Ocean Grove Tent Colony

Ocean Grove was founded in 1869 by a group of Methodist ministers and laypeople who set aside this stretch of coast as a permanent camp meeting, a place to gather each summer for worship, preaching, and prayer by the sea. In the earliest years the faithful came and pitched simple tents on the ground near the preaching stand, living in canvas for the season as they attended the services.

As the community took root, those temporary tents gave way to a more settled arrangement. Families secured regular spots and built the distinctive canvas-and-wood structures that still stand, a striped tent front for living joined to a small permanent cabin behind for cooking and sleeping. Around this canvas village grew the town of gingerbread cottages and, in 1894, the Great Auditorium, but the tents remained the spiritual and physical heart of the colony.

Each unit in the colony is really two parts joined together. The front is a canvas tent, raised each spring and taken down each fall, with a covered porch where families sit out the summer evenings. Behind it stands a small wooden cabin, a permanent little structure that holds the kitchen, bath, and sleeping space, so that the whole makes a compact seasonal home.

The tents belong to the Camp Meeting Association and are leased to the families who occupy them, and the arrangement has held for generations. Families return to the same tent summer after summer, decorating the porches, tending the flowers, and passing the lease down to their children, which is why an opening in the colony is so rare and so prized. The canvas goes up in spring and comes down in fall, marking the rhythm of the shore year.

The tent colony sits at the center of Ocean Grove, one of the best-preserved Victorian seaside towns in the country, so intact that the whole village is a National Historic Landmark district. The narrow lanes between the tents open onto streets of ornate wooden cottages, and the whole scene, canvas and gingerbread together, feels like a step back into the nineteenth century.

The town was long famous for its strict Sabbath, once closing its gates to traffic on Sundays, and a gentle version of that quiet tradition survives. Walking the lanes of the colony, past porches strung with flowers and families gathered in the evening cool, visitors witness a tradition that has been carried on unbroken since the days of the camp meeting, only steps from the beach and boardwalk.

Summer is the only season the colony truly lives, when the canvas is up, the porches are full, and families settle in for weeks by the sea. It is the time to see the tents in their glory, framed in flowers and busy with life, the camp-meeting tradition at its fullest.

Late spring is when the canvas goes up and the colony wakes, a quieter time to see the tents newly raised before the summer crowds arrive. In early fall the canvas comes down and the families depart, and through the cold months the colony stands as a village of small wooden cabins, its tents stored away, waiting for the return of warm weather to bloom again.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.