refined French styles.

To those that gathered at Chester Heights each summer well into the twentieth

century and even today, the camp meeting tradition continued and continues to resonate

in their lives. Participants have kept the tradition alive through the religious and social

74 “Earning a Minister,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 70, January 1865. Several 1870s references in Godey’s mention the camp meeting in reference to past courtships. One woman remembers a lost lover with whom she “went to camp-meeting” and another who denied a man from a bad family his request to “go to camp-meeting,” “Six Stories of First Love,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 86, March 1873, and “The Bronze Buckle,” Godey's Lady’s Book 96, March 1878.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tides of change. By the mid-twentieth century, written histories of Chester Heights

convey a sense of nostalgia and appreciation for the physical environment that

encouraged the continuation of the camp’s traditions. Through its delightful cottages, its

imposing tabernacle, and its orderly landscape below the trees, we can better understand

this environment as cherished by its campers today, as well as continue our understanding

of the complex issues behind its development and first period context.

Chester Heights Camp Meeting’s “otherworldly” cottages, to use Ellen Weiss’s

word, created a landscape that embraced community, celebrated the family unit, offered

spiritual salvation, social interaction, and an escape from ordinary concerns. Activities at

Chester Heights reached beyond the strict outline of Gorham’s schedule to include

swimming, croquet, and roller-skating. Campers approached their Biblical instruction at

Victorian-era camp meetings looking beyond the stump sermons of the Kentucky frontier

by learning ancient languages, studying maps of Jerusalem, creating art, and donning

Oriental costumes. Like the frontier meetings that fulfilled a social need in addition to

the spiritual need, and like the “megachurches” of 2005 that house basketball courts,

movie theaters, and nurseries, Victorian camp meetings like Chester Heights responded

to the cultural mood of their era, reflected secular interests, and found success by

fulfilling the social as well as spiritual needs of their constituents.

There was an openly expressed desire for recreational excursion in addition to

religious renewal at Victorian camps. The Chester Heights Camp Meeting began in 1872

with the formation of “The Philadelphia Camp Meeting and Excursion Association of the

Methodist Episcopal Church,” after the Methodist’s Preachers’ Meeting in Philadelphia

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. declared the need for “a suitable grove in the country to which members and Sunday

School children might have ready access for social and religious purposes, without the

danger of contamination from dens of vice such as are too often found in connection with

places of resort in the neighborhood of large cities.” 75

In the years of economic expansion after the Civil War, private resources turned

to the provision of suitable recreation grounds with close church ties. The “Rehoboth

Beach Camp Meeting Association of the M. E. Church” formed in July 1872 with the

purpose of “providing and maintaining a permanent Camp-meeting ground and Christian

Sea-side resort, where everything inconsistent with Christian morality... shall be

excluded and prohibited.”76 In 1869 Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association in New

Jersey formed. Pitman Grove, New Jersey followed in 1871. In 1872 the Lancaster

Assembly and Camp Meeting Association formed in Ohio, and in 1873 Washington

• 77 Grove Camp Meeting, 20 miles outside Washington, DC, formed.

These post-Civil War camp meetings differed in purpose and composition from

the camp meetings as prescribed by Gorham’s manual, more different still from the

frontier events Latrobe witnessed. Because these camps were operated by associations,

15National Register o f Historic Places Registration Form: Chester Heights Camp Meeting Historic District, NPS form 10-900 (March 16, 2001), section 8, 1.

76 The Rehoboth Beacon 1, no. 1 (Rehoboth Beach, DE: Rehoboth Beach Camp Meeting Association of the M. E. Church, 1873), 1.

77 Ray McKinzie Goodrow, “From Sacred Space to Suburban Retreat: The Evolution of the American Camp Meeting Ground” (Master’s thesis, University of Virginia, 1994), 33. Suszkowski, “Ocean Grove,” 1. John Franklin Grimes,The Romance o f the American Camp Meeting (Cincinnati: The Caxton Press, 1922).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. they could be consideredas much a business ventures for those involvedas tools of

religious conversion. Patrons purchased shares in the camp meeting company, so the

camp meeting was inherently a potentially profitable endeavor. A certificate of

ownership for two shares in Chester Heights’ “Phila. Camp Meeting and Excursion

Association” is shown in Figure 13. The spiritual hopes and good intentions of those

involved were certainly genuine, but this era’s camp meetings exhibit a far more complex

set of cultural factors than simple spirituality. They were part business endeavor and part

up-to-date modem recreational facility; Chester Heights offered a croquet field, a

swimming pool, and a band.

Although a late 1800s fire destroyed many records of the early activity at Chester

Heights, there survives a program from “The Sunday School Assembly” held at Chester

Heights July 7-16, 1880. The program offers a wealth of logistical information: the cost

of meals ($1 per day), the tent rental fee (Size ten by twelve feet, 50 cents per day, $4 for

term), the train schedules from Philadelphia (six trains per day), and the discount a

minister could expect to receive (free tents with a twenty percent discount on meals.)78

The program also details the surprisingly vast array of activities at a Chester Heights

Sunday School Assembly. They advertised a “Museum of Oriental Curiosities” with

costumes, furniture, birds, maps, mummies and other relics. The museum, operated by

Mr. A. O. VanLennep (a “native of Asia Minor”), would include an exhibition on

“manners and customs of Bible lands by a company of ladies and gentlemen.” 79 One

no Sunday-School Assembly, 1.

79Sunday-School Assembly, 1.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. could visit a model of Jerusalem, learn the “deaf-mute language,” hear scientific lectures

on “sympathetic vibrations,” and view stereopticon pictures of Egypt, the Holy Land, and

the Indies.80 In addition to expected lectures like “The Holy Spirit in Teaching” and “The

Church Catechism, Where and How to Teach it,” Chester Heights’ Sunday School

Assembly offered lectures entitled “Memory, and How to Improve It” and “Oriental

Manners and Customs.”81

The 1880 program tells us that campers at Chester Heights followedThe

Chautauqua Normal Guide, which promised that students studying the text will “without

any personal embarrassment, be aided in gaining knowledge of the geography, biography,

history, institutions, doctrines, origins and authority of the Bible.”82 Bishop John Heyl

Vincent, the co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution in New York, publishedThe

Chautauqua Normal Guide in 1880. Chester Heights Camp had an early and strong

connection with the publications and theories of the Chautauqua Institution, a connection

that clearly speaks to the spiritual and intellectual goals of camp organizers. This tie

links the small southeastern Pennsylvania camp meeting to ongoing national changes in

religious and secular educational practices.

80 John Davis’s The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth- Century American Art and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) fully contextualizes such visual representations, including the popular model of Jerusalem at Chautauqua and those at World’s Fairs. He argues that models were a projection of religious ideologies as well as nationalistic causes, and were detached from realities and made the Holy Land “American.”

81 Sunday-School Assembly, 3.

82 Sunday-School Assembly, 2.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Chautauqua Institution began life in 1873 as an assembly to train Methodist

Sunday school teachers near Lake Chautauqua in New York. After the Methodist Church

decided to use Sunday Schools to draw people into church membership, youth were

singled out for special attention.83 The Chautauqua’s popularity and broad curriculum

was phenomenal; it grew to encompass a bewildering variety of activities in education

(including the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle), religion, discussion of public

issues, music, art, theater and sports, and the traveling tent revival Chautauqua Circuit.84

Chautauqua was an organizational phenomenon with a profound affect on American

culture during tum-of-the-century years; it uniquely combined religious teachings,

secular activities, and popular entertainment.

John Heyl Vincent’s The Chautauqua Normal Guide stood at the center of

changing religious instruction, and notably, the book’s forward mentions Chester

Heights. In its introduction, theNormal Guide instructs that “Sabbath-school lessons

cannot be studied and completed within the two or three weeks of a summer

assembly.. .The way to profit by Chautauqua, and Island Park, and Round Lake, and

South Framingham, and Chester Heights, etc., is to work hard, alone and in classes,

before these services open, and to follow them by further reading, thought, and

83 This change parallels general changing attitudes toward education and childhood during the Victorian era. Menking,200 Years of Methodism, 47.

84 Theodore Morrison,Chautauqua: A Center for Education, Religion and the Arts in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 181. The Chautauqua Circuit started in 1904 and reached its peak in the mid 1920s, when 100 groups traveled the country selling tickets to an estimated 40,000,000 people per year, an estimate reported by Charles Homer, founder of the Homer Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City, who supervised a 1921 report on the International Lyceum and Chautauqua Associations.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. practice.”85 Chester Heights’ relationship with the Chautauqua organization refines our

perception of what was taught there, and the fact that John Heyl Vincent made mention of

Chester Heights in The Chautauqua Normal Guide tells us that Chester Heights had a

heretofore unrecognized national position in the implementation of new techniques in

religious instruction.

Several historic photographs from the tum-of-the-century taken at Chester

Heights are best explained through the camp’s association with the Chautauqua

movement. Figures 14 and 15 show groups posed for photographs with various Asian

objects. Figure 14, judged to be taken during the middle of the first decade of the 1900s

from the women’s style of hair and clothing, shows a group of women posed under

Chester Heights’ tabernacle tent in front of a table festooned with bunting, crepe paper,

and innumerable oriental lanterns and parasols. Figure 15, taken during the same period,

pictures a group of children posed in costume in front of 36 S. Auditorium Avenue. One

can make out that these children wear kimonos and stand beneath the Japanese Naval

ensign, or “flag of the rising sun.”86

Chester Heights’ curriculum incorporated Biblical studies with science and world

cultures. What are thought to be religious endeavors—camp meetings and Sunday school

assemblies—here explore areas that are outside of the realm of strict religious doctrine.

Framed as a way to better understand biblical heritage, secular teachings and activities

85 John Heyl Vincent, The Chautauqua Normal Guide: A Series o f Lessons for the use of the Sabbath-School Normal and Training Classes (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1880), 5.

86 This flag was adopted as the naval flag in 1889 and was used through WWII. It is often remembered as a “war flag” from that association.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. were heavily incorporated into the religious program at Chester Heights. The instruction

of world cultures ties into the Methodist proclivity for mission work during the late

nineteenth century. United Methodists started their foreign mission program in 1878,

sending Methodists all over South America, East Asia and India.87 But in the broader

cultural sphere, there was a great popularity of world cultures, especially Asian, during

this time. The Victorian curio case housed South Pacific shells and designers

incorporated stylized Japanese designs into fashionable wallpapers. In the same way that

a camp meeting can be considered the Christian version of a Victorian vacation, was the

incorporation of cultural studies a way to participate in secular fashions with propriety

and religious justification?

As the twentieth century approached, interest in camp meetings waned. Many

camps became secularized, or turned over exclusively to the instruction of children.

Those in popular resort areas, like Rehoboth Beach, found their land worth a fortune so

were consumed by hotels and boardwalks. Those camp meetings that persisted into the

twentieth century seem to fall into two groups. Some Victorian camps, like Chester

Heights, persisted with a dutiful sense of history and nostalgia. Other camps formed to

support new religious factions outside of the established Methodist tradition, parallel to

what happened one hundred years previously when Methodism formed outside of the

Church of England orthodoxy.

The early twentieth century saw a plurality within the Methodist faith. Methodist

Victorians expressed idealism through the construction of camp meetings after the Civil

87 Menking, 200 Years o f Methodism, 49.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. War, through their mission work around the world, and through their push for social

improvements through temperance movements. This changed in the aftermath of World

War I. Old certainties about God, family, and nation were “poured by the champions of

relativity into a caldron from which arose the steam of numerous moralities, numerous

theologies, numerous ‘isms.”88 The Victorian ethos changed in the modem world of

immigration, wars, and rapidly changing technology.

The “Holiness Movement” was a distinct strain of evangelism that emerged,

prospered, and became synonymous with camp meetings in the tum-of-the-century.

Holiness encouraged John Wesley’s doctrine that a believer could attain a “perfect love”

with Christ during this lifetime, after their initial conversion, or the “bom again”

experience.89 The Holiness Movement (alternately “sanctification” or “second blessing”)

was interdenominational, but firmly rooted with the Methodist Episcopal Church, and

expanded widely at camp meetings in the post-Civil War period into the twentieth

century.90 As the Methodist hierarchy grew uneasy about the movement’s influence and

lack of denominational loyalty, Holiness Movement adherents either submitted to

Methodist controlled ideologies or broke off to form groups such as the Church of God,

the Church of the Nazarene, the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and the Salvation Army

among others.91 Many interdenominational camp meetings formed around 1900

88 Menking, 200 Years of Methodism, 60.

89 Balmer, Blessed Assurance, 113.

90 Balmer, Blessed Assurance, 113.

91 Balmer, Blessed Assurance, 113.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. inevitably took the word “holiness” in their name, like Indiana’s Home Holiness Camp

Meeting Association pictured in Figure 16.

Anachronistic and a true case of survival, the built environment at Chester

Heights Camp Meeting demonstrates the complex relationship between the religious and

the secular realms in its teachings and activities, the urban and the rural worlds in its

landscape, and has cottage construction that mediates between the self-built tents of its

past and ready-made dwellings of the future. The camp meeting can be discussed not

only as a vernacular version of sacred space—an environment created to worship and

celebrate—but also discussed as liminal space, an environment created that exists at the

threshold of all other clearly defined spaces. The cottages here are neither entirely public

nor private residences, people escape here for neither entirely religious nor entirely

recreational reasons, and they are neither fully in the wilderness nor part of an industrial

urban world.

A complicated “city in the woods,” Chester Heights’ village of cottages sits

within a plan that makes use of the natural landscape. [Figure 2] Beginning with the

central open space at the center of the plan, camp organizers constructed the tabernacle at

the base of the hill so that the upsweep of land forms a natural amphitheater before it.

The central space is clearly defined and effectively walled by the surrounding cottage

facades on the south, east, and west sides of “the circle” (as the central area is called).

Figure 17 pictures the southeast comer of Auditorium circle, showing how the building

facades define the auditorium area as a special place within the camp. Today, twenty

cottages surround the circle on Auditorium Avenue; at the tum-of-the-century, there were

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. likely twenty-five. This area forms the literal and symbolic center o f Chester Heights

Camp Meeting ground. Figure 18 and 19 picture the tent and pews erected before

Chester Heights’ central tabernacle; when campers erected the tent in the middle of the

circle, lined up the benches, and congregated in this area, Auditorium circle literally

became an outdoor church

Demonstrated in this vernacular church before the tabernacle at Chester Heights,

we see the outdoor worship service as a fully embraced form by the Protestant church

orthodoxy. In the larger theological picture, churches encouraged Victorians to turn to

nature to experience God’s power; a theology termed “Christian Naturalism” by historian

Perry Miller.92 These trends were also evident in secular culture, of course, as the sea

and forest were regaled for their healthful and spiritual effects. But the specific removal

of worship from the formal church building on a popular scale illustrates a distinct

revisioning of the worship ritual in the nineteenth century. “This revisioning consisted of

radical transformations in architectural style, space, and spatial arrangement, and

furnishing and ornamentation... indicative of profound alterations that went far beyond

the material, for they were intimately connected to religious, social, and cultural

transformations.”93 Unlike the frontier camp meetings held outdoors for lack of

92 Kilde, Church Became Theatre, 152.

93 Kilde links these changing ideas about the worship ritual to the emergence of the American middle-class, to the general social upheaval of the post-Civil War years, and to the popularity of a “neo-medieval style” applied to the auditorium church. Creating a strong link to the past, medieval style ornament—such as the Gothic Revival elements found on Chester Heights’ cottages, paralleled other changes. Sermons came to discuss social issues and church groups crusaded for social reforms like abolition, temperance,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sufficient meeting spaces, Chester Heights meetings were purposefully held at a remove

from their home churches. Most congregants there belonged to congregations with large

church buildings, but they traveled into the countryside to conduct a different type of

service, one that literally refreshed their soul.

Beyond Auditorium circle at Chester Heights, streets named after Methodist

historical figures Francis Asbury and John Wesley surround the camp with curvilinear

paths and further mark the forested area as a sacred space. These romantic paths are

intersected by rectilinear, mostly numerically named streets on which most of the

residential cottages lots sit. Central Avenue, St. John’s Avenue, and Second Avenue

form almost a grid, placing a stamp of order on the sylvan landscape. The plans of

Victorian camp meetings often incorporated both a rational sense of geometry, as in the

radiating avenues on the plan at the Rehoboth Beach Camp Meeting in Figure 20, with

the curvilinear street designs of the romantic suburban style made popular at midcentury

by Alexander Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing.94

Cottages throughout Chester Heights sit on rectangular lots and share common

construction patterns and interior floor plans. They are of simple balloon frame

construction usually built upon brick pillar foundations.95 Figures 22 and 24 are scaled

and housing reform; all indications of the values of the new American middle class. Kilde, Church Became Theatre, 7.

94 John Stilgoe’sBorderland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) further explores the development of landscape design and suburban areas during the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth.

95 Balloon framing was invented in Chicago in the 1830s. Using lightweight two by four inch stud elements and factory produced nails, the technique did away with the load

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. drawings o f 19 and 20 Central Avenue’s first floor plans; both houses are pictured in

Figures 21 and 23. These two buildings represent typical construction and layout for

Chester Heights’ cottages, with 19 Central Avenue being on the larger end of the

spectrum, and 20 Central Avenue on the smaller. Both are non-insulated buildings, two-

stories tall with double porches on their front9 faade. Roof construction is simple,

comprised of all common rafter construction with simple tie beams, as illustrated in 2

Summit Avenue’s attic. [Figure 25] The exterior wall cladding on both 19 and 20

Central Avenue is “simple drop” horizontal board cladding; other Chester Heights

cottages have lapped or clapboard horizontal boards, some covered in tar paper siding.

Eleven of Chester Heights’ cottages, all located around the Auditorium Circle, have

vertical board-and-batten or channel siding, a visual distinction that emphasizes the

verticality of the two-story cottages.

The cottages’ fenestration at Chester Heights gives visual primacy to their front

facades. Nineteen Central Avenue has a double front door on its first floor, a feature

shared with twenty-four cottages at Chester Heights. This wide double door

configuration is found on cottages at several other camp meeting sites, including

Wesleyan Grove. Ellen Weiss notes there that “a wide double door centered on the first

floor is reminiscent of both tent openings and church doors.”96 Characteristic of Chester

bearing beams of box or post-and-beam construction. The 2x4 side studs ran continuously from the foundation sill to the top wall plate, with floors suspended from the side studs. Due to a simpler technique and lighter building elements, a less skilled craftsperson could construct a balloon frame house. Fred Peterson,Homes in the Heartland (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992).

96 Weiss, City in the Woods, 39.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Heights cottages in most ways, both 19 and 20 Central Avenue are unusual in the number

of windows each has along its side wall. Many of Chester Heights’ cottages have only a

distance of three to four feet between them, with no windows along adjacent sides.

Period and contemporary streetscapes along Central Avenue [Figures 26 and 27] and

along St. John’s Avenue [Figures 28 and 29] show how the cottages’ front porches open

directly up to one another, with the buildings’ long sides nearly touching. In an urban

way like a row house, attention is directed into the street by the close proximity of

Chester Heights’ cottages. The attention to street is strengthened by placement of

windows, doors, and fanciful ornamentation on the front of the cottage with little decor

elsewhere.

This window arrangement reveals the atypical residential purpose of the camp

meeting cottage. Even side windows that face directly onto a neighbor’s wall could let in

light, a crucial concern in a place that was not electrified until• 1915.07 In a • primary, non

vacation home that houses year-round activities in its interior—reading the paper,

sewing—one would expect to see illuminating windows on the long sides of the house.

Urban construction requirements encourage the building of light wells between row

houses for this purpose. Windowless side walls on these cottages reveal that outdoor

living as facilitated by the front porch was the preferred living pattern at camp meeting;

the cottage interior was mainly used for sleeping. These windowless walls also add a

modicum of privacy to interior spaces. In contrast,9 faade windows abound; they added

visual interest to the building, creating the subtle reference to church doors or tent flaps.

97 Correll, “Chester Heights.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Those cottages built at path intersections, as are 19 Central Avenue and 72 W.

Auditorium Avenue, present their long side walls to passing foot traffic and we find on

these cottages large shuttered windows for visual interest on what could otherwise be a

blank wall.98 [Figure 30] On cottages that are not fully developed residential living

spaces, window arrangements make evident the cottages’ function as decorative sleeping

quarters, more symbolic than utilitarian.

19 and 20 Central Avenue are both divided by a partition wall into a front room

and a back room with a shed roof kitchen addition on their rear, a typical arrangement at

Chester Heights.99 In the front room, there is an enclosed stair to access the room

(sometimes rooms) above. While there are no extant images of Chester Heights cottage

interiors from any date before the modem period, we know that as Victorian campers

invested in camp meetings, they filled their interiors with all the comforts of home.

Wright’s 1861 essay waxes poetic about the preponderance of furnishings at camp

meetings.

The erection of family tents is likewise becoming an established practice.. .their styles of convenience and of finish were varied, and sometimes highly attractive. They were commonly divided, by a partition, into a front and a rear apartment; the former being designed for a sitting, or reception room, and the latter for a dormitory. A carpeted floor frequently supplanted the plebian covering of straw; faultless couches with snowy counterpanes took the place of hard and uninviting pallets; comfortable chairs relieved the trunks, bags, and bundles of their

98 72 W. Auditorium Avenue sits at the comer of Auditorium Avenue and what used to be Third Avenue— a path so overgrown it is not recorded in the Chester Heights Figure 2 layout.

99 In some cases, the shed-roof addition at the rear of the building is contemporary to original constmction, in others it was added later.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. inappropriate burdens; spring sofas laughed at the rough benches o f the more primitive establishments; convenient chests of drawers snugly enclosed the requisite changes of apparel; while tasteful draperies and other ornamental appliances invested with new beauties these fairy habitations of the mimic city.100

This descriptive passage makes evident that though campers left their homes to

find spiritual renewal and refreshment in the wilderness, they carried all the trappings of

a Victorian interior with them, reinforcing the idea that the camp meeting cottage was a

unique arena where the private and the public worlds intersect. Wright’s “fairy

habitations of the mimic city” were an interpretation of the desired Christian home

environment. At the meeting, campers visited their like-minded neighbors in

miniaturized homes—homes tastefully and modemly outfitted to reflect the domestic

worlds of their secular lives. Bringing those domestic roles into the spiritual world of the

camp meeting through constructing little houses, hauling in spring-bottom sofas, and

frying a chicken dinner, campers sanctified their secular domestic lives through the

association with a sacred space.

The arrangement of cottages on the land at Chester Heights is very orderly: the

lots are of uniform shape and size, the buildings all face their gable ends onto the paths,

and the cottages have nearly identical footprints and heights. In this way, the buildings

reinforce the idea of community and equality at the camp meeting. In form, interior

layout, and proportions the cottages are of the same mold; of the sixty-five residential

structures on the property, forty-nine are two-story gable-fronted buildings with front

facades that measure between eleven- and fifteen-feet wide. Ten additional cottages have

100 Wright, “Failure?” 601.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the same facade width, but differ in that they are one-story tall only.All told, 80% of the

cottages at Chester Heights (more than 95% if one excludes the peripheral buildings built

on Asbury Avenue) have symmetrical front-gable facades on foundations that vary in

dimension by no more than a couple feet. The depths range on these cottages due to

varied rear shed-roof kitchen developments, but they overwhelmingly follow the pattern

of depth equals twice their width. Many measure twelve-feet wide by twenty-four-feet

deep or thirteen-feet wide by twenty-six-feet deep.

Though the specific contractual regulations from the Chester Heights Association

do not exist, extant by-laws for Crystal Springs Camp Meeting Association in Fulton

County, Pennsylvania (chartered 1886) explicitly detailed the construction of cottages.

Their rules regulate that “all tents shall be 12 feet front and 16 feet back, and 12 feet high

to the rafters, and divided into two stories; pitch of roof12x12 and covered with sawed

or shaved shingles.. .to have square fronts with such roofs as the builders may choose, the

leans of kitchens not to extend back over 8 feet.”101 The consistent footprint, orientation,

and construction materials at Chester Heights indicate that their Association must have

had similar regulations to create the sense of community between the camp meeting

cottages.

Chester Height’s cottage arrangement supports Anna Andrzejewski’s observation

that “the arrangement of the camp meeting ‘city’ exaggerated some elements of urban life

(density of communal living), inverted others (making private aspects more public), and

101 By-laws, Rules and Regulations of the Crystal Spring Campmeeting Association (Everett, Pa: John C. Chamberlain’s Book and Job Office, 1889), 8.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. transformed the experience of communal living into a spectacle dependent upon seeing

and knowing others.”102 The use of the land at Chester Heights indeed exaggerates its

urban aspects; the hundred acres was enough land to spread out the cottages, but the

building lots are clustered in dense areas. These facades open up entirely to the public

world of the footpaths; when the double doors on both floors open the fafade of the

building literally dissolves to reveal the interior. This degree of openness is acceptable in

a controlled camp meeting environment where you know your neighbors. This sense of

security and familiarity with neighbors was not a condition of the secular urban

environment of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia or Wilmington, Delaware. Cottagers

could not literally open up their secular homes and yet maintain their family’s decency.

This cottage village at a camp meeting becomes a utopian community, with the

communal advantages of urbanity tempered by a controlled population of like-minded

neighbors.

As cottage facades at Chester Heights literally open up their interior to the public

world with double doors and windows, they place the pious Christian family on view to

passers-by. Pictured in Figure 31 is the facade of 64 W. Asbury Avenue—a cottage that

is typical of other Chester Heights cottages with its paired doors on the first and second

floors flanked by windows. The cottages’ unique double story porches further promote

the expression of domestic activities to the public world, as well as provide a great

vantage point from which to visit with and observe your neighbors. Families residing in

these individual cottages at Chester Heights, therefore, reinforce to one another the

102 Andrzejewski, “Architecture and the Ideology,” 239.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Victorian era’s celebration of the nuclear family unit. The openness signifies that all

campers at the meeting are of the same Christian family symbolically, and the individual

camping units reinforce the cultural norm and propriety of nuclear family dwellings.

Period accounts noticed the camp meeting cottage’s proclivity for displaying the

family. A newspaper account of 1871 observed that “many of the friendly Methodists

threw wide open the doors of their cottages and the walls of their tents in token that they

would willingly receive the visits of the brethren in the Lord.. .Many ladies were

delighted at the opportunity to show their housekeeping talents.. .It certainly was a

pleasant thing to stroll down the line of tents, and see scores of pretty women playing

housewife so enthusiastically.”103

The requisite visitations at camp meeting were enabled by the double-story front

porches, spaces that mediate between public and private worlds. Unlike camp meetings

of the early nineteenth century, when there was a strict focus on the religious activity, this

period’s camp meeting activities included recreation and socialization within a landscape

that was imbued with religious values. The network of porches along Chester Heights’

streets gave individuals comfortable spaces to enjoy evening breezes, spend time with

family, and to interact with neighbors. This paper’s frontispiece shows campers gathered

on their front porches to enjoy the tranquil woods; Figure 32 shows a modem view of the

visibility of the porches as one strolls down a Chester Heights path. An additional social

arena in the camp meeting environment, the porch was a liminal space, part of your

103 “Methodist Camp Meeting,” New York Times, August 25, 1871.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. private quarter but open to visitation. As Herman Melville wrote in 1856, the porch

“somehow combines the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors.”104

This late nineteenth century was peak time for the American porch: the popular

Queen Anne style featured fanciful wrap around porches and James Garfield ran his

successful presidential “front-porch campaign” strategically from his home in Ohio.

Knowing America’s established emotional association with the domestic front porch,

Benjamin Harrison in 1892 and William McKinley in 1896 tried to charm the country

from the public platform of their private residences as well.105 The porches on the

Chester Heights cottages provide a platform between public and private and, in the

language of the late Victorians, in that way present the best associations of “home.”

Chester Heights’ cottages conform to the streetscape in position, proportion, and

size, but in their decoration they become individuals. Festooned in ready-made and

vernacular versions of the late Victorians’ eclectic ornament, the cottages have decorative

porches, gables, windows, screens, and shutters. Although the cruel effects of time,

weather, and neglect have worn away a complete record of the festive Chester Heights

decoration, there survives a tremendous variety of details on the sixty-five cottages. To

begin with one of the most superbly decorated cottages at Chester Heights, 46 E.

Auditorium Avenue has decorative bargeboards with hanging pendants on its front

facade, a round gable window, arched windows with fitted shutters, decorative eaves

104 John Stilgoe,Borderland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 102.

105Michael Dolan, The American Porch: An Informal History o f an Informal Place (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2002), 179-83.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. brackets, and wooden simulated quoins along its front comers. [Figures 33, 34] The

cottage at 36 E. Asbury Avenue, currently the only permanently occupied building at

Chester Heights, is the highly ornamented home of today’s caretaker. It is marked as

constructed in 1898 and hosts a bounty of turned posts, pierced bargeboards, and varied

shingles on its gable. [Figure 35]

The decorative elements that liberally adom the cottages at Chester Heights are a

combination of catalogue-ordered parts and vernacular interpretations of Victorian

ornamentation. Chester Heights’ era saw the publication of hundreds of style books and

trade catalogues. The introduction of the balloon frame building technique in the 1830s

allowed more Americans to undertake the construction of their own homes, and

transportation routes allowed for the dispersal of ready-made parts to build and ornament

them. A craftsman could turn to many published catalogues and style manuals geared to

his purpose. Books like William T. Comstock’s 1886Detail, Cottage and Constructive

Architecture... Showing a Great Variety of Designs for Cornices, Brackets, Windows,

Window Caps, Doors, Piazzas, Porches, Bay and Dormer Windows, Observatories,

Towers, Chimney tops, Balconies, Canopies, Scrolls, Gable and Sawed Ornaments,

Fences, Stairs, Newels, Architraves, Mantels, Plaster Finish, etc. etc., Including 45

Perspectives, Elevations, and Plans o f Modern Designs for Cottages with

Details...Making in all a Practical Book for Architects, Builders, Carpenters, and all

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. who contemplate building or remodeling Wood, Stone, or Brick contained Buildings

varied enough information to justify their lengthy titles.106

These books provided designs for exterior and interior building elements arranged

on plates in the eclectic styles of the Victorians—Gothic Revival, Eastlake, Queen Anne,

and Italianate, to name a few. Some books were intended to convey modem styles and to

instruct, others offered architectural components and hardware for direct purchase. Rand,

McNally & Company published an 1893 New Universal Moulding Book from which one

could order sashes, doors, blinds, “stairwork,” mantels, cut and embossed glass, and “all

kinds of interior and exterior finish.”107 Items were ordered by style number, and large

tables listed the prices as they varied by requested dimension. By comparing period

catalogues and style books with architectural elements at Chester Heights, we see that

builders procured at least some of the millwork this way.

The eaves brackets pictured in Figures 36, 37, 38, and 39 are four of the many

bracket designs on Chester Heights’ cottages. Plate 35 from Comstock’s design book

shown in Figure 40 features remarkably similar styles in complexity and design. Figures

41,42,43, and 44 show the repetition of a mass-produced sawn balustrade on several

Chester Heights cottages, all parts likely ordered from a catalogue as well. Decoratively

shaped gable end windows, like the fan-shaped and ogee-shaped windows pictured in

106 William T. Comstock,Detail, Cottage, and Constructive Architecture, 6th ed. (New York: William T. Comstock, 1886).

107 This particular catalogue was found at the Mulliner Box & Planing Co. and published by that company as Turn-of-the-Century Doors, Windows, and Decorative Millwork: The Mulliner Catalog o f1893 (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 45 from cottages at 34 and 35 S. Auditorium Avenue, are available in these

stylebooks, as are the pointed arch windows, tracery bargeboards, varied spindles, and

delicate finials that ornament and add individuality and charm to cottages throughout

Chester Heights. Mass-produced ornamental hardware on screen doors, cast shutter

holds, and flag holders mark Chester Heights’ cottages as keeping with commercially

available styles. [Figure 46, 47, 48, 49]

Chester Heights cottages are often more vernacular in style than buildings

pictured in these Victorian style books. Compared with many camp meetings, however,

like the nearby Brandywine Summit Camp Meeting, Chester Heights’ buildings are

ornamented and fashionable.108 When compared to seaside cottages at secular resorts or

the lovely cottages on Martha’s Vineyard at Wesleyan Grove, they are simple. The gable

ornaments in Figures 50, 51, and 52 reference the ubiquitous “gingerbread” bargeboards

found in the popular style books, but are so simply constructed that they were likely made

by a layman piecing together sawn geometric component shapes. The saw-tooth edge

bargeboard in Figure 50 was created by the application of right triangles to a straight

board; and the zigzag edges of the bargeboards in Figures 51 an 52 present irregularities,

likely not of factory production. The craftsmen at Chester Heights may have looked to

design books for their ideas, but some certainly directly imitated the industrially

manufactured elements purchased by their neighbors. At Ocean Grove Camp Meeting,

108 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Brandywine Summit Camp Meeting Historic District, NPS form 10-900, section 8.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. extant contracts reveal that 55% of customers desired a design concept from a neighbor’s

cottage.109

The ornamentation at Chester Heights, with its mix of manufactured decorative

millwork and handmade versions of the same designs, speaks to the changing means of

style transmission in the vernacular building tradition during the late nineteenth century.

During the 1870 to 1940 period, industrial development subsumed the traditional modes

for the transfer of ideas about spatial organization, systems of ornamentation, and

construction techniques.110 What was once transmitted by word of mouth and

demonstration was now dependent on commercially available architectural products

distributed by new transportation systems (railroads) and communication media. Trade

catalogues, and eventually companies like Sears & Roebuck, became the instructors of

the traditional American building technique. The cottages at Chester Heights exist in a

stylistic boundary. On one hand, they have up-to-date catalogue millwork parts; on the

other hand they employ true “vernacular” interpretations of the eclectic Victorian designs

that had been popular at resort areas for a few decades.

Though Chester Heights’ cottage ornamentation is an eclectic mix of stylistic

references and origins, the cottagers exhibit consistency in what parts of their cottage

they ornamented. Keeping in mind the architectural loss cottages suffered over the years,

thirty-one of the sixty-five cottages have decorative bargeboard trim, thirty-six of the

sixty-five have decorative eaves brackets, forty-six of the sixty-five have some type of

109 Suszkowski,Ocean Grove, NJ, 56.

110 Herbert Gottfried and Jan Jennings, American Vernacular Design: 1870-1940 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, Inc., 1985), vii.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. decorative gable window (thirty-two have arched, pointed-arched, round, fanlight, or

ogee-shaped windows), twenty-four have double doors, and thirty-one cottages retain

their decorative screen doors. The buildings imply that their proportions and construction

were dictated by Association regulations, but what of the decorative elements? How

individualized are these cottages? At the same time cottagers engaged a variety of

ornamental styles, they all kept within the same basic design vocabulary. Instead of

expressions of individuality, their ornament is a variation on a theme.

Reflected in these cottages at Chester Heights, we see the camp meeting as a

sylvan and sacred space where campers convened to refresh their religious beliefs,

encounter something new through education, and socialize with neighbors. The cottages

evidence the celebrated position of the nuclear family in Victorian society. The very

construction of single-family dwellings indicates the transfer of religious sanctity into the

domestic sphere. The camp meeting was an exercise in communality, but the persistence

of single-family cottages reinforced the value of nuclear family ties. In tandem with the

cultural abandonment of the camp meeting as a worship and recreation form during the

twentieth century, we see the symbolic addition of kitchens to the rear of camp meeting

cottages at Chester Heights. As activity at the camp waned, including the dining hall and

communal meals, more cottages developed independent food preparation areas in shed-

additions to their rear. [Figure 53] It can be argued, as by Leigh Schmidt in Holy Fairs,

that the demise of camp meetings in twentieth-century America can be attributed to the

juxtaposition between communal living and nationalistic ideas of a valued capitalistic

society. “The tent preaching, the enthusiasm, the lengthiness and crowdedness of the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. meetings, the sociability and conviviality, the communal festivity were all seen as in

tension with the modem capitalistic society that was emerging. In this context popular

evangelicalism was not the purveyor of reform, but its object.”111

When formed by Philadelphians seeking propriety in recreation and as kept active

by an association that cherished the rich history of camp meetings, Chester Heights Camp

Meeting was a place for families to escape undesirable aspects of their secular lives.

They escaped the city for healthy refreshment and spiritual renewal. When a family

arrived at Chester Heights for the week, they could follow a defined schedule, allow their

children to frolic safely, and enjoy the community of those who were by regulation of the

Association believers in what they held to be true. Their very cottages confirm their

values; each is part of the community, conforming to the street, and displaying just

enough individuality through its ornamentation to set it apart without disturbing whole. In

all is a feeling of safety and community.

The scale of the cottages nestled in the trees and hilly landscape, set back far from

the nearest road, combines to make this environment an escapist “fairy habitation of the

mimic city.”112 Much like Main Street at Disneyland, the buildings at the camp are

scaled such that a person feels bigger, inducing a playful affect. Human appreciation for

miniaturization runs deep, big features on kittens and children’s tiny tea sets inspire soft

feelings. This is not altogether unlike the effect of Chester Heights' cottages. Their

111 Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 218.

112 Wright, “Failure?,” 601.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. facades are dominated by their features— door and windows— much like a young animal

has relatively larger eyes and ears than an adult. The cottages are diminutive, and almost

a caricature of our concept of home; when you ask a child to draw a house, the result is

often a triangle-topped rectangle with a central door and two symmetrical windows.

Campers at Chester Heights were comforted by the scale of the buildings, delighted by

their ornamentation, and refreshed by the sylvan landscape. At their religious resort, they

were reminded by the material environment that this was not the place for their everyday

concerns. At the camp meeting, fanciful cottages released people to concentrate on the

more important issues of family and God.

They found a safe place for their families, an environment where religion was

accessible, a place to dabble in secular activities like roller-skating and Chinese pottery

painting while under the blanket and approval of neighbors and the church. In this way,

the camp meeting of the tum-of-the-century is very much like the “megachurch” of 2005.

Both offer an aspect of retreat from the secular city, but fully embrace parts of it. Huge

modem churches offer praise on Friday nights to the tune of rock music; camp meetings

offered lessons in how to read Hebrew or construct a Japanese parasol. Huge modem

churches have basketball courts and swimming pools; camp meetings had croquet fields

and swimming holes. Each offers a retreat from the confusion of a modem world, but

make themselves accessible by including the comforts and fashions of that world. Camp

meetings had daguerreotype artists on site; modem megachurches use computer

presentations to liven their services.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In their non-specific religiosity—that is, non-alignment with a specific religious

doctrine—megachurches and camp meetings relate. As opposed to the spirituality at a

Catholic Mass, a Jewish Synagogue, or a Presbyterian Sunday morning service, spiritual

celebrations at camp meeting services and megachurches emphasize individual

commitment to salvation, and are inherently eclectic and populist in their teaching. As

Balmer discusses inBlessed Assurance, “The emphasis on populism and popularity in

religion, together with a passion for novelty, has led, almost inexorably to eclecticism.

The quest for large popular followings gives rise to a constant shuffling and reshuffling

of religious beliefs and opinions to find a formula that will have widespread appeal.”113

This idyllic setting with secular comforts and spiritual undertones found great

popularity throughout the nineteenth century, and as we know from the growing

influence of evangelical ministry and mall-like churches in contemporary culture, it

resonates today as well.114 The success of camp meetings in the nineteenth century and

of megachurches in the twenty-first underscores that ours truly is a “nation under God.”

Religion is a central player to American political and cultural history. With their

democratic approach to religious salvation and teachings eschewing the formality of a

church doctrine and authority, the camp meeting tradition speaks to values held by many

Americans in the nineteenth century, and though the meeting tradition waned, the desires

behind it found a new form in the twentieth century’s megachurch.

113 Balmer, Blessed Assurance, 7.

114 Jonathan Mahler, “The Soul of the New Exurb,”New York Times Magazine (March 27, 2005).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. There are contradictions inherent at the camp meeting and megachurches through

the free mixing of populist secular elements with religious practice. This contradiction

points out the true complexities in modem religion, and more importantly the true

complexities of the reasons that people include religious rituals in their lives. There is a

centuries-old pattern of successful religious movements incorporating aspects of the

secular world, creating “a mimic city,” but tempering those benefits with sacred

associations and close community, making that city a “fairy habitation.” In the

Victorian’s vernacular sacred spaces—the grounds of their camp meetings—we find an

environment that allows investigation of these complicated but crucial themes in

understanding both religious and secular culture. A spectacularly intact example of this

telling environment, Chester Heights Camp Meeting retains its cottage-filled landscape

dominated by the tabernacle, its nostalgic memory of its own history, and a continued

celebration of the Christianity under the cathedral of trees.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

Documents in Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

Correll, David. “Chester Heights Camp Meeting Grounds,”Historic Delaware County Day, May 9, 1970.

Evening Bulletin: Delaware County News, "Chester Heights Camp Meeting Auditorium Collapses,” April 16, 1958.

Pedlow, John T. “Seventy-Five Years at a Glance.” [Chester Heights, Pennsylvania]: c. 1950.

The Record, “Spooning After Worship: Camp-Meeting Edict Against Moonlight Courting,” 1905.

Rodgers, Loretta. “Scaling new Heights: Study details upgrades needed at 19th-century religious retreat.”Delaware County Daily Times, October 4, 1998.

Schultz, G. Craig. “Chester Heights Camp Meeting.” Chester Heights, Pennsylvania: Chester Heights Camp Meeting Association, 1984.

The Sunday-School Assembly, At Chester Heights, Pa., July 7-16, 1880. Chester Heights, Pennsylvania: July 1880.

Nineteenth-century Sources

Ashmead, Henry Graham. History o f Delaware County. 1884.

Comstock, William T.Detail, Cottage, and Constructive Architecture, 6th ed. New York: William T. Comstock, 1886.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Crystal Spring Campmeeting Association. By-laws, Rules and Regulations of the Crystal Spring Campmeeting Association. Everett, Pa: John C. Chamberlain’s Book and Job Office, 1889.

Druid of the Lakes [pseud.].The Camp Meeting. [United States: s. n.,] 1810. Part of the “Early American Imprints” microfiche series, #19707.

Gorham, B. W. Camp Meeting Manual: A Practical Book for the Campground. Boston: H. V. Deegan, 1854.

Landisville Camp Meeting Association o f the M. E. Church. Landisville, PA: Landisville Camp Meeting Association of the M. E. Church, 1901.

Latrobe, Benjamin Henry. The Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe 1799-1820. Edited by Edward C. Carter, John C. Van Home, and Lee W. Formwalt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Mulliner Box & Planing Co.Turn-of-the-Century Doors, Windows, and Decorative Millwork: The Mulliner Catalog o f 1893. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995.

A Poetical Description o f a Methodist Camp-Meeting. Philadelphia: Printed for the Purchaser, 1819. Part of the “Early American Imprints” microfiche series, #49145.

The Rehoboth Beacon 1, no. 1. Rehoboth Beach, DE: Rehoboth Beach Camp Meeting Association of the M. E. Church, 1873.

Spectator [pseud.].A Treatise on the Proceedings o f a Camp-Meeting. Albany, [New York]: Websters and Skinner, 1810. Part of the “Early American Imprints” microfiche series, #21512.

Vaux, Calvert. Villas and Cottages: A Series o f Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1864.

Vincent, John Heyl. The Chautauqua Normal Guide: A Series of Lessons for the use of the Sabbath-School Normal and Training Classes. New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1880.

Wright, M. Emory. “Is The Modem Camp-Meeting a Failure?,”Methodist Quarterly Review 43 (October 1861): 582-604.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Secondary

Ahlstrom, Sydney. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

Ames, Kenneth. Death in the Dining Room. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

Andrzej ewski, Anna. “Architecture and the Ideology of Surveillance in Modem America, 1850-1950.” PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 2000.

Balmer, Randall. Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Banks, William N. “The Wesleyan Grove campground on Martha’s Vineyard,” The Magazine Antiques (July 1983): 104-115.

Barber, George F. George F. Barber’s The Cottage Souvenir No. 2: A Repository of Artistic Cottage Architecture and Miscellaneous Designs, Introduction by Michael H. Tomlan. Watkins Glenn, New York: American Life Foundation and Study Institute, 1982.

Briggs, Irene and Raymond DaBoll. Recollections of the Lyceum & Chautauqua Circuits. Freeport, Maine: The Bond Wheelwright Company, 1969.

Brown, Kenneth O. Holy Ground, Too: The Camp Meeting Family Tree. Hazelton, PA: Holiness Archives, 1997.

Bruce, Dickson D. Jr.And they all Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-45. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1974.

Butler, Jon, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer. Religion in American Life: A Short History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Candee, Richard M. Review of City in the Woods: The Life and Design o f an American Camp Meeting on Martha’s Vineyard, by Ellen Weiss. The Journal o f the Society o f Architectural Historians Al, no. 3 (September 1988): 317-318.

Cooley, Steven D. “Manna and the Manual: Sacramental and Instrumental Constructions of the Victorian Methodist Camp Meeting during the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Religion and American Culture 8 (Summer 1996): 131-159.

Crowley, John E. “In Happier Mansions, Warm, and Dry: The Invention of the Cottage as the Comfortable Anglo-American House”,Winterthur Portfolio 32 (Summer/Autumn 1997): 169-188.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Davis, John. The Landscape o f Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth- Century American Art and Culture. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Dewhurst, C. Kurt, Betty MacDowell and Marsha MacDowell.Religious Folk Art in America: Reflections o f Faith. New York: E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1983.

Dolan, Michael. The American Porch: An Informal History o f an Informal Place. Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2002.

Ebner, Michael H. “Martha’s Vineyard and the Vacation Tradition.” Review of City in the Woods: The Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha’s Vineyard, by Ellen Weiss. Reviews in American History 16, no. 2 (June 1988): 251-254.

Eslinger, Ellen. Citizens o f Zion: The Social Origins o f Camp Meeting Revivalism. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

Fairchild, Louis.The Lonesome Plains: Death and Revival on the American Frontier. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2002.

Giuriceo, Judy. “The City by the Sea’: Recreation and Re-creation at South Beach, Staten Island 1886-1898.” Master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1994.

Goodrow, Ray McKinzie. “From Sacred Space to Suburban Retreat: The Evolution of the American Camp Meeting Ground.” Master’s thesis, University of Virginia, 1994.

Gottfried, Herbert and Jan Jennings. American Vernacular Design: 1870-1940. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, Inc., 1985.

Grimes, John Franklin. The Romance o f the American Camp Meeting. Cincinnati: The Caxton Press, 1922.

Hayden, Dolores. Review ofCity in the Woods: The Life and Design o f an American Camp Meeting on Martha’s Vineyard, by Ellen Weiss. The American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (October 1988): 1121-1122.

Herman, Bernard L. Review of City in the Woods: The Life and Design o f an American Camp Meeting on Martha's Vineyard, by Ellen Weiss. Winterthur Portfolio 25, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 96-97.

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization o f the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Johnson, Charles A.The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion’s Harvest Time. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955.

Johnson, Janies E. Review ofCity in the Woods: The Life and Design o f an American Camp Meeting on Martha’s Vineyard, by Ellen Weiss. The Journal o f American History 75, no. 1 (June 1988): 250.

Jones, Donald. G. The Sectional Crisis and Northern Methodism: A Study in Piety, Political Ethics and Civil Religion. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1979.

Kilde, Jeanne Halgren. When Church Became Theatre: Transformation o f Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Lippy, Charles H. “The Camp Meeting in Transition: The Character and Legacy of the Late Nineteenth Century,”Methodist History 34 (October 1995): 3-17.

Lorenz, Ellen Jane. Glory, Hallelujah! The Story o f the Campmeeting Spiritual. Nashville: Abingdon, 1980.

Loveland, Anne C. and Otis B. Wheeler. From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.

Mahler, Jonathan. “The Soul of the New Exurb,”New York Times Magazine March 27, 2005: 30-37.

Maynard, W. Barksdale. “An Ideal Life in the Woods for Boys: Architecture and Culture in the Earliest Summer Camps,”Winterthur Portfolio 34 (Spring 1999): 3-29.

McArdle, Alma and Deirdre Bartlett. Carpenter Gothic: Nineteenth-Century Ornamented Houses o f New England. New York: Whitney Library of Design, and imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, 1978.

McDannell, Colleen. The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Menking, Stanley J. 200 Years o f United Methodism: An Illustrated History. Madison, New Jersey: Drew University, 1984.

Moore, R. Laurence. “Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America,”American Quarterly 41, no. 2 (June 1989): 216-242.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Morrison, Theodore.Chautauqua; A Center for Education, Religion and the Arts in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Parker, Charles A. “The Camp Meeting on the Frontier and the Methodist Religious Resort in the East—Before 1900f Methodist History 18 (April 1980): 179-192.

. Pitman Grove New Jersey 1870-1900: Through a Tiffany Window. Woodbury, New Jersey: Gloucester County Historical Society, 1984.

Peterson, Fred W. Homes in the Heartland: Balloon Farmhouses o f the Upper Midwest, 1850-1920. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

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Ray, Christine Mostert. “The Influence of Andrew Jackson Downing on the Suburban American Home.” Master's thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, 1987.

Robins, Roger. “Vernacular American Landscape: Methodists, Camp Meetings, and Social Respectability,” Religion and American Culture 4, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 165-191.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

. Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Scully, Vincent, introduction.The Architecture o f the American Summer: The Flowering o f the Shingle Style. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1989.

. The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins o f Wright. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.

Stilgoe, John R.Borderland: Origins o f the American Suburb, 1820-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

. Common Landscapes o f America, 1580 to 1845. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Suszkowski, Laura Marie. “Proper, Convenient, and Desirable:’ Building Cottages in a Victorian Methodist Camp-Meeting Resort, Ocean Grove, NJ, 1870-1879.” Master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1997.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Tolies, Bryant F.Summer Cottages in the White Mountains: The Architecture of Leisure and Recreation 1870 to 1930. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.

United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. National Register o f Historic Places Registration Form: Brandywine Summit Camp Meeting Historic District. NPS form 10-900.

United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. National Register o f Historic Places Registration Form: Chester Heights Camp Meeting Historic District. NPS form 10-900. March 16, 2001.

The Victorian Design Book: A Complete Guide to Victorian House Ottawa,Trim. Ontario: Lee Valley Tools Ltd., 1984.

Walker, Lester. Tiny, Tiny Houses. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1987.

Weiss, Ellen. City in the Woods: Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha’s Vineyard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Williams, Peter W. Houses o f God: Region, Religion and Architecture in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 1

Speaker standing before the Chester Heights tabernacle, addressing the crowd at a circa 1940 camp meeting. Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1940 Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. First Ave. Dormitory

Dining Hall

W. Second Ave. Tabernacle E. Second Ave.

Entrance from Valleybrook Rd The Circle"

Wesley Ave PH

Pavilion

Summit Ave. m DU 0 0 0 Q 0 0

Figure 2

Chester Heights Camp Meeting building arrangement and street layout, not to scale. Key to Appendix. Summer 2004 Sketch plan by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 3

Late nineteenth-century tent and cottage at Chester Heights. The cottage is likely 45 E. Auditorium Avenue. Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1890/1900 Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. NOTE TO USERS

Copyrighted materials in this document have not been scanned at the request of the author. They are available for consultation in the author's university library.

This reproduction is the best copy available.

® UMI

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. F ig u r e !

Philadelphia Baltimore Central Railroad at Chester Heights Camp Meeting Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1905 Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 6

1878 tabernacle at Chester Heights Camp Meeting Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Winter 2005 Photograph by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 7

70, 69, and 68 W. Second Avenue (1-r) at Chester Heights Camp Meeting Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photograph by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 8 and 9

70 W. Second Avenue c. 1908 on left, fall 2004 on right Chester Heights Camp Meeting Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives Modem photograph by the author

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 11

Sketch of an American camp meeting Jean Baptiste Gaspard Roux de Rochelle,Etas-Unis d ’Ameriques (Paris, 1837) Courtesy of University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 12

Frontispiece from Rev. B. W. Gorham’sCamp Meeting Manual, A Practical Book for The Camp Ground; In Two Parts. Boston, 1854. Courtesy of University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware

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? l n s isu'M xti,//,' <\., ■ u tS t j- a S im r i 'r i ,)j th e , i 7 ,/nUU Httn'h' o f ■ i^ S k s F&fefolphfe Caap Ixcursisr. AspuciaUcu cf ths U. E. " ' ,:u /tcrg^ „ bit/kRortH.!!,ornuj, ami,and ant,, an!;/,on on tho tho .tfdsfe 'think* of of mtditMoetiitiwKjon *,.i,t/4t.,«*int.,.n no tho tin- -u m n M o f iktu Cartifionie, the Corporate Seal om f i d , lm lll.rf ntidtfni si-fnnt,,res o f t%e JW siA oitantttlmV II jit m I Cl rf.r !'■■■,, of. i! 1‘hit rt'n I'n ’sf*--

Figure 13

Certificate of ownership No. 540 in two shares of capital stock in “The Phila. Camp Meeting and Excursion Association” Signed on June 1898 by Erwin Simpson Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 14

Women with Japanesque parasols and lanterns at a table under the tabernacle tent. Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1908 Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 15

Children dressed in kimonos with Japanese “flag of the rising sun” in front 36 S. Auditorium Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1900 Photograph detail courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

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WWHIII M e e t i n g A s s o c i a t i o n

Figure 16

Photograph commemorating the 13th Annual Encampment of the Home Holiness Camp Meeting Association Jefferson County, Indiana, July 1914 Photograph from the author’s family collection

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 17

Southeast comer of Auditorium Circle, 41, 40, 39, 38, and 37 (1-r) Auditorium Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photograph by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 18

Tent erected in the Auditorium Circle Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1940 Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

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Crowd gathered below the tabernacle tent in Auditorium Circle Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1908 Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives

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Copyrighted materials in this document have not been scanned at the request of the author. They are available for consultation in the author's university library.

This reproduction is the best copy available.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 21

19 Central Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Winter 2005 Photograph by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 22

Floor plan of 19 Central Avenue’s first floor, drawn to scale Sketch plan by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 23

20 Central Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Winter 2005 Photograph by the author

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Floor plan of 20 Central Avenue’s first floor, drawn to scale Sketch plan by author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 25

Rafters and tie beam system in attic of 2 Summit Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Summer 2004 Photograph by the author

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Central Avenue looking south, 22, 23, 24, 19, 20, and 21 (1-r) Central Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1900 (top) and winter 2005 (bottom) Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archives Modem photograph by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 28 and 29

West side of St. John’s Avenue, 9, 10, 11, and 12 (1-r) St. John’s Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, c. 1900 (top) and winter 2005 (bottom) Courtesy of Chester Heights Camp Meeting Archive Modem photograph by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 30

Cottage built on comer of Third and Auditorium Avenues, 72 W. Auditorium Avenue, with a heavily fenestrated side wall. Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photograph by the author

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Fenestrated fa9ade of 64 W. Asbury Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Summer 2004 Photograph by the author

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Porches on 70, 69, 68, 67 and 66 (1-r) W. Second Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Summer 2004 Photograph by the author

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Eaves brackets, quoins, round gable window, arched windows with shutters, bargeboards and hanging finial details on 46 E. Auditorium Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photograph by the author

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Fagade of 28 E. Asbury Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photograph by the author

100

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figures 36, 37, 38. and 39

Decorative eaves brackets on cottages (clockwise from top left) 10 St. John’s Avenue, 7 Summit Avenue, 62 W. Auditorium Avenue, and 49 E. Auditorium Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photographs by the author

101

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Figure 40

Eaves brackets on Plate No. 35 from William Comstock’sDetail, Cottage and Constructive Architecture New York: William T. Comstock, 1886 Courtesy of Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Collection

102

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figures 41. 42, 43. and 44

Porch balustrade details on (clockwise from top left) 36 S. Auditorium Avenue, 38 S. Auditorium Avenue, 15 St. John’s Avenue, and 39 S. Auditorium Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photographs by the author

103

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 45

Ogee and fanlight gable windows, 35 and 34 S. Auditorium Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photographs by the author

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figures 46. 47, 48, and 49

Hardware details on Chester Heights cottages, (clockwise from top left) screen door ornamentation and shutter latch on 2 Summit Avenue, flag holder on 18 St. John’s Avenue, and shutter latch on 9 St. John’s Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photographs by the author

105

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figures 50. 51. and 52

Simple bargeboards on (top to bottom) 9 St. John’s Avenue, 11 St. John’s Avenue, and 76 W. Auditorium Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Fall 2004 Photographs by the author

106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 53

Rear shed-roof kitchen additions on (1-r) 68, 69, and 70 W. Second Avenue Chester Heights Camp Meeting, Summer 2004 Photograph by the author

107

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPENDIX

PHOTOGRAPHIC SURVEY OF CHESTER HEIGHTS CAMP MEETING

108

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1908 Pavilion

All photographs in this Appendix are keyed to the Chester Heights Camp Meeting layout in Figure 2, page 71. The layout represents building location and orientation but is not to scale.

All photographs in this Appendix taken by the author Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, Summer/Fall 2004

109

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dormitory

1878 Tabernacle

110

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dining hall

TWflOOT

1 Summit Avenue

111

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 2 Summit Avenue

3 Summit Avenue

112

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4 Summit Avenue

5 Summit Avenue

113

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 6 Summit Avenue

7 Summit Avenue

114

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8 St. John’s Avenue

9 St. John’s Avenue

115

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 10 St. John’s Avenue

11 St. John’s Avenue

116

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 12 St. John’s Avenue

13 St. John’s Avenue

117

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 14 St. John’s Avenue

mzmrz

15 St. John’s Avenue

118

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 16 St. John’s Avenue

17 St. John’s Avenue

119

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 18 St. John’s Avenue

19 Central Avenue

120

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20 Central Avenue

21 Central Avenue

121

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22 Central Avenue

24 Central Avenue

122

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 25 Central Avenue

26 Summit Avenue

123

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 27 Wesley Avenue

28 Asbury Avenue

124

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 29 Asbury Avenue

30 Wesley Avenue

125

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 32 Central Avenue

34 South Auditorium

126

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 35 South Auditorium

36 South Auditorium

127

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 37 South Auditorium

38 South Auditorium

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39 South Auditorium

40 South Auditorium

129

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41 East Auditorium

43 East Auditorium

130

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 45 East Auditorium

46 East Auditorium

131

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 47 East Auditorium

48 East Auditorium

132

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 49 East Auditorium

50 East Second Avenue

133

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 52 Heins Avenue

53 Heins Avenue

134

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54 Heins Avenue

56 East Asbury Avenue

135

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 57 East Asbury Avenue

58 East Asbury Avenue

136

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 59 Fourth Avenue

61 West Auditorium

137

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 63 Third Avenue

138

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 64 West Asbury Avenue

66 West Second Avenue

139

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 67 West Second Avenue

68 West Second Avenue

140

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 69 West Second Avenue

70 West Second Avenue

141

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 72 West Auditorium

75 West Auditorium

142

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission 76 West Auditorium

77 West Auditorium

143

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.