Family
| Camp "tents" are built by individual families on campground land and may be held by families as long as the tents are occupied each year. Each house is strongly identified with a family name, and family members gather each year from all over the country at Salem to talk, play and pray together. A single house may contain as many as 30 people or more. Prominent families are known not only by the number of generations they have been camping at Salem, but also by the size of the family groups they attract each year to the campground. |
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These family
groups (more like what anthropologists call "clans") normally
eat together as families during the camp meeting week. These meals,
generally consisting of hearty and plentiful "down-home"
regional cooking served on long communal tables inside the tents,
are important parts of the campground experience and important symbols
of family unity. For those without a tent or not wanting to stay in
the small cottages, there is also a small hotel on the campgrounds
where campers can have a simple room and meals very inexpensively. |
| Families tend to use camp meetings as a way to mark the passage of their lives. Camp tents sometimes display the "depth" of families in signs which name the family and the date at which the tent was first constructed. Campers are quick to tell visitors how many years they have been attending the camp. Recently one family marked the passing of one of their members, who, it was said, never missed a camp meeting in the more than ninety years she lived. |
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Though most of the campers live in cities and suburbs far from Salem, the annual meeting represents for them a kind of homecoming ritual, a "rite of re-aggregation" where siblings, separated during the rest of the year, get to spend time together talking, cooking, praying and eating, and where sometimes "distant" cousins get reacquainted. |
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Cookbook
compiled by Salem camp meeting families
Please click on images for larger view |
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Text
reads:
A treasury of recipes from the "Jennie Elliott Jenkins Tent." "Mama Jenks" attended Salem the year of her birth in 1888-1978. Beginning with the Elliott Family and handed down from wagon to "tent." Whether by Love, by Marriage, by Blood, by Because You Are You, and by even if you've come to the wrong "Tent" by mistake! WELCOME! Come on in! and what did you bring? May I have your recipe? |
Text reads: -Love E. Ann (Ma) McArthur Milton |
Introduction
and Table of Contents from "Appetizers and Fondue" to "Breakfast Foods & Jelly" |
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Article
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For complete article, please click image or click here |
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Opening paragraphs
read: In 1930 my father, Dr. Nat G. Long, was appointed as pastor of the Methodist Church on the Emory College Campus in Oxford near Covington.... |