The Camp Meeting That Made a Town

Before the roller coasters, before the neon, Old Orchard Beach was a place people came to pray. In the early eighteen seventies, Methodists founded the Old Orchard Beach Camp Meeting Association and laid out a religious campground in the pine grove near the shore. Worshippers sat on wooden benches built around the tree trunks, and at its height the ground could hold thousands of people gathered for open air preaching.

These camp meetings became enormous events, drawing not only Methodists but Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, and even temperance advocates who used the gatherings to spread their cause. The railroads that fed those crowds are the same rails that would later carry vacationers to the beach. In the early eighteen eighties the association platted a large oceanfront subdivision of cottage lots and campground plots, one of the most ambitious land plans in the state at the time.

Some sources describe crowds in the tens of thousands, but that figure really belongs to the national camp meeting movement as a whole. What is certain is that the piety came first. The summer crowds, the trains, and the cottages that built Old Orchard Beach all began with people coming to worship by the sea.