For All the Saints

The preaching was highly emotional, and people were convinced that they were being visited by the Holy Spirit. There were strange physical reactions: fainting, dancing, uncontrolled shaking (called “the jerks”), shouting, and singing. All of this was understood to be proof of conversion of sinners by the presence of the Holy Spirit. . . .
While he was serving simultaneously in Woodstock and at Ghent (1842–1845) Pastor Ephraim DeYoe reported to the Ministerium in 1844 . . . : “We have been favored during the past year with the gracious outpourings of the Spirit of God. We held a series of meetings last winter which were blessed beyond our expectations. The church was greatly revived and many an impenitent person was heard inquiring, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ ” . . .
Nathaniel Nash , baptized at Christ’s Church in 1847 and a trustee and council president in later years, left us this description of a meeting held by Pastor Emerick in the 1860s:
“I well remember a revival he held in the spring of the year when the frost was going out of the ground and such roads! Mud hub deep, but notwithstanding the state of the roads or the weather the church was packed to the door and some nights they could not all get in. They came long distances to attend the meetings. At these meetings many of the young people of the church were converted and later joined the church.”
. . . No doubt some of the vacuum left by the diminishing of such mass gatherings for revivalism in the Woodstock landscape was filled in the early twentieth century by the strikingly secular Maverick festivals beginning in 1915, the activities at the Woodstock Playhouse (which was, at first, a barn on the Riseley farm), the annual Library fairs, and finally culminating in those famous “Woodstock” music festivals held in Bethel and Saugerties.