Piedmont Camp Meeting Grounds Historic District

Piedmont Camp Meeting Grounds is a five-acre religious campground set in a hemlock grove beside Bottom Creek in Montgomery County, Virginia. It includes a large rustic tabernacle built in 1939, about two dozen small frame cottages from around 1940, a dining hall that began as a church, a concrete block Pentecostal Holiness church rebuilt in 1936, and the ca. 1873 Piedmont Methodist Church, the oldest building. The camp began after a 1910 tent revival at the Methodist church led a group to leave and receive donated land across the road for a tabernacle. Meetings have been held there every year since. The cottages, many board-and-batten with front porches, echo regional double-cell houses but are smaller. The district was recognized for architecture because its buildings and layout preserve the form of a seasonal campground and link to the camp meeting tradition of the early nineteenth century. The tabernacle is unique within the county.