Cane Ridge Meeting House ~ Sowing the Seeds

August 1801 - Bourbon County, Kentucky

The 'Second Great Awakening,' a series of religious revival meetings was punctuated by one particularly large and exuberant meeting that took place in early August 1801. The location was the Cane Ridge Meeting House in Bourbon County, about twenty-five miles northeast of Lexington. It must have been a well-planned and well-advertised event to have drawn such a large crowd from the sparsely populated surrounding frontier. Two hundred years later, the site remains rural and agricultural.

The organizer was Presbyterian preacher Barton W. Stone.  During the event, which lasted several days, an estimated ten to twenty thousand people converged on Cane Ridge. Stone had arranged for dozens of Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist preachers to speak. Rousing sermons are said to have induced shrieks, cries, dancing and jerking, trance-like states, barking, speaking in tongues, and visions among the huge crowds. Communion was given, confessions were heard, and hundreds, if not thousands, were saved.

Cane Ridge Meeting House - LOC collection

In less than a decade, Pleasant Hill would be one of several established frontier outposts of Shakerism. All the pieces were falling into place at just the right time.

Bourbon County is the very county that Charity Runyon and her husband Samuel Parks had migrated to from North Carolina seven or eight years before the Cane Ridge event. Mercy Runyon and her husband John Badgett had also made the trek from North Carolina about 1787, settling in nearby Fayette County. By the turn of the century, family patriarch Phineas Runyon and his wife Charity had settled along Otter Creek in Madison County.

We can only speculate about whether any Parks, Badgett, or Runyon family members attended the revival meetings at Cane Ridge. They were certainly influenced by them and the change they sparked over the coming years. As congregations and churches sprang up as a result of the revivals, so did Shakerism.

The Parks family would move on to Preble County Ohio while the Badgett and Runyon families stayed put and would soon make the pivotal decision that would change their lives and the lives of their children forever.

Society of "Harmless, Dreamy Enthusiasts"

THE MILLENNIAL CHURCH [SHAKERS.] 

The implantation of this society of harmless, dreamy enthusiasts, on the soil of Kentucky, and in the Mississippi Valley, generally, was a result of the Great Revival ... an ultimate outgrowth of the Presbyterian church. But little need be said about it. It has done no good, and comparatively but little harm, religiously. It was, especially during its early and medieval history in the west, of no small advantage to the agricultural, horticultural and mechanical interest of those neighborhoods in which its societies were located. The Shakers, wild and vague in their religious notions, but wise and practical in their management of their material resources, were the fore-runners in the improvement of live stock, agricultural and mechanical implements, and the methods of farming and gardening. On this account, if for no other reason, they deserve a brief notice. 

They are a frugal, industrious people, and have acquired considerable wealth. Their religious tenets are too silly and absurd to be worth studying.

this description comes from History of Kentucky Baptists From 1769 to 1885 by J.H. Spencer, publication date 1886