What is the Chautauqua Movement?

According to Webster's Dictionary, Chautauqua is "a meeting, usually held in the summer outdoors or under a temporary tent, providing public lectures combined with entertainment such as concerts and plays."

Lakeside was among the first communities founded as part of the Chautauqua Movement in the United States, which flourished during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is considered to be one of the greatest revival movements in American history. President Theodore Roosevelt once defined Chautauqua as, "the most American thing in America."

Ohio manufacturer, Lewis Miller, and John Heyl Vincent, a Methodist minister, founded the Chautauqua Institution at Lake Chautauqua, New York in 1875. 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 and culture. 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.

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 religion, education, cultural arts and recreation during the 1890s. Those same four founding elements, or "pillars," remain in place at Lakeside today.

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