Pike County developed in a region originally occupied by the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Natchez Indians, with Topisaw Creek taking its name from the Otapasso tribe. After the area had been claimed in succession by France, England, and Spain, Spain abandoned it to the United States in 1798; anticipating the acquisition of Mississippi Territory, President George Washington had commissioned Major Andrew Ellicott in 1796 to survey the southern border along the 31st parallel, and in 1798 Congress established the new territory’s boundaries and government. In the early 1800s the area was largely wilderness rich in cane, pasture, fish, and game, and from 1800 to 1815 several thousand settlers from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee squatted on the 20,000 square miles then designated Marlon County. Among the region’s early institutions was a series of Methodist camp meetings that later became associated with Felder Camp Ground, beginning about 1810 or 1811 near present Magnolia under Rev. Isaac Quin and Rev. Hezekiah Shaw, then shifting about 1822 to a Bogue Chitto River site known as Gatlin’s Camp Ground, where William Conerly was converted in 1826. In 1842 or 1843 John Felder, Matthew McEwen, Archie McEwen, Christian Hoover, Silas Catchings, Hardy Thompson, David Winbome, and Samuel Whitworth helped establish a camp ground apparently on that same site, and in 1845 it moved to its present location on Topisaw Creek, where it was known variously as Topisaw, Felder, and most often Otapasso Camp Meeting. The camp ground and church on the same property developed together, with early preaching in a grove, a plain first church building for monthly services, home prayer meetings, and a congregation that included the Felder, McEwen, Hoover, Bridges, Thompson, Huffman, and Gatlin families, while enslaved Black worshipers were seated in a partitioned section and took communion after the white congregation. Camp meetings ceased for more than twenty years after Mississippi seceded from the United States in 1861 and the Civil War began, but in 1881 Rev. John Wesley Sandell led the rebuilding of the campground; by 1882 the revived meeting was fully organized, hosted the Brookhaven District Conference, and saw fifty conversions and forty-six additions to the church. Since 1881 the tabernacle has remained a place of worship, though its roof, lighting, water systems, and cooking arrangements changed over time, and the campground long remained a center of hospitality, fellowship, and Methodist religious life.