What is the Chautauqua Movement?
According to Wikipedia, "Chautauqua ...is an adult education movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers and specialists of the day."
Now Here's the Real Story
Ohio manufacturer, Lewis Miller, and John Heyl Vincent, a Methodist minister, founded the Chautauqua Institution at Lake Chautauqua, New York in 1874. While its initial mission was to train Sunday school teachers, the Chautauqua venture soon expanded into a summertime center for adult education and cultural enrichment. That powerful notion -- a faith-based summer resort offering both religious and secular education -- was to blossom into the Chautauqua Movement. By the early 1900s, more than 300 Chautauqua-style resorts associated with various Christian and Jewish congregations had been established from New Jersey to California.
The word Chautauqua became, and is today, the generic descriptive term for resorts that blend summer recreation with religious observance, education, culture and recreation. Most Chautauquas shared similar financial arrangements combining donations with admission fees. The fee entitled the visitor to most if not all the organization's recreational, educational and cultural offerings. While there were always some disadvantages to fencing off a small town, the savings realized in administrative costs went a long way toward paying for quality talent.
The growing Chautauqua Movement was a natural for Lakeside. Its first Sunday school training sessions were held in 1877, which blossomed into a robust Chautauqua with a full program of education, cultural arts, religion and recreation during the 1890s. Those same four founding elements, or "pillars," remain in place at Lakeside today.
