In August 1801 settlers came from across Kentucky and beyond to a communion gathering at Cane Ridge. Estimates of the crowd run from ten to twenty thousand at a time when the largest town in the state held under two thousand people. Preachers of several denominations spoke at once from stumps and wagon beds, and the meeting ran for days.
Accounts describe scenes that divided observers then and still do: people falling to the ground under conviction, weeping, and long hours of prayer through the night. Barton Stone wrote his own careful account rather than trusting rumour.
Whatever is made of the manifestations, the frontier changed. Churches multiplied across Kentucky and Tennessee, drunkenness and lawlessness declined in whole counties, and the camp meeting became the shape of American revivalism for the next century.