Ocean and grove: holiness,leisure, and contested landscapes at Ocean Grove,New Jersey

In 1869, leading members of the Wesleyan holiness movement established Ocean Grove, an oceanfront camp meeting resort in Monmouth County, New Jersey that would become one of the most popular religious resorts in the United States. Scholarship on Ocean Grove treats the resort as a significant example of the spatial preferences and town planning efforts of the holiness movement. Tracing conflicts between leisure and worship, and between the romanticization of nature versus the sacralization of city life, suggests the landscape of the resort emerged as a mediation of these conflicts and provides further evidence for the sacralization of nature as a necessary component in the planning of Methodist and holiness communities in the late nineteenth century.