The early nineteenth century camp meetings drew so many people that it was impossible for one or two preachers to meet the spiritual and practical demands for preaching, exhortation and ministry. While the location might be associated with a particular denomination (the Cane Ridge Meeting House was Presbyterian, for example), preachers and lay-ministers from every denomination in attendance were pressed into service. This cross-denominational cooperation and collaboration is one of the characteristics that made the revivals so contagious, in my opinion. Even women were exhorters. Of course, this was an unheard of practice in the days where men and women sat in different sections of a church and where women were not invited nor expected to preach to or to teach men. Women exhorters were protested but one preacher retorted to the critic this way, as recorded in A.P. Mead's 1860 history of the camp meeting revivals, Manna In The Wilderness: " You think women are proper teachers ...

Women are often left under-acknowledged in the historical record. African American women are even less likely to be named. It is our commitment here at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project to honor the contributions of past Kentucky Christians including men, women, whites, blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and others. It takes a lot of work to find documented evidence of their existence and of how they explained the importance of their faith to their lives and work. An example of the minimal mention given to Dinah Durrett in the written record is the subject of this blog. Peter Durrett organized the first two African American churches in Kentucky beginning in 1808. His was the second African American church in the United States, an oddity given that Kentucky is a southern state and that Durrett was enslaved. His nickname was Old Captain. He emigrated to Kentucky in 1781 with the Traveling Church, a pilgrimage of some 500 Baptists from Spottsylvania, Virgina....

  The Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project is committed to discovering, honoring, and telling factual stories about people who lived and worked in this state who also gave a public account of their Christian faith. Researching the stories of women and minorities from the past is frequently more difficult than researching what happened to men from the majority culture. Many times their perspectives are missing from the standard historical narratives. Often, written accounts of their lives were neither created nor have they been preserved. Because of past gender, ethnic and racial biases, what is written is about them often disregards their own beliefs and opinions. To discover their stories takes tenacity and creativity as well as an ability to read between the lines. Take Martha Cross, for example. She, her husband, Alexander, and their seven-year-old son, James, left Hopkinsville, Kentucky, for Liberia in 1853. They were sent from the Ninth Street Christian Ch...