Two hundred years ago frontier religious revivals were made necessary by the scarcity of preachers and the great distances between people in America west of the Alleghenies.
First held in the open, these events were later held in large tents and then in roofed, but opensided, rough-hewn buildings called tabernacles. With three preaching services every day, the common feature of tents and tabernacles was a floor covered with sawdust.
Preaching for conviction of sin included an invitation for those who wished to be saved to come forward -- a short but intense journey down the aisle known as the "sawdust trail."
In my pre-teen years, when agricultural rhythms dominated American consciousness, camp meetings were scheduled between planting and harvest time. My mother's family owned one of the "tents" (actually a log cabin) near a still-existing...
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