The arbor was built without nails. The trustees raised it in 1874 using a grove-and-peg method - heavy timbers locked together by joinery alone - and covered the whole structure with a tin roof. Beneath that roof, on the third Saturday of August every year for 152 years, African American families have come back to Tucker's Grove to worship, eat, sing, and sit on the wooden mourners' bench at the front of the arbor known as the 'seeker's bench' or the 'anxious seat.' Mary Tucker gave the land. Slavery had been over less than ten years. The camp meeting has missed only a handful of years since - once for polio in 1948, and twice for COVID in 2020 - but it has endured.
Mary Tucker, the wife of a local landowner near Iron Station in Lincoln County, gave the land for the camp meeting. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church - the AME Zion Church, the denomination born in early-19th-century New York City when Black Methodists left a white-controlled church to govern themselves - had a tradition of camp meetings, week-long gatherings that combined Sunday-school revival with family reunion. Five United Methodist congregations now sponsor Tucker's Grove together: Tucker's Grove itself, Brevard Chapel, Ebenezer, Rock Hill, and St. James. Gold Hill Baptist Church joins them. The original four trustees were Wesley Abernathy, Henry Brevard, Milton Monday, and Alexander McLean. Their descendants still attend. The camp meeting is, in the strictest sense of the word, an heirloom.
Around the arbor stand 98 wooden-frame 'tents' - cabins, really, each with a dining room, a kitchen, and a bedroom or two. They form an almost continuous square enclosure around the worship space. In the early years, families walked or came by horse and buggy, bringing live chickens for the week's meals. The Ice Man delivered blocks of ice for the families to buy. The tents have grown over the decades. Some have second stories now. As the wood weathers, families repair them with new or used lumber, the work happening in the weeks before camp meeting opens. Members who moved away to Charlotte, to Atlanta, to the Northeast, time their vacations so they can come home for the third Saturday in August. The grounds fill. The arbor fills. The continuity holds.
In 2002, a slab of granite was donated and set outside the arbor. The inscription reads simply: Tucker's Grove Campground, 1874. A cross is engraved on the opposite side. The Gregory family keeps the flower garden around it. Since 2012, an annual tradition has formed on the Friday evening before camp meeting officially opens: the blessing of the grounds. The host pastor walks a procession of trustees and participants around the property, sprinkling holy water as old gospel hymns are sung. Reverend Albert Perkins served as host pastor for more than 33 years before retiring in 2018. Dr. Marvin Caldwell succeeded him. Big Sunday - the fourth Sunday of August, the closing day - draws the largest crowd of the week.
Tucker's Grove was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. The Duke Endowment funded a 2017 renovation that raised the arbor's entry heights, replaced some wooden beams with like-aged timbers, and re-roofed the tin overhead. The photography stand has been a permanent fixture since 1958. Concession stands line one side, selling food and clothes and small goods. Camp meeting at Tucker's Grove is not preserved like a museum exhibit. It is operated, used, lived in - one of the surviving African American camp meeting grounds in the Carolinas, still doing what it was built to do a century and a half after the trustees pegged the first arbor beam into place.
Tucker's Grove sits at roughly 35.47 N, 81.08 W, near Iron Station in Lincoln County, North Carolina, about 25 miles northwest of Charlotte and 7 miles east of Lincolnton. Field elevation around 900 feet. Nearest airports: Lincolnton-Lincoln County Regional (KIPJ) 8 miles west, KCLT 25 miles southeast. The 98-tent ring around the central arbor forms a recognizable open clearing in the surrounding mixed forest when viewed from low altitude in August when activity peaks.