It's just the kind of tent U.S. Grant once posed famously in front of, slouch hat angled back, left arm akimbo.

The kind that deflected rain from military brass –– and later found new life cocooning religious revivalists.

The historic old display tent at the Rawlinsville Camp Meeting is indeed military surplus.

Privately owned and in storage for many years, it was recently reacquired by RCM.

Now, it's been resurrected in honor of the 125th anniversary of the annual meeting at 475 Clearfield Road, Drumore Township. This year's session, coordinated by 14 United Methodist churches in southern Lancaster County, runs two weeks through Aug. 8.

The camp will commemorate its milestone from 1-3 p.m. today with a public historical tour of the RCM cottages, office and spring.

There's an exhibition of Rawlinsville memorabilia assembled by camper Ron Walton, a Steven Courtney band concert at 3 p.m. and frozen treats at the Boarding House.

"We're selling ice cream at 1899 prices," said the Rev. Mike Sigman, the camp's spiritual director.

And, of course, encouraging people to walk through the display tent pitched just down the hill from the Boarding House.

RCM folks now stay in little frame cottages. For veteran campers, however, the patched, khaki-colored tent brings back fond ––and not-so-fond –memories.

"These things would be polluted with daddy long-legs," said camper Cindy Gehr, who also remembered being scared by tree branches scratching against the walls in the dark.

Still, she added, wistfully recalling the open-air fellowship, it would be nice to go tenting again.

"You can stay here tomorrow night if you want," Sigman teased.

Tent 'survivors'
Gehr did not seem eager to take him up on the offer.

But many generations of families made temporary homes in the pointy-roofed pods.

Camp meetings were an American frontier phenomenon. RCM –– and its historic tent –– are stalwart monuments to a once booming tradition.

The first Methodist meeting here was held in 1870 "to glorify God and save sinners," according to an RCM historical booklet.

Nineteen tents were rented from the Landisville Camp for the inaugural RCM session, in 1886. Thirty-five tents sprouted the second year and 85 went up the third.

Coal-oil torches and bonfires built on rock piles lit the nights in that epoch. Early revivalists got to camp by horse or foot. The Lancaster & Southern trolley line briefly served the gathering in the early 1900s.

Eventually, Rawlinsville Campmeeting Association President Terry Hoffman said, the group would acquire upwards of 150 tents, which it would pack up at the end of its session and send over for use at the Central Manor Camp Meeting.

The display tent recalls those pioneering times.

The grommets were sewn in by hand, Hoffman noted. A stencil on the wall certifies the material as 8-ounce standard Army duck.

The names of long-ago campers adorn the ancient skin: Clyde Moser, for example, neatly lettered in his handle Aug. 17, 1913.

As per tradition, the front tent pole has been decorated with yellow crepe wrapping. A gladiolus plant blossoms cheerily out front.

A rain fly hovers overhead like a protective wing. It does not guarantee aridity. Once wet, the duck material conducts water like a wick.

"The last year we had the tent it was raining like everything," remembered 87-year-old Carol Huber. She positioned umbrellas over the beds to keep her children dry. Afterward, she bundled them back home, against their will.

That childhood reaction persists today, said Mary Lynn Eggers, 58, of Mount Nebo. "Once you moved to camp and got here the kids never wanted to go home."

Tenting allowed a kid maximum freedom of movement.

Just ask Walton, who at 53 is among the youngest "survivors" of the Canvas Age.

Walton fell off his cot one night and rolled out under a wall without waking up. Next morning, his family found him slumbering peacefully outside.

Camper Bev Turner has furnished the display tent with a bed much like Walton's. His grandparents' green camp meeting rocker sits nearby. A throw rug adorns the rough-board floor and a wooden ice box and a coal-oil stove stand in the corner.

The site is as neat and clean as it would have been in the old days, said Theresa Huber, Carol's daughter. "We never had mice because we always had black snakes," the younger Huber volunteered.

Even when the weather was dry there was, naturally, running water.

A kid ran and got if from the 1889 springhouse, Sigman joked.

In former times, as now, camp meetings sometimes spawned romantic ones. Walton said his parents' romance started at RCM.

Carol Huber, who told of walking out to RCM from Mount Nebo as a child, first dated her future husband of 63 years, Dick Huber, at the camp.

"Dick was 16 and I was 15," a footnote that has caused some eyebrow arching among her daughters, Carol Huber said.

The generations continue to throng the Rawlinsville Camp Meeting every summer.

Today, Sigman said, the sessions are as popular as ever, with up to 1,500 annual participants and a 13-year waiting list for cottages.

The white-painted cottages started springing up in the late 1950s and superceded the tents by the late 1960s.

When the tents went, Eggers said, "We were sad. You didn't want them to build the cabins. Now that I'm this age ... thank goodness!"