Salem Methodist Campground

Salem's camp meeting began in 1826 and settled on this site in 1842, but its early congregation was not all free. Local tradition says enslaved people sat on logs at the edge of the tabernacle in the antebellum years. In 1880 most of the campground's Black members left to form Mt. Pleasant Campground a few miles north. The oldest surviving tent dates to about 1876, and the present tabernacle, the second, to 1891. Twenty-two tents, joined by dogtrot dining rooms, still ring the tabernacle for the revival each October.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pascagoula River Wildlife Management Area — 6.6 mi
  State-held bottomland along one of the last unchanged river systems in the lower forty-eight, in George and Jackson counties near Lucedale.
• Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge — 20 mi
  A refuge for one of the rarest birds in North America and the wet pine savanna it needs, created in 1975 as the first refuge established under the Endangered Species Act.
• LaPointe-Krebs House (Old Spanish Fort) — 25 mi
  The oldest standing structure in Mississippi, a French colonial plantation house in Pascagoula, set on land where Pascagoula and Biloxi peoples lived before the colonists came.
• Walter Anderson Museum of Art — 26 mi
  A museum in downtown Ocean Springs built around the artist who rowed to Horn Island to paint, with his 1952 murals of Iberville's 1699 landing and the Seven Climates of the town.

More markers nearby

• Graveline — 20 mi
• Moss Point Blues — 22 mi
• Eric Clark Coastal Preserve — 22 mi
• Gautier School — 24 mi