Qualla: Tucker's Grove Camp Meeting Ground

Tucker's Grove Camp Meeting Ground: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Tucker's Grove Camp Meeting Ground: Mary Tucker's Gift

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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-cont...

Tucker's Grove Camp Meeting Ground: The Tents

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 chick...

Tucker's Grove Camp Meeting Ground: The Monument and the Blessing

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Frida...

Tucker's Grove Camp Meeting Ground: Why It Still Stands

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 pe...