Fields of the Wood
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Fields of the Wood is a Christian religious park of more than 200 acres (81 ha) in Cherokee County, North Carolina, owned by the Church of God of Prophecy—a Holiness Pentecostal denomination. It is best known for the largest representation of the Ten Commandments in the world, measuring 300 feet (91 m) wide across a mountainside.[1]
Fields of the Wood was the creation of A. J. Tomlinson (1865-1943), ultimate founder of the several Holiness Pentecostal denominations called the Church of God, five of which have headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee. In 1940, Tomlinson, as head of the Church of God of Prophecy, returned to the area to memorialize the place where he said God had revealed to him the true church in 1903—he having realized that in the same year he had founded the Church in the extreme southwestern county of North Carolina, the Wright Brothers had made their first successful flight in the extreme far eastern part of the state.[2] Tomlinson believed that the same chapter in the Book of Isaiah had predicted both.[3] Tomlinson named the park "Fields of the Wood" after a reference in the King James Version of Psalms 132: 6: "We found it in the fields of the wood."[4] In 1941, Tomlinson dedicated the site with a sermon while church-leased airplanes dropped gospel tracts to fulfill Deuteronomy 32: 2: "May my teaching drop as the rain."[5] Some temporary markers were placed on the site in 1940, but most permanent construction occurred after 1943 under the direction of Tomlinson's son, M. A. Tomlinson, and other leaders of the Church of God of Prophecy.[6][7]