The 2024 Horry County Museum Documentary Film Series continues with Hallowed Ground: Primitive Camp Meetings of the South Carolina Lowcountry. This film features the St. Paul Camp Meeting, located in Harleyville, South Carolina, approximately 45 miles northwest of Charleston.  Similar meetings were first started in the late 1700s by the horseback evangelist, Bishop Francis Asbury, along with African American evangelist, Harry Hosier, who rode with him to conduct “brush arbor” worship services for white planters and those enslaved on their plantations. In the Dorchester County pine forests of South Carolina these camp-meetings have “tents” built and owned by long-standing extended families from their respective communities. The campgrounds are all located within a 20 mile radius of each other near St. George, SC. At five different times each year these camp-meetings draw more than 3,000 congregants from extended families and friends of families nationwide. These congregants stay for a week and are invited to the “tents” of family members, the worship services, and to enjoy the Southern home-cooked meals prepared 3-times-a-day on wood stoves in each tent during the seven days of camp-meeting. St. Paul began in the decades after emancipation, when four leaders of the St. Paul community purchased property to hold religious services. Interviews for the St. Paul meeting feature new and lifetime participants of the event and focus on the importance of food, faith, and fellowship in this historic annual gathering.

The film is free to the public and will be shown at 1:00 PM, Wednesday, February 28^th, at the Horry County Museum, located at 805 Main Street in Conway.

The Horry County Museum Documentary Film Matinees will continue throughout 2024. For a list of films, visit our website at www.horrycountymuseum.org. For more information, call the Horry County Museum at 843-915-5320 or e-mail hcg.museum@horrycountysc.gov.