by Joel A. Brown
The Cane Ridge meetinghouse, nestled in the serene landscapes of Bourbon County, Kentucky, stands as a reminder of one of the most significant events in American religious history. During the second week of August 1801, a sacramental meeting hosted by the Presbyterian church at Cane Ridge and its pastor, Barton W. Stone, drew large crowds. It is estimated that somewhere from ten to twenty thousand people—nearly ten percent of Kentucky’s population at the time—may have set foot on the grounds that week. The log meetinghouse seated perhaps four hundred; a wooden “tent”—a covered platform about a hundred yards to the southwest—helped accommodate the overflow. Wagons covered an area the size of several city blocks; nearby homes hosted services when rain and heat pressed worshipers indoors.
The pattern followed the Scots-Presbyterian communion season: Friday and Saturday preaching to prepare, the Supper on Sunday, and a thanksgiving sermon on Monday. Yet almost immediately, the predictable form spilled over into something else. On Saturday, preaching became continuous—inside the meetinghouse and from the outdoor stand. Before dark, the grounds echoed with penitent cries and shouts. People began “falling”—a phenomenon Stone had witnessed earlier in the spring at another revival in Logan county: many lying for hours “as men slain in battle,” occasionally reviving with groans, shrieks, or fervent prayers; then, faces clearing from gloom to hope to joy, they stood “shouting deliverance,” testifying in language “truly eloquent and impressive.”
Sunday brought a soaking rain and ordered sacrament. Long tables ran through the aisles; communicants entered in successive table-sittings as ministers rotated in administering the Supper. Estimates of communicants run from 800 to 1,100. And yet, at the same time, the meeting overflowed in unprogrammed ways: Methodist preacher William Burke climbed a fallen tree east of the meetinghouse and preached to a swelling crowd. In multiple places at once—meetinghouse, tent, stumps, wagons, Burke’s tree—four or five preachers were frequently speaking at the same time. An African American preacher addressed a largely African American gathering some 150 yards southeast of the meetinghouse.
Cane Ridge was not only large in scale; it was ecumenical and interracial, and it was marked by predictable rituals that gave way to improvisation as those gathered followed the Spirit’s leading. Presbyterians predominated among the clergy, but Methodists and Baptists also participated. The event cracked the shell of settled Presbyterian order on the frontier. It revealed a religious energy that transcended individual confessions. And it communicated to careful observers like Barton Stone that Christian truth and authority might be discerned in the cries and testimonies of the people, not only in the canons of a synod.
Turning the Spotlight on Cane Ridge
As we approach the 225th anniversary of the Cane Ridge Revival this year, we are intentionally turning our attention toward the Stone side of the Stone-Campbell story. This anniversary not only provides an occasion to celebrate and remember, which we plan to do, but also to think critically and carefully—historically and theologically—about Cane Ridge, Barton W. Stone, The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804), and how they shaped the movement, and continue to do so.
Admittedly, we have sometimes fixated on the Campbell side of the movement to the exclusion of Stone and his followers. This is true of the Historical Society and of historians across the three streams of the movement. There are understandable reasons for this: e.g., the Historical Society is located in Campbell land (Bethany, WV), and the Campbells left a robust documentary legacy, disproportionate to Stone’s. Across all three streams of the Stone-Campbell movement, historians have often prioritized the Campbells, sometimes for good reason but often not. Taken to an extreme, this imbalance has led some historians to question Stone’s place among the movement’s founders altogether. I strongly disagree with such assessments, but I also confess that I have sometimes been guilty myself of prioritizing the Campbells and not giving Stone due attention. When we consistently spotlight one side of the story, the other can slip from view.
For that reason, it is good and right that, in this anniversary year, we deliberately turn the spotlight toward Barton Stone and Cane Ridge—not necessarily as an act of contrition born of guilt, but as an invitation to deeper and perhaps even renewed understanding.
Learning to See Cane Ridge Anew
My own way of seeing Cane Ridge was shaped significantly by my studies with Newell Williams, Stone’s biographer, when I was a Master’s student at Brite Divinity School. I vividly remember one class session in particular. In the middle of his lecture on the Cane Ridge Revival, Professor Williams suddenly stiffened his body, tilted his head back, and let out a short howl. It was startling to us students, and I doubt any of us has forgotten that moment. He was, of course, reenacting for us one of the more curious and sensational of the reported “exercises” at Cane Ridge—barking.
Then he stopped and said something that has also stayed with me ever since. It is easy, he warned, to get lost in the spiritual excess and sensationalism of these accounts. But if we are to read them critically and generously—as we should—we must attend to what they were signaling and responding to. We might begin to see them as genuine, if radical and alien to us, responses to people sensing the Spirit of God moving powerfully among them. “It was,” Newell said, “as though the ground was shaking under their feet.”
Moving toward a renewed understanding of Cane Ridge will rely on our ability to remember that the objects within our historical gaze, as Jon Meacham puts it, “did not live in some land called ‘History’ or ‘the Past.’ Like all of us, they dwelt in a vivid, living, chaotic present.” It can sometimes be helpful, in fact, to consider that there is no such thing as the past, but only someone else’s present, and that one of the key tasks of the historian is to help us shed the illusion of the past and enter that previous present. Then we will encounter something familiar, something we know, or don’t—that they, like us, did not know how things would turn out. The future was as elusive to them as it is to us. They experienced the same anxiety we do about what lies ahead and how the decisions we make now will shape it. They went to Cane Ridge without the slightest idea of what would happen or what it would produce.
Cane Ridge in Context
In recent decades, historians have helpfully complicated our understanding of Cane Ridge, moving toward richer contextualization so that we can enter the “vivid, living, chaotic present” of those who gathered there. One important contribution to that effort was the volume Cane Ridge in Context: Perspectives on Barton W. Stone and the Revival (1992), published by the Historical Society upon the 200th anniversary of the construction of the Cane Ridge meetinghouse in 1791. (The complete digitized volume is publicly available on JSTOR.)
Collectively, the chapters in that volume challenged the idea that Cane Ridge was merely an isolated eruption of frontier enthusiasm, situating the revival within its social, theological, and transatlantic contexts. It produced a more complex picture. Cane Ridge was not simply spontaneous; it was structured. It was not uniquely American; it was shaped by older religious practices carried across the Atlantic. And it was not only an instance of spiritual and emotional excess; it was rooted in sacramental practice and ritual time.
This historiographical point matters. It helps us resist both the temptation to dismiss Cane Ridge as irrational enthusiasm and the temptation to celebrate it as uniquely American religious genius. Instead, we are invited to see Cane Ridge as part of a longer Christian story—shaped by continuity and exchange as much as innovation.
Birthplace or Turning Point?
In the same year that Cane Ridge in Context was published (1992), literary critic Harold Bloom, in addition to referring to Cane Ridge as “the first Woodstock,” suggested that it was not only the birthplace of the Stone-Campbell movement but that “The American Religion proper is born at Cane Ridge.” Bloom’s is certainly a radical (and, in my opinion, not particularly helpful) claim, but it is not inconsistent with how many from the frontier school have interpreted Cane Ridge—the quintessential American revival, “America’s Pentecost.”
It is also of a piece with most Stone-Campbell historical accounts, popular and scholarly. Disciples have long pointed to Cane Ridge as our “birthplace.” Edgar DeWitt Jones, serving as President of the Cane Ridge Preservation Project in 1954, made his appeal for enshrining the meetinghouse and grounds of Cane Ridge precisely because it is “the birthplace of a faith.” It is worth pondering, however, what such a characterization occludes—what do we miss when we view Cane Ridge as only birthplace?
In one of the most insightful books on American revivalism in the era of Cane Ridge, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (Eerdmans, 2001/1989), Leigh Eric Schmidt notes, “To become a birthplace is to become a beginning and only a beginning.” If we understand Cane Ridge only as an origin story, we might miss its culminating and transitional significance. We should take our cue here from Stone, Richard McNemar, and the other signatories of the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, one of our “foundational” documents that would emerge three years later in 1804. In the immediate aftermath of the revival, they certainly sensed that something new was taking root, but just as much, they recognized that something else was coming to an end. In form, the document does not signal the birth of a new movement, but rather serves as a death announcement.
As much as we should think about Cane Ridge as a birthplace for Disciples—which it certainly is—we only partially understand its significance if that’s the only way we view it. It would also be helpful, as Schmidt suggests, if we “turned this story around and viewed the Kentucky revivals … as recurrent festivals within a long and complex Scottish tradition. … Cane Ridge is not so much an American birthplace, but a culminating event in a transatlantic exchange of religious practices surrounding the Lord’s Supper.” Cane Ridge was many things—a birthplace for sure—but it was also a complex, transitional event in the shaping of American religion at the dawn of the nineteenth century. It was a moment of rupture, too, between two different worlds, a topic I plan to explore in a forthcoming installment of the “Historian’s Corner” later this year.
Remembering—and Forgetting—at Cane Ridge
Turning toward Cane Ridge, we inevitably engage habits of memory. We remember it as an origin story. We can and should give thanks for that memory. It is powerful and formative.
But birth stories almost always carry an equal and opposite forgetting.
The minutes and memoirs preserve some names and omit others. The farms and fields that hosted wagons and worship were worked by enslaved people, whose labor made such gatherings possible but whose lives are largely absent from the record. We know that an African American preacher addressed a largely African American gathering during the revival, but his words were heard and not recorded. Women and children exhorted with astonishing freedom, only to see their voices gradually disciplined and domesticated as new forms of order took shape.
Cane Ridge is a site of revival, but it also stands in a landscape shaped by enslavement, displacement, and racial and gendered hierarchies. It does not float above that history. It is a story entangled with race, with settler-colonial expansion, and with persistent questions about who is authorized to speak, to exhort, to preside, to be educated, and to be remembered.
Naming this does not diminish the memory of Cane Ridge. It brings it into clearer focus. And it should be instructive for us as we prepare to commemorate its anniversary. Faithful remembering, which is the business we are in, welcomes gratitude and celebration but also demands honesty and bravery to tell the hard truths.
Looking Ahead
As we prepare to mark the 225th anniversary of Cane Ridge, we need to tune our historical gaze. How we remember shapes how we commemorate. So, in coming issues, Historian’s Corner will feature reflections from me and other scholars on Cane Ridge, Barton Stone, and the many layers of meaning bound up in this place and event. My hope is that, together, these essays will help us approach the anniversary not nostalgically, but with historical acuity and spiritual awareness—attentive to ritual and context, to memory and omission, and to the ongoing work of the Spirit that still calls the church into freedom, unity, and even revival.