Cane Ridge Shrine, Bourbon County, Kentucky

Yesterday I visited the Cane Ridge Shrine, in Bourbon County, Kentucky. This is a state historic site that is dedicated to preserving the history of the 1801 Cane Ridge Revival. An original meeting house has been preserved by the construction of a stone building over the original log structure. There is a cemetery in which some three hundred, mostly unnamed people lie buried, a visitor center/museum with a very small shop and a large number of picnic tables. The site is open most days from 10-5 and does not charge any admission. One lovely, very elderly docent was there when we visited. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of blogs about faith-based museums and historic sites. I want to begin to profile them in the same way that Charlotte Smith created a taxonomy for house museums. I want to understand the place these sites hold both for current expressions of faith and for what they articulate about the history and future of faith in our culture. I want to look at variations in the way the sites handle and serve religious pilgrimages, proselytizing, and bias in general. I want to see why people visit and what they go away having experienced and, I want to look at how these sites treat the "other": nonbelievers, people of other faiths as well as people the site's faith-tradition has tended to disregard, marginalize or objectify.

Rev. Barton Stone invited the community to attend a series of meetings in August 1801 to which as many as 20,000 are thought to have attended. This became the most significant event of the Second Great Awakening. Preachers and congregants from several different Protestant faith traditions including whites, enslaved and freed Africans and Native Americans preached in the open air and became convicted of the message of Christian salvation. So how does the site use its architectural, artifactual and archival resources to interpret this historic religious event? And how does it connect to today's visiting audiences? My comments will be restricted to what I observed in just a couple of hours and, as I continue to probe faith-based historic sites and museums, I will augment these kinds of observations with other types of research.

Historic Preservation at Cane Ridge - Architecture

The Cane Ridge Meeting House was built in 1791. Here it is preserved under a stone "memorial" edifice, turning the site into a shrine. A cement has been used between the logs instead of what was probably a mixture of mud, straw and animal hair. Had the preservation decisions been based on today's standards, cement would likely not have been used. However, sheltering the meeting house within a modern stone building makes it invulnerable to most of the damage brought by sun, wind and weather.

I love the shutter that allows you to see how the meeting house would have let in air and insects, not protected by screens. The electric lighting betrays what could have been a more relevant historical experience - daylight and lanterns would have been the late 18th century practice. 

No restrictions to visitors are set. People can climb the steep steps into the pulpit, flip through a Bible that is from the era but not originally from the site, and imagine what it would have been like to preach in that place. Many groups reserve the meeting house for services and performances today so the original purpose of the building still obtains, in addition to its role as a memorial

To be continued
c. 2018 Photographs and text by Lesley Barker