Falls Creek: The World's Largest Youth Camp

In the Arbuckle Mountains south of Davis, Oklahoma, a Baptist youth camp has been running every summer since nineteen seventeen. It started when two organizers, J. B.

Rounds and W. D. Moorer, spotted a photograph of a wooded creek property at a barbershop in Davis and immediately thought it was the right place for the Baptist Young People's Union's annual gathering.

That first summer, two hundred seventy-three campers showed up. A century later, Falls Creek draws more than fifty-five thousand young people each summer, making it the largest youth encampment in the United States and the largest Christian camp in the world. Over two million people have walked its three hundred and five acres since it opened.

What began with a barbershop photograph became a permanent institution in American evangelical life.