National Campground

The founders came from six denominations: Presbyterian, Cumberland Presbyterian, Baptist, the northern and southern branches of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Friends. They incorporated under state law with two trustees from each, and their board passed binding ordinances that banned alcohol on the grounds and protected the trees and shrubbery. The Reverend W. B. Brown, a Presbyterian known as Billy, preached the first meeting in the tabernacle, whose benches were set straight into the ground. As cars spread, people stopped camping and drove in for the nightly services.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Loudoun State Historic Park — 6.8 mi
  A reconstructed 1756-57 British fort on the Little Tennessee River in Overhill Cherokee country, besieged in 1760 and surrendered on August 9 of that year.
• Sequoyah Birthplace Museum — 7.5 mi
  The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' museum on Tellico Lake, near the town where Sequoyah was born, telling how he built the Cherokee syllabary and what the Tellico Dam drowned.
• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 21 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 23 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.

More markers nearby

• Morganton Crossing — 3.1 mi
• Sam Houston Homesite — 6.6 mi
• Cherokee Villages — 6.7 mi
• Sequoyah — 6.7 mi