Joyner's Camp Meeting will celebrate its 118th Anniversary during the summer of 2011.
A landmark in Fayette County in Joyners Campground, 9 miles north of Somerville, where interdenominational Camp Meetings have taken place every year since the first one was held in a bush arbor in 1892. Reverend Robert Venerable Taylor started the meeting in that year. He wanted a place in the northern part of Fayette County where a tabernacle could be built and people could meet and worship God for days and nights in succession.
To do this, he needed water, and was successful in finding this ground that had two springs on it, shady and cool. The owners, John T. Joyner and his wife Henrietta, agreed to donate 5 acres for this site. Mrs. Priscilla Jackson also donated 2 acres from her adjoining land. The place was named in memory of the Reverend Thomas Joyner, a pioneer Methodist preacher in North Mississippi and West Tennessee.
The Tabernacle was build the next year (1893), a large shed-like building of logs, open at the back and both sides with hand-hewn wooden benches. Dirt floored, covered with sawdust, the Tabernacle remains much as it was when originally constructed, except that a tin roof has replaced the early wooden shingles and electric lights have replaced the lanterns. Several of the old lantern wires are still hanging from the Tabernacle rafters.
Attendance in the early years reached as nigh as 2,000 for the night meetings and so many encamped during the week's services that the place took on the appearance of a small city with tents, cabins, a hotel, livery stable, barber shop and shoe shine shop.
Today, fifth and sixth generation families still move into their cabins on the campground every July for a week of good preaching and singing, just as their parents and grandparents did before them. They are still called to service by the blowing of a cow horn, a long-standing tradition. The first cabin built, called the "Singer's Cabin", still stands.
