Sandy Springs Methodist Church camp meeting was held on church property, conveniently near the spring for which the community is named. The first Sandy Springs Methodist Church building was a log cabin constructed on five acres donated by Wilson Spruill sometime between 1849 and 1851. The camp meeting tradition appears to have begun before the Civil War, as maps drawn by Union soldiers in Sandy Springs in 1864 indicated the location of the Methodist campground.
Each year at laying by time, the days that followed the last work on the crops before harvest time, families would gather at the campground for five to ten days of religious meetings, singing, food, and socializing. They stayed in small structures called tents, which were log cabins with sawdust floors.
To prepare for camp meeting, the family gathered food, bedding and cooking utensils. Women sewed new clothes for the family so they could look their best for the event, which was the sum-mer vacation of a farming family. People also brought their musical instruments to entertain friends between sermons.
Sandy Springs camp meeting in 1912 ended on August 11th after almost a week of daily sermons. “The tents were filled with hundreds of worshipers from the surrounding territory, and the final service was marked by short sermons by four prominent divines,” announced the newspapers. Ac-cording to Lois Coogle’s “Sandy Springs Past Tense,” the preachers who came to camp meeting were provided room and board for their sermons. A large tent that could hold ten men was located on the camp property where a water tower was later built.
The 1927 camp meeting was advertised in the Atlanta Journal newspaper. The location was Sandy Springs, 12 miles north of Atlanta on Roswell Road. The advertisement included the names of guest preachers and the directors that year for camp meeting….
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