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By Eugene Scheel
Sunday, August 6, 2000; Page V03

In 19th-century Loudoun County, August was the month for family gatherings. The hay had been cut and stacked. The wheat had been cut, milled into flour and driven to downriver markets. There was time for leisure before corn weeding and harvest in the fall.

August also was the month for meetings: the quarterly Friends' meeting in Lincoln, the annual Potomac Baptist Association gatherings at various Virginia Piedmont churches and the Methodist camp meetings. In Leesburg, then as now, the Loudoun County Fair was held, and so were August Court Days, when lawyers tried their most difficult cases before admiring or curious onlookers.

The meetings and the fair always had what was called a "dirty camp," where "ardent spirits"--as liquor and wine were called--were sold on the sly. There were several saloons near the courthouse, for Leesburg--like Warrenton, Marshall, Middleburg and Upperville--had always been wet. There the profit motive won out over scriptural warnings that equated excessive drinking with sin.

The Old Testament's anti-alcohol teachings prevailed in Hamilton and Waterford, in the heartland of the Loudoun Valley, which was heavily Quaker, Baptist and Methodist. In the valley--in some woods belonging to Samuel Piggott Brown, just north of the present Holmes Gregg place in Lincoln--the first Bush Meeting was held in August 1876. There was no clearer statement of the meeting's purpose than an 1878 advertisement: "We shall endeavor to make this a Grand Religious Temperance Demonstration."

The meeting got its name from the shelter in which it was held. As had been the custom at many protracted religious and temperance gatherings, the organizers drove stakes into the ground, put up cross pieces and placed bushes atop the pieces to shade the meeting-goers.

From 1877 on, Bush Meeting was held in Purcellville, then a village of 200 on the Washington & Ohio Railroad in an area known as The Hill or Dillon's Woods between today's 25th and 28th streets. The sponsoring organization was the Loudoun County Lodge, International Order of Good Templars.

Before long, the annual three-day gala was a fixture, and throughout upper Loudoun, the July greeting became: "Are you going to Bush Meeting?" Temperance orators and evangelists came from across the Middle Atlantic states and later from across the United States and Canada. Some speakers were known by their nicknames: M. Van Bennett was called "the Kansas Cyclone"; Rollo Kirk Bryan, of Michigan, "the Chalk Talker"; and George Bain, "the silver-tongued Kentuckian."

In 1882, when daily crowds numbered as many as 5,000--one-quarter of Loudoun County's population--the railroad began its half-fare round-trip excursions--$1.55, a day's wage for the average city person--between Washington and Purcellville. The trip took 2 1/2 hours each way, but the scenery--and several high wooden trestles over creeks--made the journey exciting. The railroad's ads noted: "All persons who have never seen the BEAUTIFUL LOUDOUN VALLEY, with its grand old mountains and green vales, should not lose this opportunity to do so."

Bush Meetings were chronicled in detail by Yardley Taylor Brown, the intellectual Quaker editor of upper Loudoun's only newspaper at the time, The Hamilton Telephone. Taylor fancied himself a wordsmith and was an exuberant headline writer. Among his 1882 efforts: "Temperance Tornado, Rum's Gilded Citadel Torn by a Tremendous Torrent of Temperance Talk. A Cold-Water Storm Sweeps the Country of Bacchus."

But Taylor had other than literary reasons for attending regularly. Before a meeting, he would publish a notice to readers: "Say, do you owe anything on subscription? [$1.50 a year] If so, do not forget to take your wallet to Bush Meeting, where you will find the editor, prepared to receive all dues."

Also collecting were a slew of concessionaires, and judging from bids for the privilege of setting up shop at Bush Meeting, the main goody by far was ice cream. Hamilton confectioner John W. Wiley usually won the ice cream concession and told Yardley Taylor Brown that he sold 1,500 dishes one day. His outrageous price--5 cents a dish--helped recoup the $80 plus he doled out to the Good Templars.

Admission was free, and the money the Templars received from concessionaries--about $325--was their only recorded profit, although they may have received a cut from the collection buckets that were passed among the audience. In their charming book, "A Medieval Virginia Town," the Janney brothers, Asa Moore and Werner, say that each night of meeting, a different local preacher gave the benediction, "bringing in that minister's congregation as a side benefit."

Beginning in 1890, the meetings were led by Dan Hoge, a Quaker farmer in the Lincoln area, and Chester Gaver, a Methodist Hillsboro cloth manufacturer. Hoge was persuaded by his daughter-in-law, Sarah, to make the first day of Bush Meeting a children's day, and next year there was a women's day. The Walter Harmon Quartette, which sang between speakers, serenaded the ladies with "When Girls Can Vote"--which came to pass 29 years later. After Sarah Hoge became president of the Virginia Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1898, a post she held for 40 years, she persuaded many women speakers to join "The Team of Talkers," as publisher Brown called the orators.

For the 1894 meeting, an 85-foot well was dug near the big tent, which at some point had replaced the bush arbor. Potable water had always been a problem, for it had been siphoned into a tank from shallow wells, streams or ice ponds, which were often polluted. In addition, hundreds of people shared the dipper. Typhoid outbreaks often followed Bush Meeting.

The three-day 1894 meeting was the first to charge admission, 5 cents a day for those 15 and older. A half-hour after it ended, while the crowd was saying its last goodbyes, a sudden tornado, unseen by the throng in the huge tent, swept in from the west, straight into the tent's opening. Young John Nichols was crushed as the tent blew apart, and he died within minutes. Five others, all from Loudoun and Fauquier, were injured.

A reinforced tent was ready for the 1895 meeting, which also featured the newly formed Purcellville Band. Eighty-two years later, R. Chamblin Steele could recall the players and instruments: conductor Charles Steele at cornet, along with Turner Dillon and Cleveland Furr; John Benedum and Henry Frame on drums; Bob Appel, Spencer Marcus and Carl Tavenner on trombones; Jake Tavenner on tuba; Rufus Ballenger and William Marcus, baritones; and Carroll Cornwell and Ernest Sharkey, alto horns. John Philip Sousa's "Semper Fidelis" and "Stars and Stripes Forever" were favorites.

The 1903 meeting was the first to be held under the auspices of the newly incorporated Prohibition and Evangelical Association of Loudoun, "devoted to the cultivation and development of Civic Righteousness, the cultivation of fraternal unity and cooperation among Christian people, the suppression of the liquor traffic and the worship of God." The state authorized the association to issue as much as $5,000 in stock, with each share costing $25. To please stockholders, daily admission was raised to a dime.

Despite the charter's lofty aims, however, Bush Meeting became more secular, focusing more on politics and elocutionary skills. As its duration extended to five days, then eight or even 10 days, the big draws were not evangelists and temperance women, but politicians--perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan; Virginia Gov. Westmoreland Davis; his arch-enemy, Gov. Harry Flood Byrd (he never forgave Davis for implying that Byrd used his newspaper, The Winchester Star, to finance his political campaigns); and Loudoun's own Harvey Washington Wiley, scientist and instigator of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

The 1903 meeting was the first to be called a Chautauqua, a name borrowed from the summer galas, famed for their literary and scientific discussions, held on the shore of Lake Chautauqua, N.Y. The first Chautauqua had been held in 1874, just two years before the first Bush Meeting.

In 1904, Round Hill master builder Arch Simpson and his crew completed the mammoth Tabernacle, which cost $2,500 and was designed to seat 3,000. Until the Dulles Airport Terminal was built in 1962, the octagonal German-sided building remained the largest structure in Loudoun.

J. Dalton Dillon sold the Tabernacle, the three-acre Bush Meeting grounds and its frame two-story boarding house to the Prohibition and Evangelical Association in 1906, for $2,000 and perhaps some stock.

When Virginia prohibited alcoholic beverages in 1916 and the United States followed suit in 1920, the temperance element of Bush Meeting waned even further. But with an abundance of bootlegged liquor and dances across the Virginia Piedmont, the final decade of Bush Meeting returned to at least one of its original purposes, Christian worship. The addition of classical music was aimed at bringing in nonbelievers.

Noted Oregon evangelist R.J. Bulgin spoke at Bush Meeting in 1924, prompting more than 500 people to come forward and be saved. ("Dr. Bulgin sure could preach," Edwin Payne told me, speaking for a number of skeptics. "He took half the money in Purcellville with him.") His success led to the organization of the Purcellville Baptist Church, which returned to the Tabernacle last year to hold its Sunday youth services.

Bush Meeting bowed out in grand style in August 1931. Billy Sunday, the era's most famed evangelist, delivered a graphic sermon titled "Crooks, Corkscrews, Bootleggers and Whiskey Politicians." Purcellville's Blue Ridge Herald remarked: "[He] had an abundance of lurid materials from which to select his examples of the harm done society by the above-mentioned evil doers, and he did not fail to make use of it."

There were several reasons for the meeting's demise. The Quakers, most of whom were Republicans, could no longer stomach decades of Democratic speakers, and many Quakers no longer believed in the Holy Trinity. In addition, the Methodist and Baptist congregations nurtured by Bush Meeting were now interested in their own fledgling churches. There also was competition from the Loudoun County Fair, which had moved from Leesburg to Purcellville in 1919.

Then the drought of 1930 was followed by a drier-than-normal 1931, which put potable water at a premium. Finally, the long aftermath of the Depression of 1929 curtailed vacations and trips. For those who could afford to travel, newly paved roads spanned the country and transcontinental train travel was at its zenith. A week in Purcellville held little appeal.

After Bush Meeting's close, the grounds and Tabernacle passed into private hands. It hosted the first Loudoun 4-H Fair in 1935, became a roller skating rink, hosted wrestling matches and country singers--most notably Patsy Cline--in the 1940s and '50s. The Purcellville fire company bought the complex in 1947, primarily as a town baseball field.

The field was the first in Loudoun to add lights, and in the first area night game--June 16, 1949--1,300 cheered as Purcellville beat Round Hill, 4-2. Last year, the field was refurbished for the Babe Ruth baseball tournament, drawing hundreds of players and thousands of spectators to town.

Eugene Scheel is a Waterford historian and mapmaker.