Bloys Camp Meeting
Fort Davis vicinity, Jeff Davis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Held each year since 1890. Founded by Rev. W. B. Bloys, a Presbyterian. His camp pulpit was an Arbuckle Coffee crate. First campers, 48 people from remote ranches and towns, slept in tents, wagons. Family groups had chuck-box meals, sharing with guests. Some 1,500 attend mid-August meetings today. Still nothing is ever sold in camp. Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Methodists and Presbyterians incorporated the Cowboys' Camp Meeting in 1902. Site, Skillman Grove, has been a camp ground since the 1850s. Elevation is about 6,000 feet.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Held every August since 1890, this interdenominational gathering was founded by Presbyterian minister Rev. W. B. Bloys, who preached from a pulpit made of an Arbuckle Coffee crate to 48 people camped in tents and wagons at Skillman Grove, a campground since the 1850s. Ranch families brought chuck-box meals and shared them with guests, and in 1902 Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Methodists, and Presbyterians formally incorporated the Cowboys' Camp Meeting. Some 1,500 people now attend the mid-August meetings, where—by tradition—nothing has ever been sold in camp.
Why it matters
The Bloys Camp Meeting is a living survival of the frontier camp-meeting tradition, binding scattered ranch families of the remote Davis Mountains into a community of faith that has endured, unbroken and uncommercialized, for well over a century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1890, the ranch families of the Davis Mountains lived scattered across some of the loneliest country in Texas—a high, dry expanse where the nearest neighbor might be many miles off and the nearest town farther still. At roughly six thousand feet, in a landscape of grass, rock, and enormous distances, community was something you had to deliberately gather; it did not happen by accident of a crowded street. Skillman Grove, the site of this meeting, had already served as a campground since the 1850s, a natural gathering spot with the shade and space that such a place required.
This was the tail end of the frontier era, the Reconstruction and Gilded Age decades, when the West was filling in but was still raw. For people this isolated, the rhythms of faith and fellowship could not depend on a permanent church on every corner. Instead they leaned on an older American tradition: the camp meeting, where families traveled in and camped together for days of preaching, singing, and shared meals.
The camp meeting was born of that need. It turned distance into an occasion—if you could not go to church every Sunday, you could come together once a year and make it count. That is the world into which the Bloys Camp Meeting was founded, and it is why, well over a century later, it still gathers.
People & events
It began with a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. W. B. Bloys, and a beginning so humble it has become the meeting's signature memory: his first pulpit was a crate that had held Arbuckle Coffee—a brand so common on the frontier that an empty box of it was the most ordinary object imaginable. From that makeshift stand he preached to the first campers, just forty-eight people drawn in from remote ranches and towns, who slept in tents and wagons because there was nowhere else to sleep.
What held them together was as much table as pulpit. Family groups brought their chuck-box meals and shared them with guests, so that hospitality was built into the gathering from the start. No one arrived a stranger for long. And from the beginning there was a rule that still defines the place: nothing is ever sold in camp. The meeting was never a market or a fair; it was a gift freely given and freely shared.
In 1902 the gathering took formal shape when four denominations—Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Methodists, and Presbyterians—incorporated it as the Cowboys' Camp Meeting. That act is quietly remarkable: on the frontier, where denominational lines often ran deep, these groups chose to hold one meeting together. What started with forty-eight people and a coffee crate now draws some fifteen hundred to the mid-August meetings each year.
Its place in the American story
The camp meeting is one of America's most distinctive religious inventions, a fixture of frontier life across the country in the 1800s. Most of those gatherings faded as towns grew, churches were built, and roads made Sunday travel easy. The Bloys Camp Meeting is significant precisely because it did not fade—it is a living survival of a tradition that has largely passed into history everywhere else, still doing the very thing it was created to do.
Its interdenominational character speaks to a broader American impulse, too. Out where people were few and hardship was shared, practical fellowship often mattered more than doctrinal division; neighbors who might have worshiped separately in a city found common ground on the frontier. Four denominations joining under one arbor is a small monument to that cooperative spirit.
And the unbroken rule that nothing is ever sold sets the place apart in a country where almost every gathering eventually acquires a price of admission or a row of vendors. A community that has kept a thing free and uncommercialized for well over a hundred years has preserved something genuinely rare in American public life.
If you visit
If you find yourself in the Fort Davis vicinity in mid-August, you are visiting during the one time of year the meeting truly comes alive—but even outside that window, knowing what happens at Skillman Grove changes how the place feels. This is a working campground with a long memory, and the quiet of the high country around it is part of its character. Picture the tents and wagons, the shared tables, the singing carried on the thin mountain air.
Let the small details do the work. Imagine a coffee crate standing in for a pulpit, and how far forty-eight people once had to travel to reach it. At about six thousand feet, the setting is cool and open, ringed by the Davis Mountains, and it rewards a visitor who slows down and simply takes in the scale of the country these families crossed to be together.
This is a gentle, contemplative stop on a Trans-Pecos road trip rather than a busy attraction—and that is the point. Come for the sense of continuity, the feeling of standing where a frontier community has kept faith with itself for generation after generation, and where, by long tradition, nothing is for sale.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Rev. W. B. Bloys
Related events
- · Incorporation of the Cowboys' Camp Meeting (1902)
Themes & tags
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