"Fairy habitations of the mimic city": sacred victorian cottages at Chester Heights Camp Meeting

Abstract

To walk among the grove of cottages at Chester Heights Camp Meeting is to experience the surroundings of a Victorian religious resort. Its sixty-five cottages, imposing tabernacle, and wooded landscape comprise the quintessential vernacular camp meeting. Similar to today's “megachurches” that offer basketball courts and nurseries, Victorian camp meetings prospered by fulfilling the spiritual, recreational, and social needs of their constituents. Using historic photographs and fragmentary written documents to supplement what is primarily an interpretation of extant buildings, this study finds Pennsylvania's 1872 Chester Heights Camp Meeting to be representative in layout and history but exceptional in survival. There, uniform layout, scale, and ornament foster a feeling of community and playful escapism, while the creation of individual family cottages asserts the primacy of the nuclear family unit.