The Story of Chautauqua

Lewis Miller (1878)

The Story of Chautauqua

By

Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, D.D.

Author of "The Story of the Bible," "Teacher Training
Lessons for the Sunday School," etc.

With 50 Illustrations
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1921

Copyright, 1921
by
Jesse L. Hurlbut
Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to the honoured memory
of the two Founders of Chautauqua
Lewis Miller
and
John Heyl Vincent

PREFACE

WHY AND WHEREFORE

An ancient writer—I forget his name—declared that in one of the city-states of Greece there was the rule that when any citizen proposed a new law or the repeal of an old one, he should come to the popular assembly with a rope around his neck, and if his proposition failed of adoption, he was to be immediately hanged. It is said that amendments to the constitution of that state were rarely presented, and the people managed to live under a few time-honored laws. It is possible that some such drastic treatment may yet be meted out to authors—and perhaps to publishers—as a last resort to check the flood of useless literature. To anticipate this impending constitutional amendment, it is incumbent upon every writer of a book to show that his work is needed by the world, and this I propose to do in these prefatory pages.

Is Chautauqua great enough, original enough, sufficiently beneficial to the world to have its history written? We will not accept the votes of the thousands who beside the lake, in the Hall of Philosophy, or under the roof of the amphitheater, have been inoculated with the Chautauqua spirit. We will seek for the testimony of sane, intelligent, and thoughtful people, and we will be guided in our conclusions by their opinions. Let us listen to the words of the wise and then determine whether a book about Chautauqua should be published. We have the utterances by word of mouth and the written statements of public men, governors, senators, presidents; of educators, professors, and college presidents; of preachers and ecclesiastics in many churches; of speakers upon many platforms; of authors whose works are read everywhere; and we present their testimonials as a sufficient warrant for the preparation and publication of The Story of Chautauqua.

The Hon. George W. Atkinson, Governor of West Virginia, visited Chautauqua in 1899, and in his Recognition Day address on "Modern Educational Requirements" spoke as follows:

It (Chautauqua) is the common people's College, and its courses of instruction are so admirably arranged that it somehow induces the toiling millions to voluntarily grapple with all subjects and with all knowledge.

My Chautauqua courses have taught me that what we need most is only so much knowledge as we can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; for if more be given it may become injurious.

Chautauqua is doing more to nourish the intellects of the masses than any other system of education extant; except the public schools of the common country.

Here is the testimony of ex-Governor Adolph O. Eberhardt of Minnesota:

If I had the choice of being the founder of any great movement the world has ever known, I would choose the Chautauqua movement.

The Hon. William Jennings Bryan, from the point of view of a speaker upon many Chautauqua platforms, wrote:

The privilege and opportunity of addressing from one to seven or eight thousand of his fellow Americans in the Chautauqua frame of mind, in the mood which almost as clearly asserts itself under the tent or amphitheater as does reverence under the "dim, religious light"—this privilege and this opportunity is one of the greatest that any patriotic American could ask. It makes of him, if he knows it and can rise to its requirements, a potent human factor in molding the mind of the nation.

Viscount James Bryce, Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States, and author of The American Commonwealth, the most illuminating work ever written on the American system of government, said, while visiting Chautauqua:

I do not think any country in the world but America could produce such gatherings as Chautauqua's.

Six presidents of the United States have thought it worth while to visit Chautauqua, either before, or during, or after their term of office. These were Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft. Theodore Roosevelt was at Chautauqua four times. He said on his last visit, in 1905, "Chautauqua is the most American thing in America"; and also:

This Chautauqua has made the name Chautauqua a name of a multitude of gatherings all over the Union, and there is probably no other educational influence in the country quite so fraught with hope for the future of the nation as this and the movement of which it is the archtype.

Let us see what some journalists and writers have said about Chautauqua. Here is the opinion of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, and a leader of thought in our time:

Chautauqua has inspired the habit of reading with a purpose. It is really not much use to read, except as an occasional recreation, unless the reading inspires one to think his own thoughts, or at least make the writer's thoughts his own. Reading without reflection, like eating without digestion, produces dyspepsia. The influence and guidance of Chautauqua will long be needed in America.

The religious influence of Chautauqua has been not less valuable. Chautauqua has met the restless questioning of the age in the only way in which it can be successfully met, by converting it into a serious seeking for rest in truth.

Dr. Edwin E. Slosson, formerly professor in Columbia University, now literary editor of the Independent, wrote in that paper:

If I were a cartoonist, I should symbolize Chautauqua by a tall Greek goddess, a sylvan goddess with leaves in her hair—not vine leaves, but oak, and tearing open the bars of a cage wherein had been confined a bird, say an owl, labeled "Learning." For that is what Chautauqua has done for the world—it has let learning loose.

From the American Review of Reviews, July, 1914:

The president of a large technical school is quoted as having said that ten per cent. of the students in the institution over which he presides owe their presence to Chautauqua influence. A talk on civic beauty or sanitation by an expert from the Chautauqua platform often results in bringing these matters to local attention for the first time.

Here is an extract from The World To-day:

Old-time politics is dead in the States of the Middle West. The torchlight parade, the gasoline lamps, and the street orator draw but little attention. The "Republican Rally" in the court-house and the "Democratic Barbecue" in the grove have lost their potency. People turn to the Chautauquas to be taught politics along with domestic science, hygiene, and child-welfare.

Mr. John Graham Brooks, lecturer on historical, political, and social subjects, author of works widely circulated and highly esteemed, has given courses of lectures at Chautauqua, and has expressed his estimate in these words:

After close observation of the work at Chautauqua, and at other points in the country where its affiliated work goes on, I can say with confidence that it is among the most enlightening of our educational agencies in the United States.

Dr. A. V. V. Raymond, while President of Union College in New York State, gave this testimony:

Chautauqua has its own place in the educational world, a place as honorable as it is distinctive; and those of us who are laboring in other fields, by other methods, have only admiration and praise for the great work which has made Chautauqua in the best sense a household word throughout the land.

Mr. Edward Howard Griggs, who is in greater demand than almost any other lecturer on literary and historical themes, in his Recognition Day address, in 1904, on "Culture Through Vocation," said as follows:

The Chautauqua movement as conceived by its leaders is a great movement for cultivating an avocation apart from the main business of life, not only giving larger vision, better intellectual training, but giving more earnest desire and greater ability to serve and grow through the vocation.

This from Dr. William T. Harris, United States Commissioner of Education:

Think of one hundred thousand persons of mature age following up a well-selected course of reading for four years in science and literature, kindling their torches at a central flame! Think of the millions of friends and neighbors of this hundred thousand made to hear of the new ideas and of the inspirations that result to the workers!

It is a part of the great missionary movement that began with Christianity and moves onward with Christian civilization.

I congratulate all members of Chautauqua Reading Circles on their connection with this great movement which has begun under such favorable auspices and has spread so widely, is already world-historical, and is destined to unfold so many new phases.

Prof. Albert S. Cook, of Yale University, wrote in The Forum:

As nearly as I can formulate it, the Chautauqua Idea is something like this: A fraternal, enthusiastic, methodical, and sustained attempt to elevate, enrich, and inspire the individual life in its entirety, by an appeal to the curiosity, hopefulness, and ambition of those who would otherwise be debarred from the greatest opportunities of culture and spiritual advancement. To this end, all uplifting and stimulating forces, whether secular or religious, are made to conspire in their impact upon the person whose weal is sought. . . . Can we wonder that Chautauqua is a sacred and blessed name to multitudes of Americans?

The late Principal A. M. Fairbairn, of Mansfield College, Oxford, foremost among the thinkers of the last generation, gave many lectures at Chautauqua, and expressed himself thus:

The C. L. S. C. movement seems to me the most admirable and efficient organization for the direction of reading, and in the best sense for popular instruction. To direct the reading for a period of years for so many thousands is to affect not only their present culture, but to increase their intellectual activity for the period of their natural lives, and thus, among other things, greatly to add to the range of their enjoyment. It appears to me that a system which can create such excellent results merits the most cordial praise from all lovers of men.

Colonel Francis W. Parker, Superintendent of Schools, first at Quincy, Mass., and later at Chicago, one of the leading educators of the land, gave this testimony, after his visit to Chautauqua:

The New York Chautauqua—father and mother of all the other Chautauquas in the country—is one of the great institutions founded in the nineteenth century. It is essentially a school for the people.

Prof. Hjalmar H. Boyesen, of Columbia University, wrote:

Nowhere else have I had such a vivid sense of contact with what is really and truly American. The national physiognomy was defined to me as never before; and I saw that it was not only instinct with intelligence, earnestness, and indefatigable aspiration, but that it revealed a strong affinity for all that makes for righteousness and the elevation of the race. The confident optimism regarding the future which this discovery fostered was not the least boon I carried away with me from Chautauqua.

Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer, President of Wellesley College, expressed this opinion in a lecture at Chautauqua:

I could say nothing better than to say over and over again the great truths Chautauqua has taught to everyone, that if you have a rounded, completed education you have put yourselves in relation with all the past, with all the great life of the present; you have reached on to the infinite hope of the future.

I venture to say there is no man or woman educating himself or herself through Chautauqua who will not feel more and more the opportunity of the present moment in a present world.

The character of Chautauqua's training has been that she has made us wiser than we were about things that last.

Rev. Charles M. Sheldon, author of In His Steps, a story of which three million copies were sold, said:

During the past two years I have met nearly a million people from the platform, and no audiences have impressed me as have the Chautauqua people for earnestness, deep purpose, and an honest desire to face and work out the great issues of American life.

This is from the Rev. Robert Stuart MacArthur, the eminent Baptist preacher:

I regard the Chautauqua Idea as one of the most important ideas of the hour. This idea, when properly utilized, gives us a "college at home." It is a genuine inspiration toward culture, patriotism, and religion. The general adoption of this course for a generation would give us a new America in all that is noblest in culture and character.

Dr. Edward Everett Hale, of Boston, Chaplain of the United States Senate, in his Tarry At Home Travels, wrote:

If you have not spent a week at Chautauqua, you do not know your own country. There, and in no other place known to me, do you meet Baddeck and Newfoundland and Florida and Tiajuara at the same table; and there you are of one heart and one soul with the forty thousand people who will drift in and out—people all of them who believe in God and their country.

More than a generation ago, the name of Joseph Cook was known throughout the continent as a thinker, a writer, and a lecturer. This is what he wrote of Chautauqua:

I keep Chautauqua in a fireside nook of my inmost affections and prayers. God bless the Literary and Scientific Circle, which is so marvelously successful already in spreading itself as a young vine over the trellis-work of many lands! What rich clusters may ultimately hang on its cosmopolitan branches! It is the glory of America that it believes that all that anybody knows everybody should know.

Phillips Brooks, perhaps the greatest of American preachers, spoke as follows in a lecture on "Literature and Life":

May we not believe—if the students of Chautauqua be indeed what we have every right to expect that they will be, men and women thoroughly and healthily alive through their perpetual contact with the facts of life—that when they take the books which have the knowledge in them, like pure water in silver urns, though they will not drink as deeply, they will drink more healthily than many of those who in the deader and more artificial life of college halls bring no such eager vitality to give value to their draught? If I understand Chautauqua, this is what it means: It finds its value in the vitality of its students. . . . It summons those who are alive with true human hunger to come and learn of that great world of knowledge of which he who knows the most knows such a very little, and feels more and more, with every increase of his knowledge, how very little it is that he knows.

Julia Ward Howe, author of the song beginning "Mine eyes have seen the glory," and honored throughout the land as one of the greatest among the women of America, wrote as follows:

I am obliged for your kind invitation to be present at the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Chautauqua Assembly. As I cannot well allow myself this pleasure, I send you my hearty congratulations in view of the honorable record of your association. May its good work long continue, even until its leaven shall leaven the whole body of our society.

The following letter was received by Dr. Vincent from one of the most distinguished of the older poets:

April 29, 1882.

J. H. Vincent, D.D.,

Dear Friend: I have been watching the progress of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle inaugurated by thyself, and take some blame to myself for not sooner expressing my satisfaction in regard to its objects and working thus far. I wish it abundant success, and that its circles, like those from the agitated center of the Lake, may widen out, until our entire country shall feel their beneficent influences. I am very truly thy friend,

John G. Whittier.

After these endorsements, we may confidently affirm that a book on Chautauqua, its story, its principles, and its influence in the world, is warranted.

And now, a few words of explanation as to this particular book. The tendency in preparing such a work is to make it documentary, the recital of programs, speakers, and subjects. In order to lighten up the pages, I have sought to tell the story of small things as well as great, the witty as well as the wise words spoken, the record of by-play and repartee upon the platform, in those days when Chautauqua speakers were a fraternity. In fact, the title by which the body of workers was known among its members was "the Gang." Some of these stories are worth preserving, and I have tried to recall and retain them in these pages.

Jesse Lyman Hurlbut.

Feb. 1, 1921.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Story of Chautauqua

CHAPTER I

THE PLACE

John Heyl Vincent—a name that spells Chautauqua to millions—said: "Chautauqua is a place, an idea, and a force." Let us first of all look at the place, from which an idea went forth with a living force into the world.

John H. Vincent (1876)

The State of New York, exclusive of Long Island, is shaped somewhat like a gigantic foot, the heel being at Manhattan Island, the crown at the St. Lawrence River, and the toe at the point where Pennsylvania touches upon Lake Erie. Near this toe of New York lies Lake Chautauqua. It is eighteen miles long besides the romantic outlet of three miles, winding its way through forest primeval, and flowing into a shallow stream, the Chadakoin River, thence in succession into the Allegheny, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and finally resting in the bosom of the Gulf of Mexico. As we look at it upon the map, or sail upon it in the steamer, we perceive that it is about three miles across at its widest points, and moreover that it is in reality two lakes connected by a narrower channel, almost separated by two or three peninsulas. The earliest extant map of the lake, made by the way for General Washington soon after the Revolution (now in the Congressional Library at Washington), represents two separate lakes with a narrow stream between them. The lake receives no rivers or large streams. It is fed by springs beneath, and by a few brooks flowing into it. Consequently its water is remarkably pure, since none of the surrounding settlements are permitted to send their sewage into it.

The surface of Lake Chautauqua is 1350 feet above the level of the ocean; said to be the highest navigable water in the United States. This is not strictly correct, for Lake Tahoe on the boundary between Nevada and California is more than 6000 feet above sea-level. But Tahoe is navigated only by motor-boats and small steamers; while Lake Chautauqua, having a considerable town, Mayville, at its northern end, Jamestown, a flourishing city at its outlet, and its shores fringed with villages, bears upon its bosom many sizable steam-vessels.

It is remarkable that while Lake Erie falls into the St. Lawrence and empties into the Atlantic at iceberg-mantled Labrador and Newfoundland, Lake Chautauqua only seven miles distant, and of more than seven hundred feet higher altitude, finds its resting place in the warm Gulf of Mexico. Between these two lakes is the watershed for this part of the continent. An old barn is pointed out, five miles from Lake Chautauqua, whereof it is said that the rain falling on one side of its roof runs into Lake Erie and the St. Lawrence, while the drops on the other side through a pebbly brook find their way by Lake Chautauqua into the Mississippi.

Nobody knows, or will ever know, how this lake got its smooth-sounding Indian name. Some tell us that the word means "the place of mists"; others, "the place high up"; still others that its form, two lakes with a passage between, gave it the name, "a bag tied in the middle," or "two moccasins tied together." Mr. Obed Edson of Chautauqua County, who made a thorough search among old records and traditions, which he embodied in a series of articles in The Chautauquan in 1911-12, gives the following as a possible origin. A party of Seneca Indians were fishing in the lake and caught a large muskallonge. They laid it in their canoe, and going ashore carried the canoe over the well-known portage to Lake Erie. To their surprise, they found the big fish still alive, for it leaped from the boat into the water, and escaped. Up to that time, it is said, no muskallonge had ever been caught in that lake; but the eggs in that fish propagated their kind, until it became abundant. In the Seneca language, ga-jah means fish; and ga-da-quah is "taken out" or as some say, "leaped out." Thus Chautauqua means "where the fish was taken out," or "the place of the leaping fish." The name was smoothed out by the French explorers, who were the earliest white men in this region, to "Tchadakoin," still perpetuated in the stream, Chadakoin, connecting the lake with the Allegheny River. In an extant letter of George Washington, dated 1788, the lake is called, "Jadaqua."

From the shore of Lake Erie, where Barcelona now stands, to the site of Mayville at the head of Lake Chautauqua ran a well-marked and often-followed Indian trail, over which canoes and furs were carried, connecting the Great Lakes with the river-system of the mid-continent. If among the red-faced warriors of those unknown ages there had arisen a Homer to sing the story of his race, a rival to the Iliad and the Nibelungen might have made these forests famous, for here was the borderland between that remarkable Indian confederacy of central New York, the Iroquois or Five Nations,—after the addition of the Tuscaroras, the Six Nations—those fierce Assyrians of the Western Continent who barely failed in founding an empire, and their antagonists the Hurons around Lake Erie. The two tribes confronting each other were the Eries of the Huron family and the Senecas of the Iroquois; and theirs was a life and death struggle. Victory was with the Senecas, and tradition tells that the shores of Chautauqua Lake were illuminated by the burning alive of a thousand Erie prisoners.

It is said that the first white man to launch his canoe on Lake Chautauqua was Étienne Brule, a French voyageur. Five years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, with a band of friendly Hurons he came over the portage from Lake Erie, and sailed down from Mayville to Jamestown, thence through the Chadakoin to the Allegheny and the Ohio, showing to the French rulers in Canada that by this route lay the path to empire over the continent.

Fifteen years later, in 1630, La Salle, the indomitable explorer and warrior, passed over the portage and down the lake to the river below. Fugitives from the French settlements in Nova Scotia, the Acadia of Longfellow's Evangeline, also passed over the same trail and watercourses in their search for a southern home under the French flag. In 1749, Captain Bienville de Celoron led another company of pioneers, soldiers, sailors, Indians, and a Jesuit priest over the same route, bearing with him inscribed leaden plates to be buried in prominent places, as tokens of French sovereignty over these forests and these waters. Being a Frenchman, and therefore perhaps inclined to gayety, he might have been happy if he could have foreseen that in a coming age, the most elaborate amusement park on the border of Tchadakoin (as he spelled it on his leaden plates) would hand down the name of Celoron to generations then unborn!

Steamer in the Outlet

In order to make the French domination of this important waterway sure, Governor Duquesne of Canada sent across Lake Erie an expedition, landing at Barcelona, to build a rough wagon-road over the portage to Lake Chautauqua. Traces of this "old French road" may still be seen. Those French surveyors and toilers little dreamed that in seven years their work would become an English thoroughfare, and their empire in the new world would be exploited by the descendants of the Puritan and Huguenot!

During the American Revolution, the Seneca tribe of Indians, who had espoused the British side, established villages at Bemus and Griffiths points on Lake Chautauqua; and a famous British regiment, "The King's Eighth," still on the rolls of the British army, passed down the lake, and encamped for a time beside the Outlet within the present limits of Jamestown. Thus the redskin, the voyageur, and the redcoat in turn dipped their paddles into the placid waters of Lake Chautauqua. They all passed away, and the American frontiersman took their place; he too was followed by the farmer and the vinedresser. In the last half of the nineteenth century a thriving town, Mayville, was growing at the northern end of the lake; the city of Jamestown was rising at the end of the Outlet; while here and there along the shores were villages and hamlets; roads, such as they were before the automobile compelled their improvement, threaded the forests and fields. A region situated on the direct line of travel between the east and the west, and also having Buffalo on the north and Pittsburgh on the south, could not long remain secluded. Soon the whistle of the locomotive began to wake the echoes of the surrounding hills.

In its general direction the lake lies southeast and northwest, and its widest part is about three miles south of Mayville. Here on its northwestern shore a wide peninsula reaches forth into the water. At the point it is a level plain, covered with stately trees; on the land side it rises in a series of natural terraces marking the altitude and extent of the lake in prehistoric ages; for the present Chautauqua Lake is only the shrunken hollow of a vaster body in the geologic periods. In the early 'seventies of the last century this peninsula was known as Fair Point; but in a few years, baptized with a new name Chautauqua, it was destined to make the little lake famous throughout the world and to entitle an important chapter in the history of education.

CHAPTER II

THE FOUNDERS

Every idea which becomes a force in the world has its primal origin in a living man or woman. It drops as a seed into one mind, grows up to fruitage, and from one man is disseminated to a multitude. The Chautauqua Idea became incarnate in two men, John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller, and by their coördinated plans and labors made itself a mighty power. Let us look at the lives of these two men, whose names are ever one in the minds of intelligent Chautauquans.

John Heyl Vincent was of Huguenot ancestry. The family came from the canton of Rochelle, a city which was the Protestant capital of France in the period of the Reformation. From this vicinity Levi Vincent (born 1676), a staunch Protestant, emigrated to America in the persecuting days of Louis XIV., and settled first at New Rochelle, N. Y., later removed to New Jersey, and died there in 1736. For several generations the family lived in New Jersey; but at the time of John Heyl Vincent's birth on February 23, 1832, his father, John Himrod Vincent, the great-great-grandson of the Huguenot refugee, was dwelling at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Dr. Vincent used to say that he began his ministry before he was six years old, preaching to the little negroes around his home. The family moved during his early childhood to a farm near Lewisburg, Pa., on Chillisquasque Creek, where at the age of fifteen he taught in the public school.

When not much above sixteen he was licensed as a local preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He soon became a junior preacher on a four weeks' circuit along the Lehigh River, which at that time seems to have been in the bounds of the old Baltimore Conference. He rode his circuit on horseback, with a pair of saddlebags behind him, and boarded 'round among his parishioners. His saintly mother, of whose character and influence he always spoke in the highest reverence, died at this time, and soon after he went to visit relatives in Newark, N. J. There he served as an assistant in the city mission, and at the same time studied in the Wesleyan Academy on High Street. A fellow student, who became and continued through a long life one of his most intimate friends, the Rev. George H. Whitney, said that young Vincent differed from most of his classmates in his eager desire for education, his appetite for book-knowledge leading him to read almost every volume that came his way, and his visions, then supposed to be mere dreams, of plans for the intellectual uplift of humanity. It was his keenest sorrow that he could not realize his intense yearning for a course in college; but perhaps his loss in youth became a nation's gain in his maturer years.

In 1853 he was received formally as a member "on trial" in the New Jersey Conference, at that time embracing the entire State. His first charge as pastor was at North Belleville, later known as Franklin, now Nutley, where a handsome new church bears his name and commemorates his early ministry. His second charge was at a small suburb of Newark, then called Camptown, now the thriving borough of Irvington. His ministry from the beginning had been marked by an interest in childhood and youth, and a strong effort to strengthen the work of the Sunday School. At Camptown he established a definite course of Bible teaching for teachers and young people. Near the church he staked out a map of Palestine, marked its mountains and streams, its localities and battlefields, and led his teachers and older scholars on pilgrimages from Dan to Beersheba, pausing at each of the sacred places while a member of the class told its story. The lessons of that Palestine Class, taught on the peripatetic plan in the fifties, are still in print, showing the requirements for each successive grade of Pilgrim, Resident in Palestine, Dweller in Jerusalem, Explorer of other Bible Lands, and after a final and searching examination, Templar, wearing a gold medal. At each of his pastoral charges after this, he conducted his Palestine Class and constructed his outdoor map of the Holy Land. May we not find here the germ destined to grow into the Palestine Park of the Chautauqua Assembly?

After four years in New Jersey young Vincent was transferred in 1857 to Illinois, where in succession he had charge of four churches, beginning with Joliet, where he met a young lady teacher, Miss Elizabeth Dusenbury, of Portville, N. Y., who became his wife, and in the after years by her warm heart, clear head, and wise judgment greatly contributed to her husband's success. He was a year at Mount Morris, the seat of the Rock River Conference Seminary, at which he studied while pastor in the community. For two years, 1860 and '61, he was at Galena, and found in his congregation a quiet ex-army officer, named Ulysses S. Grant, who afterward said when introducing him to President Lincoln, "Dr. Vincent was my pastor at Galena, Ill., and I do not think that I missed one of his sermons while I lived there." Long after the Civil War days Bishop Vincent expressed in some autobiographical notes his estimate of General Grant. He wrote: "General Grant was one of the loveliest and most reverent of men. He had a strong will under that army overcoat of his, but he was the soul of honor and as reverent as he was brave." After two years at Rockford—two years having been until 1864 the limit for a pastorate in American Methodism—in 1865 he was appointed to Trinity Church, Chicago, then the most important church of his denomination in that city.

Chicago opened the door of opportunity to a wider field. The pastor of Trinity found in that city a group of young men, enthusiasts in the Sunday School, and progressive in their aims. Dr. Vincent at once became a leader among them and by their aid was able to introduce a Uniform Lesson in the schools of the city. He established in 1865 a Sunday School Quarterly, which in the following years became the Sunday School Teacher, in its editorials and its lesson material setting a new standard for Sunday School instruction. His abilities were soon recognized by the authorities in his church, and he was called to New York to become first General Agent of the Sunday School Union, the organization directing Methodist Episcopal Sunday Schools throughout the world, and in 1868, secretary and editor. He organized and set in circulation the Berean Uniform Lessons for his denomination, an important link in the chain of events which in 1873 made the Sunday School lessons uniform throughout America and the world. It is the fashion now to depreciate the Uniform Lesson Plan as unpedagogic and unpsychologic; but its inauguration was the greatest forward step ever taken in the evolution of the Sunday School; for it instituted systematic study of the Bible, and especially of the Old Testament; it brought to the service of the teacher the ablest Bible scholars on both sides of the Atlantic; it enabled the teachers of a school, a town, or a city to unite in the preparation of their lessons. Chicago, New York, Brooklyn, Boston, and many other places soon held study-classes of Sunday School teachers, of all grades, of a thousand or more gathered on a week-day to listen to the lectures of great instructors. The Plainfield (N. J.) Railroad Class was not the only group of Sunday School workers who spent their hour on the train passing to and from business in studying together their Sunday School lesson.

Old Business Block and Post-Office

Soon after Dr. Vincent assumed the charge of general Sunday School work, having his office in New York, he took up his residence in Plainfield, N. J., a suburban city which felt his influence and responded to it for twenty years. Having led the way to one summit in his ideals, he saw other mountain-heights beyond, and continually pointed his followers upward. When he succeeded to the editorship of the Sunday School Journal, the teachers' magazine of his church, he found a circulation of about five thousand. With the Uniform Lesson, and his inspiring editorials, it speedily rose to a hundred thousand, and a few years later to two hundred thousand subscribers, while his lesson leaves and quarterlies went into the millions. With voice—that wonderful, awakening, thrilling voice—and with a pen on fire, he appealed everywhere for a training that should fit Sunday School teachers for their great work. He established in many places the Normal Class, and marked out a course of instruction for its students. This was the step which led directly to the Chautauqua Assembly, which indeed made some such institution a necessity.

The Normal Class proposed a weekly meeting of Sunday School teachers or of young people seeking preparation for teaching, a definite course of study, examinations at regular stages, and a diploma to those who met its standards. Dr. Vincent conceived the plan of bringing together a large body of teacher-students, who should spend at least a fortnight in daily study, morning and afternoon, and thus accomplish more work than in six months of weekly meetings. He aimed also to have lectures on inspiring themes, with a spice of entertainment to impart variety. While this ideal was rising before him and shaping in his mind, he found a kindred spirit, a genius in invention, and a practical, wise business man whose name was destined to stand beside his own in equal honor wherever and whenever Chautauqua is named—Lewis Miller of Akron, Ohio, the first and until his death in 1899 the only president of Chautauqua.

Lewis Miller was born on July 24, 1829, at Greentown, Ohio. He received in his childhood the limited education in "the three R's—reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic," usual in the country school; and at the age of sixteen was himself a school teacher. In 1849, twenty years old, he began work at the plastering trade, but at the same time was attending school. He became a partner in the manufacturing firm of Aultman, Ball and Co., which soon became Aultman, Miller and Co., and was removed from Greentown to Canton, Ohio. Here, about 1857, Mr. Miller invented and put into successful operation the Buckeye Mower and Reaper, which made him famous, and with other inventions brought to him a fortune. His home was for many years, and until his death, at Akron. From his earliest years he was interested in education, and especially in education through the Sunday School. He became Sunday School Superintendent of the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Akron, and made it more than most of the Sunday Schools in that generation a school, and not merely a meeting for children. He organized a graded system and required his pupils to pass from grade to grade through the door of an examination in Bible knowledge. He was one of the earliest Sunday School superintendents to organize a Normal Class for the equipment and training of young people for teaching in his school. At a certain stage in the promotions every young man and young woman passed one year or two years in the Normal Grade; for which he arranged the course until one was provided by Dr. Vincent after he became Secretary of Sunday School work for the denomination in 1868; and in the planning of that early normal course, Mr. Miller took an active part, for he met in John H. Vincent one who, like himself, held inspiring ideals for the Sunday School, and the two leaders were often in consultation. It was an epoch in the history of the American Sunday School when Mr. Miller built the first Sunday School hall in the land according to a plan originated by himself; its architectural features being wrought out under his direction by his fellow-townsman and friend, Mr. Jacob Snyder, an architect of distinction. In this building, then unique but now followed by thousands of churches, there was a domed central assembly hall, with rooms radiating from it in two stories, capable of being open during the general exercises, but closed in the lesson period so that each class could be alone with its teacher while studying.

Mr. Miller was also interested in secular education, was for years president of the Board of Education in Akron, always aiming for higher standards in teaching. He was also a trustee of Mount Union College in his own State. Two men such as Vincent and Miller, both men of vision, both leaders in education through the Sunday School, both aiming to make that institution more efficient, would inevitably come together; and it was fortunate that they were able to work hand in hand, each helping the other.

These two men had thoughts of gatherings of Sunday School workers, not in conventions, to hear reports and listen to speeches, not to go for one-day or two- or three-day institutes, but to spend weeks together in studying the Bible and methods of Sunday School work. They talked over their plans, and they found that while they had much in common in their conception each one could supplement the other in some of the details. It had been Dr. Vincent's purpose to hold his gathering of Sunday School workers and Bible students within the walls of a large church, in some city centrally located and easily reached by railroad. He suggested to Mr. Miller that his new Sunday School building, with its many classrooms opening into one large assembly hall, would be a suitable place for launching the new enterprise.

One cannot help asking the question—what would have been the result if Dr. Vincent's proposal had been accepted, and the first Sunday School Assembly had been held in a city and a church? Surely the word "Chautauqua" would never have appeared as the name of a new and mighty movement in education. Moreover, it is almost certain that the movement itself would never have arisen to prominence and to power. It is a noteworthy fact that no Chautauqua Assembly has ever succeeded, though often attempted, in or near a large city. One of the most striking and drawing features of the Chautauqua movement has been its out-of-doors and in-the-woods habitat. The two founders did not dream in those days of decision that the fate of a great educational system was hanging in the balance.

An inspiration came to Lewis Miller to hold the projected series of meetings in a forest, and under the tents of a camp meeting. Camp meetings had been held in the United States since 1799, when the first gathering of this name took place in a grove on the banks of the Red River in Kentucky led by two brothers McGee, one a Presbyterian, the other a Methodist. In those years churches were few and far apart through the hamlets and villages of the west and south. The camp meeting brought together great gatherings of people who for a week or more listened to sermons, held almost continuous prayer meetings, and called sinners to repentance. The interest died down somewhat in the middle of the nineteenth century, but following the Civil War, a wave of enthusiasm for camp meetings swept over the land. In hundreds of groves, east and west, land was purchased or leased, lots were sold, tents were pitched, and people by the thousand gathered for soul-stirring services. In one of the oldest and most successful of these camp meetings, that on Martha's Vineyard, tents had largely given place to houses, and a city had arisen in the forest. This example had been followed, and on many camp-meeting grounds houses of a primitive sort straggled around the open circle where the preaching services were held. Most of these buildings were mere sheds, destitute of architectural beauty, and innocent even of paint on their walls of rough boards. Many of these antique structures may still be seen at Chautauqua, survivals of the camp-meeting period, in glaring contrast with the more modern summer homes beside them.

At first Dr. Vincent did not take kindly to the thought of holding his training classes and their accompaniments in any relationship to a camp meeting or even upon a camp ground. He was not in sympathy with the type of religious life manifested and promoted at these gatherings. The fact that they dwelt too deeply in the realm of emotion and excitement, that they stirred the feelings to the neglect of the reasoning and thinking faculties, that the crowd called together on a camp-meeting ground would not represent the sober, sane, thoughtful element of church life—all these repelled Dr. Vincent from the camp meeting.

Mr. Miller had recently become one of the trustees of a camp meeting held at Fair Point on Lake Chautauqua, and proposed that Dr. Vincent should visit the place with him. Somewhat unwillingly, yet with an open mind, Vincent rode with Miller by train to Lakewood near the foot of the lake, and then in a small steamer sailed to Fair Point. A small boy was with them, sitting in the prow of the boat, and as it touched the wharf he was the first of its passengers to leap on the land—and in after years, George Edgar Vincent, LL.D., was wont to claim that he, at the mature age of nine years, was the original discoverer of Chautauqua!

It was in the summer of 1873, soon after the fourth session of the Erie Conference Camp Meeting of the Methodist Episcopal Church, that Dr. Vincent came, saw, and was conquered. His normal class and its subsidiary lectures and entertainments should be held under the beeches, oaks, and maples shading the terraced slopes rising up from Lake Chautauqua.

A lady who had attended the camp meeting in 1871, its second session upon the grounds at Fair Point, afterward wrote her first impressions of the place. She said that the superintendent of the grounds, Mr. Pratt (from whom an avenue at Chautauqua received its name some years afterward), told her that until May, 1870, "the sound of an axe had not been heard in those woods." This lady (Mrs. Kate P. Bruch) wrote:

Many of the trees were immense in size, and in all directions, from the small space occupied by those who were tenting there, we could walk through seas of nodding ferns; while everywhere through the forest was a profusion of wild flowers, creeping vines, murmuring pine, beautiful mosses and lichens. The lake itself delighted us with its lovely shores; where either highly cultivated lands dotted with farmhouses, or stretches of pine forest, met on all sides the cool, clear water that sparkled or danced in the sunlight, or gave subdued but beautiful reflection of the moonlight. We were especially charmed with the narrow, tortuous outlet of the lake—then so closely resembling the streams of tropical climes. With the trees pressing closely to the water's edge, covered with rich foliage, tangled vines clinging and swaying from their branches; and luxuriant undergrowth, through which the bright cardinal flowers were shining, it was not difficult to fancy one's self far from our northern clime, sailing over water that never felt the cold clasp of frost and snow.

The steamers winding their way through the romantic outlet were soon to be laden with new throngs looking for the first time upon forest, farms, and lake. Those ivy-covered and moss-grown terraces of Fair Point were soon to be trodden by the feet of multitudes; and that camp-meeting stand from which fervent appeals to repentance had sounded forth, to meet responses of raptured shouts from saints, and cries for mercy from seekers, was soon to become the arena for religious thought and aspiration of types contrasted with those of the camp meeting of former years.

CHAPTER III

SOME PRIMAL PRINCIPLES

We have looked at the spot chosen for this new movement, and we have become somewhat acquainted with its two leaders. Let us now look at its foundations, and note the principles upon which it was based. We shall at once perceive that the original plans of the Fair Point Assembly were very narrow in comparison with those of Chautauqua to-day. Yet those aims were of such a nature, like a Gothic Church, as would readily lend themselves to enlargement on many sides, and only add to the unique beauty of the structure.

In this chapter we are not undertaking to set forth the Chautauqua Idea, as it is now realized—for everybody, everywhere, and in every department of knowledge, inspired by a Christian faith. Whatever may have been in the mind of either founder, this wide-reaching aim was not in those early days made known. Both Miller and Vincent were interested in education, and each of them felt his own lack of college training, but during the first three or four years of Chautauqua's history all its aims were in the line of religious education through the Sunday School. We are not to look for the traits of its later development, in those primal days. Ours is the story of an evolution, and not a philosophical treatise.

The first assembly on Chautauqua Lake was held under the sanction and direction of the governing Sunday School Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church, by resolution of the Board in New York at its meeting in October, 1873, in response to a request from the executive committee of the Chautauqua Lake Camp Ground Association, and upon the recommendation of Dr. Vincent, whose official title was Corresponding Secretary of the Sunday School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The Normal Committee of the Union was charged with the oversight of the projected meetings; Lewis Miller was appointed President, and John H. Vincent, Superintendent of Instruction.

Although held upon a camp ground and inheriting some of the camp-meeting opportunities, the gathering was planned to be unlike a camp meeting in its essential features, and to reach a constituency outside that of the camp ground. Its name was a new one, "The Assembly," and its sphere was announced to be that of the Sunday School. There was to be a definite and carefully prepared program of a distinctly educational cast, with no opening for spontaneous, go-as-you-please meetings to be started at any moment. This was arranged to keep a quietus on both the religious enthusiast and the wandering Sunday School orator who expected to make a speech on every occasion. On my first visit to Fair Point—which was not in '74 but in '75—I found a prominent Sunday School talker from my own State, grip-sack in hand, leaving the ground. He explained, "This is no place for me. They have a cut-and-dried program, and a fellow can't get a word in anywhere. I'm going home. Give me the convention where a man can speak if he wants to."

In most of the camp meetings, but not in all, Sunday was the great day, a picnic on a vast scale, bringing hundreds of stages, carryalls, and wagons from all quarters, special excursion trains loaded with visitors, fleets of boats on the lake or river, if the ground could be reached by water route. No doubt some good was wrought. Under the spell of a stirring preacher some were turned from sin to righteousness. But much harm was also done, in the emptying of churches for miles around, the bringing together of a horde of people intent on pleasure, and utter confusion taking the place of a sabbath-quiet which should reign on a ground consecrated to worship. Against this desecration of the holy day, Miller and Vincent set themselves firmly. As a condition of accepting the invitation of the Camp Meeting Association to hold the proposed Assembly at Fair Point, the gates were to be absolutely closed against all visitors on Sunday; and notice was posted that no boats would be allowed to land on that day at the Fair Point pier. In those early days everybody came to Fair Point by boat. There was indeed a back-door entrance on land for teams and foot passengers; but few entered through it. In these modern days of electricity, now that the lake is girdled with trolley lines, and a hundred automobiles stand parked outside the gates, the back door has become the front door, and the steamboats are comparatively forsaken.

In addition to the name Assembly, the exact order of exercises, and the closed ground on Sunday, there was another startling departure from camp-meeting usages—a gate fee. The overhead expenses of a camp meeting were comparatively light. Those were not the days when famous evangelists like Sam Jones and popular preachers such as DeWitt Talmage received two hundred dollars for a Sunday sermon. Board and keep were the rewards of the ministers, and the "keep" was a bunk in the preachers' tent. The needed funds were raised by collections, which though nominally "voluntary" were often obtained under high-pressure methods. But the Assembly, with well-known lecturers, teachers of recognized ability, and the necessary nation-wide advertising to awaken interest in a new movement would of necessity be expensive. How should the requisite dollars by the thousand be raised? The two heads of the Assembly resolved to dispense with the collections, and have a gate fee for all comers. Fortunately the Fair Point grounds readily lent themselves to this plan, for they were already surrounded on three sides by a high picket-fence, and only the small boys knew where the pickets were loose, and they didn't tell.

The Sunday closing and the entrance charge raised a storm of indignation all around the lake. The steamboat owners—in those days there were no steamer corporations; each boat big or little, was owned by its captain—the steamboat owners saw plainly that Sunday would be a "lost day" to them if the gates were closed; and the thousands of visitors to the camp meeting who had squeezed out a dime, or even a penny, when the basket went around, bitterly complained outside the gates at a quarter for daily admission, half of what they had cheerfully handed over when the annual circus came to town. During the first Assembly in 1874, the gatekeepers needed all their patience and politeness to restrain some irate visitors from coming to blows over the infringement of their right to free entrance upon the Fair Point Camp Ground. There were holders of leases upon lots who expected free entrance for themselves and their families—and "family" was stretched to include visitors. Then there were the preachers who could not comprehend why they should buy a ticket for entrance to the holy ground! The financial and restrictive regulations were left largely to Lewis Miller, who possessed the suaviter in modo so graciously that many failed to realize underneath it the fortiter in re. Behind that smiling countenance of the President of Chautauqua was an uncommonly stiff backbone. Rules once fixed were kept in the teeth of opposition from both sinners and saints.

Let me anticipate some part of our story by saying that at the present time there are from six to eight hundred all-the-year residents upon Chautauqua grounds. Before the Assembly opens on July 1st, every family must obtain season tickets to the public exercises for all except the very youngest members and bedridden invalids. A lease upon Chautauqua property does not entitle the holder to admission to the grounds. If he owns an automobile, it must be parked outside, and cannot be brought through the gates without the payment of an entrance fee, and an officer riding beside the chauffeur to see that in Chautauqua's narrow streets and thronged walks all care is taken against accident. The only exception to this rule is in favor of physicians who are visiting patients within the enclosure.

The catholicity of the plans for the first Assembly must not be forgotten. Both its founders were members of the Methodist Episcopal Church and loyal to its institutions. But they were also believers in and members of the Holy Catholic Church, the true church of Christ on earth, wherein every Christian body has a part. They had no thought to ignore the various denominations, but aimed to make every follower of Christ at home. Upon the program appeared the names of men eminent in all the churches; and it was a felicitous thought to hold each week on one evening the prayer meetings of the several churches, each by itself, also to plan on one afternoon in different places on the ground, for denominational conferences where the members of each church could freely discuss their own problems and provide for their own interests. This custom established at the first assembly has become one of the traditions of Chautauqua. Every Wednesday evening, from seven to eight, is assigned for denominational prayer meetings, and on the second Wednesday afternoon in August, two hours are set apart for the Denominational Conferences. The author of this volume knows something about one of those meetings; for year after year it has brought him to his wit's end, to provide a program that will not be a replica of the last one, and then sometimes, to persuade the conferences to confer. But if a list were made of the noble names that have taken part in these gatherings, it would show that the interdenominational plan of the founders has been justified by the results. It is a great fact that for nearly fifty years the loyal members of almost every church in the land have come together at Chautauqua, all in absolute freedom to speak their minds, yet with never the least friction or controversy. And this relation was not one of an armed neutrality between bodies in danger of breaking out into open war. It did not prevent a good-natured raillery on the Chautauqua platform between speakers of different denominations. If anyone had a joke at the expense of the Baptists or the Methodists or the Presbyterians, he never hesitated to tell it before five thousand people, even with the immediate prospect of being demolished by a retort from the other side.

A conversation that occurred at least ten years after the session of '74 belongs here logically, if not chronologically. A tall, long-coated minister whose accent showed his nativity in the southern mountain-region said to me, "I wish to inquire, sir, what is the doctrinal platform of this assembly." "There is none, so far as I know," I answered. "You certainly do not mean, sir," he responded, "that there is not an understanding as to the doctrines allowed to be taught on this platform. Is there no statement in print of the views that must or must not be expressed by the different speakers?" "I never heard of any," I said, "and if there was such a statement I think that I should know about it." "What, sir, is there to prevent any speaker from attacking the doctrines of some other church, or even from speaking against the fundamental doctrines of Christianity?" "Nothing in the world," I said, "except that nobody at Chautauqua ever wishes to attack any other Christian body. If anyone did such a thing, I don't believe that it would be thought necessary to disown or even to answer him. But I am quite certain that it would be his last appearance on the Chautauqua platform."

In this chapter I have sought to point out the foundation stones of Chautauqua, as they were laid nearly half a century ago. Others were placed later in the successive years; but these were the original principles, and these have been maintained for more than a generation. Let us fix them in memory by a restatement and an enumeration. First, Chautauqua, now an institution for general and popular education, began in the department of religion as taught in the Sunday School. Second, it was an out-of-doors school, held in the forest, blazing the way and setting the pace of summer schools in the open air throughout the nation and the world. Third, although held upon a camp-meeting ground it was widely different in aim and method, spirit and clientele from the old-fashioned camp meeting. Fourth, it maintained the sanctity of the Sabbath, closed its gates, and frowned upon every attempt to secularize or commercialize the holy day, or to make it a day of pleasure. Fifth, the enterprise was supported, not by collections at its services, or by contributions from patrons, but by a fee upon entrance from every comer. Sixth, it was to represent not one branch of the church, but to bring together all the churches in acquaintance and friendship, to promote, not church union, but church unity. And seventh, let it be added that it was to be in no sense a money-making institution. There were trustees but no stockholders, and no dividends. If any funds remained after paying the necessary expenses, they were to be used for improvement of the grounds or the enlargement of the program. Upon these foundations Chautauqua has stood and has grown to greatness.

CHAPTER IV

THE BEGINNINGS

But let us come to the opening session of the Assembly, destined to greater fortune and fame than even its founders at that time dreamed. It was named "The Sunday School Teachers' Assembly," for the wider field of general education then lay only in the depths of one founder's mind. For the sake of history, let us name the officers of this first Assembly. They were as follows:

The property of the Camp Meeting Association, leased for the season to the Assembly, embraced less than one fourth of the present dimensions of Chautauqua, even without the golf course and other property outside the gates. East and west it extended as it does now from the Point and the Pier to the public highway. But on the north where Kellogg Memorial Hall now stands was the boundary indicated by the present Scott Avenue, though at that time unmarked. The site of Normal Hall and all north of it were outside the fence. And on the south its boundary was the winding way of Palestine Avenue. The ravine now covered by the Amphitheater was within the bounds, but the site of the Hotel Athenæum was without the limit.

Lewis Miller, Cottage and Tent

He who rambles around Chautauqua in our day sees a number of large, well-kept hotels, and many inns and "cottages" inviting the visitor to comfortable rooms and bountiful tables. But in those early days there was not one hotel or boarding-house at Fair Point. Tents could be rented, and a cottager might open a room for a guest, but it was forbidden to supply table board for pay. Everybody, except such as did their own cooking, ate their meals at the dining-hall, which was a long tabernacle of rough unpainted boards, with a leaky roof, and backless benches where the feeders sat around tables covered with oilcloth. And as for the meals—well, if there was high thinking at Chautauqua there was certainly plain living. Sometimes it rained, and D.D.'s, LL.D.'s, professors, and plain people held up umbrellas with one hand and tried to cut tough steaks with the other. But nobody complained at the fare, for the feast of reason and flow of soul made everybody forget burnt potatoes and hard bread.

Bishop Vincent's Tent-Cottage

What is now Miller Park, the level ground and lovely grove at the foot of the hill, was then the Auditorium, where stood a platform and desk sheltered from sun on some days and rain on others. Before it was an array of seats, lacking backs, instead of which the audience used their own backbones. Perhaps two thousand people could find sitting-room under the open sky, shaded by the noble trees. A sudden shower would shoot up a thousand umbrellas. One speaker said that happening to look up from his manuscript he perceived that an acre of toadstools had sprouted in a minute. At the lower end of this park stood the tent wherein Dr. Vincent dwelt during many seasons; at the upper end was the new cottage of the Miller family with a tent frame beside it for guests. At this Auditorium all the great lectures were given for the first four years of Chautauqua history, except when continued rain forbade. Then an adjournment, sometimes hasty, was made to a large tent up the hill, known as the Tabernacle.

One day, during the second season of the Assembly in 1875, Professor William F. Sherwin, singer, chorus leader, Bible teacher, and wit of the first water, was conducting a meeting in the Auditorium. The weather had been uncertain, an "open and shut day," and people hardly knew whether to meet for Sherwin's service in the grove or in the tent on the hill. Suddenly a tall form, well known at Chautauqua, came tearing down the hill and up the steps of the platform, breathless, wild-eyed, with mop of hair flying loose, bursting into the professor's address with the words, "Professor Sherwin, I come as a committee of fifty to invite you to bring your meeting up to the Tabernacle, safe from the weather, where a large crowd is gathered!" "Well," responded Sherwin, "you may be a committee of fifty, but you look like sixty!" And from that day ever after at Chautauqua a highly respected gentleman from Washington, D.C., was universally known as "the man who looks like sixty."

When we speak of Sherwin, inevitably we think of Frank Beard, the cartoonist, whose jokes were as original as his pictures. He would draw in presence of the audience a striking picture, seemingly serious, and then in a few quick strokes transform it into something absurdly funny. For instance, his "Moses in the Bulrushes" was a beautiful baby surrounded by waving reeds. A sudden twist of the crayon, and lo, a wild bull was charging at the basket and its baby. This was "The Bull Rushes." Beard was as gifted with tongue as with pen, and in the comradeship of the Chautauqua platform he and Sherwin were continually hurling jokes at each other. Oftentimes the retort was so pat that one couldn't help an inward question whether the two jesters had not arranged it in advance.

Frank Beard used to hold a question drawer occasionally. There was a show of collecting questions from the audience, but those to be answered had been prepared by Mr. Beard and his equally witty wife, and written on paper easily recognized. One by one, these were taken out, read with great dignity, and answered in a manner that kept the crowd in a roar. On one occasion Professor Sherwin was presiding at Mr. Beard's question drawer—for it was the rule that at every meeting there must be a chairman as well as the speaker. The question was drawn out, "Will Mr. Beard please explain the difference between a natural consequence and a miracle?" Mr. Beard did explain thus: "This difficult question can be answered by a very simple illustration. There is Professor Sherwin. If Professor Sherwin says to me, 'Mr. Beard, lend me five dollars,' and I should let him have it, that would be a natural consequence. If Professor Sherwin should ever pay it back, that would be a miracle!" It is needless to say that the opportunity soon arrived for Mr. Sherwin to repay Mr. Beard for full value of debt with abundant interest.

Mention has been made that at each address or public platform meeting a chairman must be in charge. In the old camp-meeting days all the ministers had been wont to sit on the platform behind the preacher; and some of them could not reconcile themselves to Dr. Vincent's rule that only the chairman and the speaker of the hour should occupy "the preachers' stand." Notwithstanding repeated announcements, some clergymen continued to invade the platform. The head of the Department of Order once pointed to a well-known minister and said to the writer, "Four times I have told that man—and a good man he is—that he must not take a seat on the platform." Whoever casts his eyes on the platform of the Amphitheater may notice that before every public service, the janitor places just the number of chairs needed, and no more. This is one of the Chautauqua traditions, begun under the Vincent régime.

Before we come to the more serious side of our story let us notice another instance of the contrast between the camp meeting and Chautauqua. A widely known Methodist came, bringing with him a box of revival song-books, compiled by himself. He was a leader of a "praying band," and accustomed to hold meetings where the enthusiasm was pumped up to a high pitch. One Sunday at a certain hour he noticed that the Auditorium in the grove was unoccupied; and gathering a group of friends with warm hearts and strong voices, he mounted the platform and in stentorian tones began a song from his own book. The sound brought people from all the tents and cottages around, and soon his meeting was in full blast, with increasing numbers responding to his ardent appeals. Word came to Dr. Vincent who speedily marched into the arena. He walked upon the platform, held up his hand in a gesture compelling silence, and calling upon the self-appointed leader by name, said:

"This meeting is not on the program, nor appointed by the authorities, and it cannot be held."

"What?" spoke up the praying-band commander. "Do you mean to say that we can't have a service of song and prayer on these grounds?"

"Yes," replied Dr. Vincent, "I do mean it. No meeting of any kind can be held without the order of the authorities. You should have come to me for permission to hold this service."

The man was highly offended, gathered up his books, and left the grounds on the next day. He would have departed at once, but it was Sunday, and the gates were closed. Let it be said, however, that six months later, when he had thought it over, he wrote to Dr. Vincent an ample apology for his conduct and said that he had not realized the difference between a camp meeting and a Sunday School Assembly. He ended by an urgent request that Dr. Vincent should come to the camp ground at Round Lake, of which he was president, should organize and conduct an assembly to be an exact copy of Chautauqua in its program and speakers, with all the resources of Round Lake at his command. His invitation was accepted. In due time, with this man's loyal support, Dr. Vincent organized and set in motion the Round Lake Assembly, upon the Chautauqua pattern, which continues to this day, true to the ideals of the founder.

One unique institution on the Fair Point of those early days must not be omitted—the Park of Palestine. Following the suggestion of Dr. Vincent's church lawn model of the Holy Land, Dr. Wythe of Meadville, an adept in other trades than physic and preaching, constructed just above the pier on the lake shore a park one hundred and twenty feet long, and seventy-five feet wide, shaped to represent in a general way the contour of the Holy Land. It was necessary to make the elevations six times greater than longitudinal measurements; and if one mountain is made six times as large as it should be, some other hills less prominent in the landscape or less important in the record must be omitted. The lake was taken to represent the Mediterranean Sea, and on the Sea-Coast Plain were located the cities of the Philistines, north of them Joppa and Cæsarea, and far beyond them on the shore, Tyre and Sidon. The Mountain Region showed the famous places of Israelite history from Beersheba to Dan, with the sacred mountains Olivet and Zion, Ebal and Gerizim having Jacob's Well beside them, Gilboa with its memories of Gideon's victory and King Saul's defeat, the mountain on whose crown our Lord preached his sermon, and overtopping all, Hermon, where he was transfigured. From two springs flowed little rills to represent the sources of the River Jordan which wound its way down the valley, through the two lakes, Merom and the Sea of Galilee, ending its course in the Dead Sea. There were Jericho and the Brook Jabbok, the clustered towns around the Galilean Sea, and at the foot of Mount Hermon, Cæsarea-Philippi. Across the Jordan rose the Eastern Tableland, with its mountains and valleys and brooks and cities even as far as Damascus.

As the Assembly was an experiment, and might be transferred later to other parts of the country, the materials for this Palestine Park were somewhat temporary. The mountains were made of stumps, fragments of timber, filled in with sawdust from a Mayville mill, and covered with grassy sods. But the park constructed from makeshift materials proved one of the most attractive features of the encampment. Groups of Bible students might be seen walking over it, notebooks in their hands, studying the sacred places. A few would even pluck and preserve a spear of grass, carefully enshrining it in an envelope duly marked. A report went abroad, indeed, that soil from the Holy Land itself had been spread upon the park, constituting it a sort of Campo Santo, but this claim was never endorsed by either its architect or its originator. The park of Palestine still stands, having been rebuilt several times, enlarged to a length of 350 feet, and now, as I write, with another restoration promised.

One fact in this sacred geography must needs be stated, in the interests of exact truth. In order to make use of the lake shore, north had to be in the south, and east in the west. Chautauqua has always been under a despotic though paternal government, and its visitors easily accommodate themselves to its decrees. But the sun persists in its independence, rises over Chautauqua's Mediterranean Sea where it should set, and continues its sunset over the mountains of Gilead, where it should rise. Dr. Vincent and Lewis Miller could bring to pass some remarkable, even seemingly impossible, achievements, but they were not able to outdo Joshua, and not only make the sun stand still, but set it moving in a direction opposite to its natural course.

In one of his inimitable speeches, Frank Beard said that Palestine Park had been made the model for all the beds on Fair Point. He slept, as he asserted, on Palestine, with his head on Mount Hermon, his body sometimes in the Jordan valley, at other times on the mountains of Ephraim; and one night when it rained, he found his feet in the Dead Sea.

In the early days of Chautauqua a tree was standing near Palestine Park, which invited the attention of every child, and many grown folks. It was called "the spouting tree." Dr. Wythe found a tree with one branch bent over near the ground and hollow. He placed a water-pipe in the branch and sent a current of fresh water through it, so that the tree seemed to be pouring forth water. At all times a troop of children might be seen around it. At least one little girl made her father walk down every day to the wonder, to the neglect of other walks on the Assembly ground. Afterward at home from an extended tour, they asked her what was the most wonderful thing that she had seen in her journey. They expected her to say, "Niagara Falls," but without hesitation she answered, "The tree that spouted water at Chautauqua." The standards of greatness in the eyes of childhood differ from those of the grown-up folks.

The true Chautauqua, aided as it was by the features of mirth and entertainment and repartee, was in the daily program followed diligently by the assembled thousands. Here is in part the schedule, taken from the printed report. It was opened on Tuesday evening, August 4, 1874, in the out-of-doors auditorium, now Miller Park, beginning with a brief responsive service of Scripture and song, prepared by Dr. Vincent. Chautauqua clings to ancient customs; and that same service, word for word, has been rendered every year on the first Tuesday evening in August, at what is known as "Old First Night."

Bishop Vincent afterward wrote of that memorable first meeting:

The stars were out, and looked down through trembling leaves upon a goodly well-wrapped company, who sat in the grove, filled with wonder and hope. No electric light brought platform and people face to face that night. The old-fashioned pine fires on rude four-legged stands covered with earth, burned with unsteady, flickering flame, now and then breaking into brilliancy by the contact of a resinous stick of the rustic fireman, who knew how to snuff candles and how to turn light on the crowd of campers-out. The white tents around the enclosure were very beautiful in that evening light.

At this formal opening on August 4, 1874, brief addresses were given by Dr. Vincent and by a Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Methodist, and a Congregational pastor. This opening showed the broad brotherhood which was to mark the history of Chautauqua.

On the next day, Wednesday, began what might be called the school sessions of the Assembly. The fourteen days were divided into three terms. Every morning at 8 o'clock a brief service of prayer and Bible reading began the day in the auditorium, now Miller Park. At 8:15 during the first term, August 4th-9th, a conference was held of Normal Class and Institute conductors, at which reports were rendered of work done, courses of study, and methods of work, and results obtained. In those days when training classes for Sunday School teachers were almost unknown, this series of conferences, attended by hundreds of workers, proved of infinite value, and set in motion classes in many places. At 9 o'clock, section meetings were held for superintendents and pastors, and teachers of the different grades, from the primary class to the adult Bible class.

The Normal Class held its sessions during the second term, from August 10th-13th, and the third term, August 14th-18th. Four classes were held simultaneously in different tents, with teachers changed each day. At these classes most of the lessons were on the Bible—its Evidences, Books and Authors, Geography, History, and Interpretation. The topics pertaining to the teacher and the class were taken up in the different conferences. The Normal Class was held to be the core and life of the Assembly, and everybody was urged to attend its sessions. All whose names began with letters from A to G were to attend regularly Tent A. Those with initials from H to M were to go to Tent B, and so on through the alphabet, to the four Normal Tents. But the students soon found their favorite teachers, would watch for them, and follow them into their different tents. There was another infraction of the program. The blackboard was a new feature in Sunday School work, and not enough blackboards of good quality had been secured. Some were too small, some were not black enough, and one was painted with the lines for music. It is reported that some of the teachers bribed the janitor to provide for their use the good boards. There is even the tale that a Sunday School leader was seen stealing a blackboard and replacing it in another's tent by an inferior one. We humbly trust that this report was false.

That the Normal Class, the conferences, and the lectures on Sunday School work were taken seriously is shown by the report of the written examination, held on Monday, August 17th, the day before the Assembly closed. More than two hundred people sat down in the Tabernacle on the hill, each furnished with fifty questions on the Bible and the Sunday School. Twenty or more dropped out, but at the end of the nearly five hours' wrestling one hundred and eighty-four papers were handed in. Three of these were marked absolutely perfect, those of the Rev. C. P. Hard, on his way to India as a missionary, Mr. Caleb Sadler of Iowa, and the Rev. Samuel McGerald of New York. Ninety-two were excellent, fifty more were passed, making one hundred and forty-five accepted members of the Normal Alumni Association; eighteen had their papers returned to be rewritten after further study, and the lowest fourteen were consigned to the wastebasket.

The Western Christian Advocate gave a picture of the first normal examination at Chautauqua, which we republish.

The tent is a very large one, and was plentifully supplied with benches, chairs, camp-stools, etc. The spectacle was very imposing. The ladies seemed a little in the majority. There were two girls under fifteen, and one boy in his fourteenth year. Each was provided with paper, and each wore a more or less silent and thoughtful air. There was no shuffling, no listlessness, no whispering. The conductor, with a big stump for his table, occupied a somewhat central position, ready to respond to the call of any uplifted hand. We stood just back of Dr. Vincent, with the scene in full view. To our right, but a little on the outside of the tent, were Bishop Simpson and Dr. Thomas M. Eddy, who remained only a few minutes, as the latter was compelled to take the ten o'clock train for New York. On the same side, and a little nearer to us, were groups of visitors, mostly from the country adjacent, who gazed in rapt astonishment at the sight before them, not daring to inquire the meaning of all this mute array of paper and pencil. A little to our left was a lawyer of large experience and almost national fame, who had removed his hat, collar, coat and cuffs; just by his side was an ex-State senator; and a little further on was a boy from Iowa. He had improvised for his table a small round log, and had gathered together for the better resting of his knees, a good-sized pile of dry beech-leaves. This lad, we learned, had been studying the Normal course during the last year; and we further discovered that he succeeded in answering accurately all but ten or twelve of the fifty questions, one of the to him insoluble and incomprehensible being, "What is the relation of the church to the Sunday School?" Nearly in front of the conductor were two veteran spectacled sisters, who at no time whispered to each other, but kept up a strong thinking and a frequent use of the pencil. Near these sat a mother and daughter from Evanston, Illinois, silent and confident. On the outer row of seats we observed three doctors of divinity, a theological student, the president of an Ohio college, a gentleman connected with the internal revenue, and a lady principal of a young ladies' seminary, all with their thinking-caps admirably adjusted.

At the end of an hour and forty minutes a New York brother, who had been especially active in sectional work, held up his hand in token of success, and his paper was passed up to Dr. Vincent. Shortly afterward another made a similar signal; but nearly all occupied over three hours in the work. Over one half attained to seventy-five or eighty per cent.

Let it be remembered that no matter how long the student was compelled to remain, even long past the dinner hour, he was not permitted to take a recess for his midday meal. He must stay to the end, or give up his examination.

The report of the Assembly shows twenty-two lectures on Sunday School work, theory, and practice; sectional meetings—nine primary, six intermediate, one senior, five of pastors and superintendents, eight normal class and institute conductors' conferences; six Normal Classes in each of the four tents—twenty-four in all; three teachers' meetings for preparation of the Sunday School lesson; four Bible readings; three praise services; two children's meetings; and six sermons. All the leading Protestant churches were represented; and twenty-five States in the Union, besides Ontario, Montreal, Nova Scotia, Ireland, Scotland, and India. Among the preachers we find the names of Dr. H. Clay Trumbull, editor of the Sunday School Times, John B. Gough, Bishops Simpson and Janes, Dr. James M. Buckley, Dr. Charles F. Deems, Dr. T. DeWitt Talmage, and four ministers who later became bishops in the Methodist Episcopal Church:—Drs. H. W. Warren, J. F. Hurst, E. O. Haven, and C. H. Fowler.

The two Sundays, August 9th and 16th, were golden days in the calendar. An atmosphere of quiet and peace reigned throughout the grounds. No steamboats made the air discordant around the pier; the gates were closed and the steamers sailed by to more welcome stations; no excursion trains brought curious and noisy throngs of sightseers. Tents and cottages lay open while their dwellers worshiped under the trees of the Auditorium, for no one was required to watch against thieves in the crowd. The world was shut out, and a voice seemed to be saying, "Come ye yourselves apart and rest awhile."

The day began with a Sunday School graded to embrace both young and old. The riches of officers and teachers formed an embarrassment. For once, nay twice (for there were two Sundays), a Superintendent had at call more instructors than he could supply with classes. On each Sunday the attendance at the school was fifteen hundred.

At the sunset hour each evening an "Eventide Conference" was held on the lake side. The dying day, the peaceful surroundings, the calm sheet of water, the mild air, combined to impart a tone of thoughtful, uplifting meditation. I have heard old Chautauquans speak many times of the inspiring spiritual atmosphere breathed in the very air of the first Chautauqua.

Never before had been brought together for conference and for study so many leaders in the Sunday School army, representing so large a variety of branches in the church catholic. And it was not for a day or two days as in conventions and institutes, but for a solid fortnight of steady work. The Chautauqua of to-day is a widely reaching educational system, embracing almost every department of knowledge. But it must not be forgotten that all this wide realm has grown out of a school to awaken, instruct, and inspire Sunday School workers. In their conception, however, the two famous founders realized that all truth, even that looked upon as secular, is subsidiary, even necessary for successful teaching of the word of God. Hence with the courses of study and conferences upon practical details, we find on the program, some literature and science, with the spice of entertainment and amusement.

The conception of Dr. Vincent was not to locate the Assembly in one place, but from time to time to hold similar meetings on many camp grounds, wherever the opportunity arose. There is a suspicion that Lewis Miller held his own secret purpose to make it so successful on Chautauqua Lake as to insure its permanent location at Fair Point. That was a wise plan, for with settlement in one place, buildings could be erected, and features like Palestine Park could be increased and improved. Whether it was by a suggestion or a common impulse, on the last day of the Assembly a meeting was held and a unanimous appeal was presented to make Fair Point the home of the Assembly. The trustees of the camp meeting shared in the sentiment and offered to receive new members representing the Assembly constituency. As a result, the officiary was reorganized, no longer as a camp meeting but as an Assembly Board. For two years Fair Point was continued as the name of the Post Office, although the title "Chautauqua Sunday School Assembly" was adopted. But soon Fair Point became "Chautauqua" on the list of the Post Office Department, and the old name lingers only in the memory of old Chautauquans.

Before we leave that pioneer Chautauqua, we must recall some of its aspects, which might be forgotten in these later days, at once amusing, perplexing, and sometimes trying. More steamers, great and small, were plying Chautauqua's waters than at the present under the steamboat corporation system. Old Chautauquans will remember that ancient three-decker, The Jamestown, with its pair of stern wheels, labeled respectively "Vincent" and "Miller." Each steamer was captained by its owner; and there was often a congestion of boats at the pier, especially after the arrival of an excursion train. Those were not the days of standard time, eastern and central, with watches set an hour fast or slow at certain well-known points. Each boat followed its own standard of time, which might be New York time, Buffalo or Pittsburgh time, forty minutes slower, or even Columbus or Cincinnati time, slower still. Railroads crossing Ohio were required to run on Columbus time. When you were selecting a steamer from the thirty placards on the bulletin board at the Fair Point Post office, in order to meet an Erie train at Lakewood, unless you noticed the time-standard, you might find at the pier that your steamer had gone forty minutes before, or on arriving at Lakewood learn that your boat was running on Cincinnati time, and you were three quarters of an hour late for the train, for even on the Erie of those days, trains were not always an hour behind time.

Nor was this variety of "time, times, and half-time" all the drawbacks. When news came that an excursion train was due from Buffalo, every steamboat on the lake would ignore its time-table and the needs of the travelers; and all would be bunched at the Mayville dock and around it to catch the passengers. Or it might be a similar but more tangled crowd of boats in the Outlet at Jamestown to meet a special train from Pittsburgh. Haven't I seen a bishop on the Fair Point pier, who must get the train at Lakewood to meet his conference in Colorado, scanning the landscape with not a boat in sight, all piled up three miles away?

Nor were the arrangements for freight and baggage in those early years any more systematic than those for transportation. Although Chautauqua Lake is on the direct line of travel east and west, between New York and Chicago, and north and south between Buffalo and Pittsburgh, Fair Point, the seat of the Assembly, was not a railroad station. Luggage could be checked only to Jamestown, Lakewood, or Mayville, and thence must be sent by boat. Its destination might be indicated by a tag or a chalk mark, or it might remain unmarked. Imagine a steamer deck piled high with trunks, valises, bundles of blankets, furniture, tent equipment, and things miscellaneous, stopping at a dozen points along the lake to have its cargo assorted and put ashore—is it strange that some baggage was left at the wrong place, and its owner wandered around looking vainly for his property? One man remarked that the only way to be sure of your trunk was to sit on it; but what if your trunk was on the top or at the bottom of a pile ten feet high? Considering all the difficulties and discomforts of those early days—travel, baggage, no hotels nor boarding houses, a crowded dining hall with a hungry procession outside perhaps in the rain waiting for seats at the tables, the food itself none of the best—it is surprising that some thousands of people not only found the Assembly, but stayed to its conclusion, were happy in it, lived in an enchanted land for a fortnight, and resolved to return the very next year! More than this, they carried its enthusiasm and its ideals home with them and in hundreds of places far apart, the Sunday Schools began to assume a new and higher life. Some time after this, but still early in Chautauqua's history, a prominent Sunday School man expressed to the writer his opinion that "people who came home from Chautauqua became either a mighty help or a mighty nuisance. They brought with them more new ideas than could be put into operation in ten years; and if they couldn't get them, one and all, adopted at once they kicked and growled incessantly."

Before we leave the Assembly of 1874, we must not forget to name one of its most powerful and far-reaching results—the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. This assembly was held soon after the great crusade of 1874 in Ohio, when multitudes of women, holding prayer meetings on the sidewalk in front of liquor saloons literally prayed thousands of them out of existence. While the fire of the crusade was still burning, a number of women held meetings at Chautauqua during the Assembly, and took counsel together concerning the best measures to promote the temperance reform. They united in a call signed by Mrs. Mattie McClellan Brown, Mrs. Jennie Fowler Willing, Mrs. Emily Huntington Miller, and others, for a convention of women to be held in Cleveland, Ohio, November 17, 1874. At this convention, sixteen States were represented, and the national Woman's Christian Temperance Union was organized, an institution which did more than any other to form public sentiment, to make State after State "dry," and finally to establish nation-wide constitutional prohibition. It may not be generally known that this mighty movement began at the first Chautauqua Assembly.

CHAPTER V

THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT

Chautauqua was a lusty infant when it entered upon life in 1874, and it began with a penetrating voice, heard afar. Like all normal babies (normal seems to be the right word just here) it began to grow, and its progress in the forty-seven years of its life thus far (1920) has been the growth of a giant. Territorially, on Chautauqua Lake, it has enlarged at successive stages from twenty acres to more than three hundred and thirty acres, impelled partly by a demand of its increasing family for house-room, educational facilities, and playgrounds, partly from the necessity of controlling its surroundings to prevent occupation by undesirable neighbors. There has been another vast expansion in the establishment of Chautauquas elsewhere, until the continent is now dotted with them. A competent authority informs the writer that within twelve months ten thousand assemblies bearing the generic name Chautauqua have been held in the United States and the Dominion of Canada. There has been a third growth in the intellectual sweep of its plans. We have seen how it began as a system of training for teachers in the Sunday School. We shall trace its advancement into the wider field of general and universal education, a school in every department and for everybody everywhere.

To at least one pilgrim the Assembly of 1875 was monumental, for it marked an epoch in his life. That was the writer of this volume, who in that year made his first visit to Chautauqua. (The general reader who has no interest in personal reminiscences may omit this paragraph.) He traveled by the Erie Railroad, and that evening for the first time in his life saw a berth made up in a sleeping-car, and crawled into it. If in his dreams that night, a vision could have flashed upon his inward eye of what that journey was to bring to him in the coming years, he might have deemed it an Arabian Night's dream. For that visit to Chautauqua, not suddenly but in the after years, changed the entire course of his career. It sent him to Chautauqua thus far for forty-six successive seasons, and perhaps may round him out in a semi-centennial. It took him out of a parsonage, and made him an itinerant on a continent-wide scale. It put him into Dr. Vincent's office as an assistant, and later in his chair as his successor. It dropped him down through the years at Chautauqua assemblies in almost half of the States of this Union. On Tuesday morning, August 3, 1875, I left the train at Jamestown, rode across the city, and embarked in a steamer for a voyage up the lake. As we slowly wound our way through the Outlet—it was on the old steamer Jamestown which was never an ocean-greyhound—I felt like an explorer in some unknown river. Over the old pier at Fair Point was the sign, "National S. S. Assembly," and beneath it I stepped ashore on what seemed almost a holy ground, for my first walk was through Palestine Park. On Friday, August 6th, I gave a normal lesson, the first in my life, with fear and trembling. It was on "the city of Jerusalem," and I had practiced on the map until I thought that I could draw it without a copy. But, alas, one of the class must needs come to the blackboard and set my askew diagram in the right relations. Twenty years afterward, at an assembly in Kansas, an old lady spoke to me after a lesson, "I saw you teach your first lesson at Chautauqua. You said that you had never taught a normal class before, and I thought it was the solemn truth. You've improved since then!"

Some new features had been added to the grounds since the first Assembly. Near Palestine Park was standing a fine model of modern Jerusalem and its surrounding hills, so exact in its reproduction that one day a bishop pointed out the identical building wherein he had lodged when visiting the city—the same hostel, by the way, where this writer stayed afterward in 1897, and from whose roof he took his first view of the holy places. Near Palestine Park, an oriental house had been constructed, with rooms in two stories around an open court. These rooms were filled with oriental and archæological curiosities, making it a museum; and every day Dr. A. O. Von Lennep, a Syrian by birth, stood on its roof and gave in Arabic the Mohammedan call to prayer. I failed to observe, however, the people at Chautauqua prostrating themselves at the summons. Indeed, some of them actually mocked the make-believe muezzin before his face. On the hill, near the Dining Hall, stood a sectional model of the great pyramid, done in lath and plaster, as if sliced in two from the top downward, half of it being shown, and the room inside of it indicated. Also there was a model of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, covered with its three curtains, and containing within an altar, table, and candlestick. Daily lectures were given before it by the Rev. J. S. Ostrander, wearing the miter, robe, and breastplate of the high priest.

The evolution of the Chautauqua Idea made some progress at the second Assembly. Instead of eight sessions of the Normal Class, two were held daily. The program report says that fifty normal sessions were held; regularly two each day, one at 8 o'clock in the morning on a Bible topic. Breakfast must be rushed through at seven to brace up the students for their class. Another was held at 3:30, on some subject pertaining to the pupil or the teacher; with extra sessions in order to complete the specified course. A class in Hebrew was held daily by Dr. S. M. Vail, and attended by forty students. Dr. Vail had been for many years professor of Hebrew in the earliest Methodist theological school, the Biblical Institute at Concord, New Hampshire, which afterward became the School of Theology in Boston University. Dr. Vail was an enthusiast in his love of Hebrew language and literature. One who occupied a tent with him—all the workers of that season were lodged in a row of little tents on Terrace Avenue, two in each tent—averred that his trunk contained only a Hebrew Bible (he didn't need a lexicon) and a clean shirt.

Besides the class in Hebrew, Madame Kriege of New York conducted a class in kindergarten teaching, and Dr. Tourjee of Boston, W. F. Sherwin, and C. C. Case held classes in singing. All these were supposedly for Sunday School teachers, but they proved to be the thin end of the wedge opening the way for the coming summer school.

Even more strongly than at the earlier session, the Normal Class, with a systematic course of instruction in the Bible and Sunday School work, was made the center of the program. It is significant of the importance assigned to this department that for several years, no other meeting, great or small, was permitted at the normal hours. The camp must either attend the classes or stay in its tents.

At this session, Mrs. Frank Beard, noting the insistent announcement of the Normal Classes, and the persistent urging that everybody attend them, was moved to verse. As true poetry is precious, her effusion is here given:

To Chautauqua went
On pleasure bent
A youth and maiden fair.
Working in the convention
Was not their intention,
But to drive away dull care.
Along came John V——
And what did he see
But this lover and his lass.
Says he, "You must
Get up and dust
And go to the Normal Class."

The great event in the Assembly of '75 was the visit of General U. S. Grant, then President of the United States on his second term. It was brought about partly because of the long-time friendship of the General with Dr. Vincent, dating back to the Galena pastorate of 1860 and '61, but also through the influence and activity of the Rev. Dr. Theodore L. Flood, who though a successful Methodist minister was also somewhat of a politician. The President and his party came up from Jamestown on a steamer-yacht, and at Fair Point were lodged in the tent beside the Lewis Miller cottage. True to his rule while General and President, Grant made no speech in public, not even when a handsomely bound Bagster Bible was presented to him in behalf of the assembly. Those were the palmy days of "Teachers' Bibles," with all sorts of helps and tables as appendices; and at that time the Bagster and the American Tract Society were rivals for the Sunday School constituency. Not to be outdone by their competitors, the Tract Society's representative at Chautauqua also presented one of his Bibles to the President. One can scarcely have too many Bibles, and the General may have found use for both of them. He received them with a nod but never a word. Yet those who met him at dinners and in social life said that in private he was a delightful talker and by no means reticent. The tents and cottages on the Chautauqua of those days were taxed to almost bursting capacity to house the multitude over the Sunday of the President's visit. As many more would have come on that day, if the rules concerning Sabbath observance had been relaxed, as some had expected. But the authorities were firm, the gates by lake and land were kept closed, and that Sunday was like all other Sundays at Chautauqua.

Spouting Tree and Oriental House

At the close of the Assembly, the normal examinations were given to 190 students; some left the tent in terror after reading over the questions, but 130 struggled to the end and handed in their papers, of which 123 were above the passing grade. There were now two classes of graduates, and the Chautauqua Normal Alumni Association was organized. Mr. Otis F. Presbrey of Washington, D. C. (the man who on a certain occasion "looked like sixty"), was its first president. The secretary chosen was the Rev. J. A. Worden, a Presbyterian pastor at Steubenville, Ohio, and one of the normal teachers at Chautauqua; who afterward, and for many years, was general secretary and superintendent of Sabbath School work in the Presbyterian Church.

At the Assembly of 1875, a quiet, unassuming little lady was present, who was already famous, and helped to increase the fame of Chautauqua. This was Mrs. G. R. Alden, the wife of a Presbyterian pastor, but known everywhere as "Pansy," whose story-books were in almost every Sunday School library on the continent. She wrote a book, Four Girls at Chautauqua, which ingeniously wove into the account of the actual events of the season, including some of its rainy days—that was the year when it rained more or less on fourteen of the seventeen days of the Assembly—her four girls, so well imagined that they seemed real. Indeed when one read the account of one's own speech at a children's meeting, he could not doubt that the Flossie of the story who listened to it was a veritable flesh and blood girl in the audience. The story became one of the most popular of the Pansy books, brought Chautauqua to the attention of many thousands, and led large numbers of people to Fair Point. Pansy has ever been a true friend of Chautauqua, and has written several stories setting forth its attractions.

CHAPTER VI

THE NATIONAL CENTENNIAL YEAR

The founders of Chautauqua looked forward to its third session with mingled interest and anxiety. It was the centennial year of American Independence, and an exposition was opening in Philadelphia, far more noteworthy in its buildings and exhibits than any previous effort in the annals of the nation. The World's Fair in the Crystal Palace of New York, in 1855, the first attempt in America to hold an universal exposition, was a pigmy compared with the immense display in the park of Philadelphia on the centennial year. Could the multitudes from every State and from foreign lands be attracted from Philadelphia five hundred miles to Chautauqua Lake? Had the quest of the American people for new interests been satisfied by two years at the Assembly? Would it be the wiser course in view of the competition to hold merely a modest little gathering at Fair Point, or to venture boldly upon greater endeavors than ever before; to enlarge the program, to advertise more widely, and to compel attention to the new movement? Anyone who knew the adventurous, aspiring nature of both Miller and Vincent would unhesitatingly answer these questions.

The Assembly of 1876 was planned upon a larger scale than ever before. The formal opening took place on Tuesday evening, August 1st, in the forest-sheltered Auditorium, but two gatherings were held in advance and a third after its conclusion, so that the entire program embraced twenty-four days instead of seventeen.

The first meeting was the Scientific Conference, July 26th to 28th, aiming both to present science from the Christian point of view, and Christianity from the scientific point of view, showing the essential harmony between them, without either subjecting conclusions of science to church-authority or cutting up the Bible at the behest of the scientists. There had been frequent battles between the theologians and the students of nature and the "conflict of science and religion" had been strongly in evidence, ever since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Most pulpits had uttered their thunders against "Darwinism," even though some of the pulpiteers had never read Darwin's book, nor could have understood it if they had tried. And many professors who had never listened to a gospel sermon, and rarely opened their Bibles, had launched lightnings at the camp of the theologians. But here was something new; a company of scholars including Dr. R. Ogden Doremus of New York, Professor A. S. Lattimore of Rochester, Dr. Alexander Winchell of Michigan, and others of equal standing, on the same platform with eminent preachers, and no restraint on either side, each free to utter his convictions, and all certain that the outcome would be peace and not war.

The writer of these pages was present at most of those lectures, and remembers one instance showing that the province of science is in the past and the present and not in the future. Dr. Doremus was giving some brilliant experiments in the newer developments of electricity. Be it remembered that it was the year 1876, and in the Centennial Exposition of that year there was neither an automobile, a trolley-car, nor an electric light. He said, "I will now show you that remarkable phenomenon—the electric light. Be careful not to gaze at it too steadily, for it is apt to dazzle the beholder and may injure the eyesight." Then as an arc-light of a crude sort flashed and sputtered, and fell and rose again only to sputter and fall, the lecturer said, "Of course, the electric light is only an interesting experiment, a sort of toy to amuse spectators. Every effort to utilize it has failed, and always will fail. The electric light in all probability will never be of any practical value."

Yet at that very time, Thomas A. Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was perfecting his incandescent light, and only three years later, 1879, Chautauqua was illuminated throughout by electricity. When the scientist turns prophet he becomes as fallible as the preacher who assumes to prescribe limitations to scientific discovery. We live in an age of harmony and mutual helpfulness between science and religion; and Chautauqua has wrought mightily in bringing to pass the new day.

It is worthy of mention that Chautauqua holds a connecting link with "the wizard of Llewellyn Park" and his electric light; for some years later Mr. Edison married Miss Mina Miller, daughter of the Founder Lewis Miller. The Miller family, Founder, sons, daughters, and grandchildren, have maintained a deep interest in Chautauqua; and the Swiss Cottage at the head of Miller Park has every year been occupied. Representatives of the Miller family are always members of the Board of Trustees.

Rustic Bridge over Ravine

After the Scientific Conference came a Temperance Congress, on July 29th and 30th. A new star had arisen in the firmament. Out of a little meeting at Chautauqua in 1874, had grown the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, already in 1876 organized in every State and in pretty nearly every town. Its founders had chosen for President of the Union a young woman who combined in one personality the consummate orator and the wise executive, Miss Frances Elizabeth Willard of Evanston, Illinois, who resigned her post as Dean of the Woman's Department of the Northwestern University to enter upon an arduous, a lifelong and world-wide warfare to prohibit intoxicants, and as a means to that end, to obtain the suffrage for women. Frances Willard died in 1898, but if she could have lived until 1920 she would have seen both her aims accomplished in the eighteenth and nineteenth amendments to the Constitution of the United States; one forbidding the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic liquors, the other opening the door of the voting-booth to every woman in the land. In Statuary Hall, Washington, the only woman standing in marble is Frances E. Willard (there will be others later), and her figure is there among the statesmen and warriors of the nation's history, by vote of the Legislature of the State of Illinois.

At every step in the progress of Chautauqua the two Founders held frequent consultations. Both of them belonged to the progressive school of thought, but on some details they differed, and woman's sphere was one of their points of disagreement. Miller favored women on the Fair Point platform, but Vincent was in doubt on the subject. Of course some gifted women came as teachers of teachers in the primary department of the Sunday School, but on the program their appearance was styled a "Reception to Primary Teachers by Mrs. or Miss So-and-So." Dr. Vincent knew Frances E. Willard, admired her, believed honestly that she was one of the very small number of women called to speak in public, and he consented to her coming to Chautauqua in the Temperance Congress of 1876. From the hour of her first appearance there was never after any doubt as to her enthusiastic welcome at Chautauqua. No orator drew larger audiences or bound them under a stronger spell by eloquent words than did Frances Elizabeth Willard. Frances Willard was the first but by no means the last woman to lecture on the Chautauqua platform. Mrs. Mary A. Livermore soon followed her, and before many summers had passed, Dr. Vincent was introducing to the Chautauqua constituency women as freely as men, to speak on the questions of the time.

Another innovation began on this centennial season—The Chautauqua Assembly Herald. For two years the Assembly had been dependent upon reports by newspaper correspondents, who came to the ground as strangers, with no share in the Chautauqua spirit, knowing very little of Chautauqua's aims, and eager for striking paragraphs rather than accurate records. A lecturer who is wise never reads the report of his speech in the current newspapers; for he is apt to tear his hair in anguish at the tale of his utterances. Chautauqua needed an organ, and Dr. Theodore L. Flood, from the first a staunch friend of the movement, undertook to establish a daily paper for the season. The first number of the Herald appeared on June 29, 1876, with Dr. Flood as editor, and Mr. Milton Bailey of Jamestown as publisher. The opening number was published in advance of the Assembly and sent to Chautauquans everywhere; but the regular issue began on July 29th with the Scientific Conference, and was continued daily (except Sunday) until the close of the Assembly. Every morning sleepers (who ought to have arisen earlier in time for morning prayers at 6:40) were awakened by the shrill voices of boys calling out "Daily Assembly Herald!" The Daily was a success from the start, for it contained accurate and complete reports of the most important lectures, outlines of the Normal lessons, and the items of information needed by everybody. All over the land people who could not come to Chautauqua kept in touch with its life through the Herald. More than one distinguished journalist began his editorial career in the humble quarters of The Chautauqua Daily Assembly Herald. For two seasons the Daily was printed in Mayville, though edited on the ground. In 1878 a printing plant was established at the Assembly and later became the Chautauqua Press. Almost a generation after its establishment, its name was changed to The Chautauquan Daily, which throughout the year is continued as The Chautauquan Weekly, with news of the Chautauqua movement at home and abroad.

Visitors to Chautauqua in the centennial year beheld for the first time a structure which won fame from its inhabitants if not from its architecture. This was the Guest House, standing originally on the lake shore near the site of the present Men's Club building; though nobody remembers it by its official name, for it soon became known as "The Ark." No, gentle reader, the report is without foundation that this was the original vessel in which Noah traveled with his menagerie, and that after reposing on Mount Ararat it went adrift on Lake Chautauqua. "The Ark" was built to provide a comfortable home for the speakers and workers at the Assembly who for two years had been lodged in tents, like the Israelites in the Wilderness. It was a frame building of two stories, shingle-roofed, with external walls and internal partitions of tent-cloth. Each room opened upon a balcony, the stairs to the upper floor being on the outside and the entire front of each cell a curtain, which under a strong wind was wont to break loose, regardless of the condition of the people inside. After a few years a partition between two rooms at one end was taken down, a chimney and fireplace built, and the result was a living room where the arkites assembled around a fire and told stories. Ah, those noctes ambrosianæ when Edward Everett Hale and Charles Barnard and Sherwin and the Beards narrated yarns and cracked jokes! Through the thin partitions of the bedrooms, every sneeze could be heard. The building was soon dubbed Noah's Ark, then "Knowers' Ark," from the varied learning of its indwellers; and sometimes from the reverberations sounding at night, "Snorers' Ark." Frank Beard was a little deaf, and was wont to sit at these conversazioni in the parlor of the Ark with his hand held like an ear-trumpet. Mrs. Beard used to say that whenever she wished to hold a private conversation with him, they hired a boat and rowed out at least a mile from the shore. When the Assembly enlarged its boundaries by a purchase of land, the Ark was moved up to higher ground in the forest near where the Normal Hall now stands, and there served almost a generation of Chautauqua workers, until its frail materials were in danger of collapse, and it was taken down. Less famous buildings have been kept in memory by tablets and monuments; but it would require no small slab of marble to contain the names of the famous men and women who dwelt in that old Guest House; and what a book might have been made if some Boswell had kept the record of its stories and sayings! After spending two nights in the Ark, the Rev. Alfred Taylor's poetic muse was aroused to sing of the place and its occupants after this fashion:

This structure of timber and muslin contained
Of preachers and teachers some two or three score;
Of editors, parsons a dozen or more.
There were Methodists, Baptists, and 'Piscopals, too
And grave Presbyterians, a handful or two.
There were lawyers, and doctors and various folks,
All full of their wisdom, and full of their jokes.
There were writers of lessons, and makers of songs,
And shrewd commentators with wonderful tongues;
And all of these busy, industrious men
Found it hard to stop talking at just half-past ten.
They talked, and they joked, and they kept such a clatter
That neighboring folks wondered what was the matter
But weary at last, they extinguished the light,
And went to their beds for the rest of the night.

The formal opening of the Assembly in 1876 took place after the Scientific and Temperance gatherings, on Tuesday evening, August 1st, in the leaf-roofed Auditorium, but the benches were now provided with backs for the comfort of the thousands. The platform had been enlarged to make room for a choir, under the leadership in turn of W. F. Sherwin and Philip P. Bliss, whose gospel songs are still sung around the world. Only a few months later, that voice was hushed forever on earth, when the train bearing the singer and his wife crashed through a broken bridge at Ashtabula, Ohio. The record of that evening shows that fifteen speakers gave greetings, supposedly five minutes in length, although occasionally the flow of language overpassed the limit. Among the speakers we read the names of Dr. Henry M. Sanders of New York, Mr. John D. Wattles of the Sunday School Times, Dr. Henry W. Warren of Philadelphia, soon to become a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, Dr. C. F. Burr, the author of Ecce Cœlum, a book of astronomy ministering to religion, famous in that day, though almost forgotten in our time; Dr. Lyman Abbott, who came before the audience holding up his pocket-Bible, with the words, "I am here to-night, because here this book is held in honor," Dr. Warren Randolph, the head of Sunday School work among the Baptist churches, and Mr. A. O. Van Lennep, in Syrian costume and fez-cap. He made two speeches, one in Arabic, the other in English.

Normal work for Sunday School teachers was kept well in the foreground. The subjects of the course were divided into departments, each under a director, who chose his assistants. Four simultaneous lessons were given in the section tents, reviewed later in the day by the directors at a meeting of all the classes in the pavilion. In addition, Dr. Vincent held four public platform reviews, covering the entire course. The record states that about five hundred students were present daily in the Normal department. About one hundred undertook the final examinations for membership in the Normal Alumni Association. The writer of these pages well remembers those hours in the pavilion, for he was one of those examined, and Frank Beard was another. The first question on the paper was, "What is your name and address?" Mr. Beard remarked audibly, that he was glad he could answer at least one of the questions. To dispel the doubts of our readers, we remark that both of us passed, and were duly enrolled among the Normal Alumni.

Transcriber's Note: Clicking on this image will provide a larger image for more detail.

The list of the lecturers and their subjects show that Bible study and Bible teaching still stood at the fore. The program contained with many others the following names: Dr. W. E. Knox on "The Old Testament Severities," Dr. Lyman Abbott, "Bible Interpretation," Dr. R. K. Hargrove of Tennessee, later a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, "Childhood and the Sunday School Work," Dr. George P. Hays, then President of Washington and Jefferson College, "How to Reason," Frank Beard, a caricature lecture with crayon on "Our School," showing types of teachers and scholars, Dr. George W. Woodruff, a most entertaining lecture on "Bright Days in Foreign Lands," Dr. A. J. Baird of Tennessee, "Going Fishing with Peter," Rev. J. A. Worden, "What a Presbyterian Thinks of John Wesley,"—a response to Rev. J. L. Hurlbut's lecture in 1875 on "What a Methodist Thinks of John Knox,"—Prof. L. T. Townsend, "Paul's Cloak Left at Troas"; also Dr. Richard Newton, M. C. Hazard, editor of the National Sunday School Teacher, Rev. Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira, and Bishop Jesse T. Peck. These are a few samples of the repast spread on the lecture platform of the Assembly.

The Centennial of American Independence was duly commemorated on Saturday, August 5th. Bishop Simpson had been engaged to deliver the oration, but was kept at home by illness and the hour was filled with addresses by different speakers, one of whom, Mr. W. Aver Duncan of London, presented the congratulations of Old England to her daughter across the sea. A children's centennial was held in the afternoon, at which the writer of this story spoke, and Frank Beard drew funny pictures. We will not tell, though we know, which of the two orators pleased the children most. At the sunset hour an impressive Bible service was held on the shore of the lake by Professor Sherwin, followed in the Auditorium by a concert of slave-songs from "The North Carolinians," a troupe of negro college students. Late in the evening came a gorgeous display on the lake, the Illuminated Fleet. Every steam vessel plying Chautauqua waters marched in line, led by the old three-decker Jamestown all hung with Chinese lanterns, and making the sky brilliant with fireworks. A week later there was a commemorative tree-planting on the little park in the angle between the present Post Office building and the Colonnade. President Lewis Miller, Dr. C. H. Payne, President of Ohio Wesleyan University, Drs. Vail and Strong, teachers of Hebrew and Greek at the Assembly, Drs. O. H. Tiffany, T. K. Beecher, Richard Newton, J. A. Worden, Beard and Sherwin, Dr. Wythe, builder of Palestine Park and Director of Recreations at the Assembly, and Prof. P. P. Bliss were some, but not all of those who planted trees. Afterward each tree was marked by a sign bearing the name of its planter. These signs were lost in the process of the years, and not all the trees are now living. I think that I can identify the tree planted by Frank Beard, but am not sure of any other in the little group remaining at the present time.

A noteworthy event at the Assembly of 1876 was the establishment of the Children's Meeting as a daily feature. Meetings for the younger people had been held from time to time in '74 and '75 but this year Frank Beard suggested a regular "Children's Hour," and the meetings were at first conducted by him, mingling religion and humor. Underneath his fun, Mr. Beard had a serious soul. He read strong books, talked with his friends on serious subjects, always sought to give at least one illustrated Bible reading during the Assembly, and resented the popular expectation that he should be merely the funny man on the program. He was assisted in his children's meeting by the Rev. Bethuel T. Vincent, a brother of the Founder, who was one of the most remarkable teachers of children and young people whom I have ever known. He could arrange the facts of Bible knowledge in outline, could present them in a striking manner, and drill them into the minds of the boys and girls in an enduring way that few instructors could equal and none surpass. Before many sessions, Mr. Vincent's lesson became the major feature and Beard's pictures the entertainment of the meeting. The grown-ups came to the meetings in such numbers as threatened to crowd out the children, until the rule was made that adults must take the rear seats,—no exception being made even for the row of ear-trumpets—leaving the front to the little people. Following the custom of the Normal Class, an examination in writing that would tax the brains of many ministers was held at the close, limited to all below a certain age, and prizes were awarded to the best papers presented. As after forty years I read the list of graduates in those early classes, I find the names of men and women who have distinguished themselves as ministers and missionaries in the churches.

Early in the Assembly season, on August 7, 1876, a momentous step was taken in the appointment by the instructors and students of the Normal Class, of a committee to prepare a course of study for the preparation of Sunday School teachers. Eleven men, present at Chautauqua, representing ten different denominations, were chosen as the committee, and their report constituted the first attempt at a union normal course. Hitherto each church had worked out its own independent course of study, and the lines laid down were exceedingly divergent. This new course prescribed forty lessons, a year's work divided between the study of the Bible, the Sunday School, the pupil, and the principles of teaching. Comparing it with the official course now adopted by the International Sunday School Association, we find it for a year's study remarkably complete and adapted to the teacher's needs. For years it stood as the basis of the teacher-training work at Chautauqua, was followed in the preparation of text-books and pursued by many classes in the United States and Canada.

The Centennial Year marked a note of progress in the music at the Assembly. Up to this time scarcely any music had been attempted outside of the church and Sunday School hymnals. This year the choir was larger than before, perhaps as many as forty voices—think of that in contrast with the three hundred now assembled in the choir-gallery of the Amphitheater! Some anthems had been attempted, but no oratorios, and no songs of the secular character. It was Professor C. C. Case who ventured with the doubtful permission of Dr. Vincent to introduce at a concert some selections from standard music outside the realm of religion. Nobody objected, perhaps because nobody recognized the significance of the step taken; and it was not long before the whole world of music was open to Chautauquans.

This writer remembers, however, that when at an evening lecture, Dr. Vincent announced as a prelude "Invitation to the Dance," sung by a quartette of ladies, he received next day a letter of protest against so immoral a song at a religious gathering. If it had been sung without announcement of its title, no one would have objected. On the following evening, Dr. Vincent actually offered a mild apology for the title. Since that time, the same title has been printed on the Chautauqua program, and the song encored by five thousand people. Surely, "the world do move!"

Another step in the advancement of Chautauqua was the incorporation of the Assembly. Up to this year, 1876, the old charter of the Erie Conference Camp Meeting Association had constituted the legal organization. On April 28, 1876, new articles of incorporation were signed at Mayville, the county seat, providing for twenty-four trustees of the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly. In the charter the object was stated "to hold stated public meetings from year to year upon the grounds at Fair Point in the County of Chautauqua for the furtherance of Sunday School interests and any other moral and religious purpose not inconsistent therewith." We note that the old name Fair Point was still used to designate the place of the Assembly. But it was for the last time; with the next year's program a new name will appear.

One of the first acts of the new Board was to purchase a large addition to the camp-meeting ground on its eastern border, and to lay out streets upon it. This section included the campus and site of the buildings that now adorn the College Hill. Some readers may inquire how the streets of the Assembly received their names. During the Camp Meeting period, the streets were named after Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church—Simpson Avenue, Janes Avenue, Merrill Avenue, and so on. Under the Assembly régime a few more bishops were thus remembered; the road winding around from Palestine Park to the land-gate on the public highway was called Palestine Avenue; Vincent Avenue ran straight up the hill past the old Dining Hall, Miller Avenue parallel with it on the west; and other streets later were named after prominent Chautauqua leaders. Wythe the first Secretary, Root, the first Vice-President, Massey, a family from Canada making liberal contributions, Miss Kimball, the efficient Executive Secretary of the Reading Circle, and a few other names in Chautauqua's annals. The visitor to the present-day Chautauqua smiles as he reads one of the earliest enactments of the new Board, a resolution to instruct the Superintendent of Grounds "to warn the person selling tobacco on the grounds that he is engaged in an unlawful occupation." We hasten to add that this anti-tobacco regulation is no longer in operation.

Transcriber's Note: Clicking on this image will provide a larger image for more detail.

The reader of this chapter perceives that the centennial year marked notable advancements at Chautauqua: a lengthened and broadened program, the establishing of a newspaper, the beginning of the daily Children's Meeting with a course of Bible study for the young, the organizing of a definite course for the training of Sunday School teachers, the incorporation of the Assembly with a full Board of Trustees, with the transfer of the property from the former camp-meeting proprietorship, and a purchase of ground doubling the extent of its territory. Chautauqua, only three years old is already, in Scripture phrase, lengthening its cords and strengthening its stakes.

CHAPTER VII

A NEW NAME AND NEW FACES

The fourth session of the Assembly opened in 1877 with a new name, Chautauqua taking the place of old Fair Point. The former title had caused some confusion. Fair Point was often misread "Fairport," and letters wandered to distant places of similar names. There was a Chautauqua Lake station on the Erie Railway, and a Chautauqua Point encampment across the lake from Fair Point, but the name "Chautauqua" had not been appropriated, and by vote of the trustees it was adopted; the government was requested to change the name of the Post Office, and the railroads and steamboats to place Chautauqua upon their announcements. Fair Point disappeared from the record, and is now remembered only by the decreasing group of the oldest Chautauquans.

Every season brings its own anxieties, and as the Assembly of 1877 drew near, a new fear came to the leaders of Chautauqua. A few will remember, and others have heard, that in 1877 took place the most extensive railway strike in the annals of the nation. The large station of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Pittsburgh was burned by a mob, and for weeks at a time, no trains ran either into or out of many important centers. Fortunately the strike was adjusted and called off before the Assembly opened, and on the first day four thousand people entered the gates, a far greater number than at any former opening.

On that year the menace of denominational rivalry threatened to confront Chautauqua. Across the lake, two miles from the Assembly, another point reaches westward, facing the Assembly ground. This tract was purchased by an enterprising company belonging to Baptist churches, and named Point Chautauqua. Its founders disclaimed any intention of becoming competitors with the Assembly. Their purpose, as announced, was to supply sites for summer homes, especially to members and friends of their own denomination. They began by building an expensive hotel at a time when the Assembly was contented with small boarding houses; and they soon followed the hotel with a large lecture-hall far more comfortable than either the out-door auditorium or the tent-pavilion at Chautauqua. To attract visitors they soon provided a program of speakers, with occasional concerts. Thus on opposite shores of the lake two institutions were rising, in danger of becoming rivals in the near future. Nor was Chautauqua Point the only rival in prospect. A year or two later a tent was erected near Lakewood for the holding of an assembly upon a "liberal" platform, where speakers of more advanced views of religion and the Bible could obtain a hearing. This gathering favored an open Sunday, and welcomed the steamers and railroad excursions on the day when the gates of Chautauqua were kept tightly closed. In those days the fear was expressed that Chautauqua Lake, instead of being a center for Christians of every name might furnish sites for separate conventions of different sects, and thus minister to dissension rather than to fellowship.

But these fears proved to be groundless. The "liberal" convocation down the lake held but one session, and left its promoters with debts to be paid. The founders of the Baptist institution made the mistake of beginning on too great a scale. The hotel and lecture-hall involved the corporation of Point Chautauqua in heavy debt, they were sold, and the place became a village, like other hamlets around the lake. The hotel was continued for some years, and the lecture-hall became a dancing pavilion, tempting the young people to cross the lake from Chautauqua where dancing was under a strict taboo. Perhaps it was an advantage to the thousands at the Assembly to find only two miles away a place where the rules were relaxed.

One story of a later season may be told in this connection, for it was without doubt typical. There are staid fathers and mothers attending lectures on sociology and civics in the Hall of Philosophy who could narrate similar experiences if only they would. A youth and two young lasses went out at the pier-gate for a sail across the lake. They landed at Point Chautauqua, refreshed their constrained bodies by a good dance, and then sailed home again. But it was late, the gate was closed, and it was of no avail to rattle the portals, for the gate-keepers were asleep in their homes far up the hill. The girls were somewhat alarmed, but the young man piloted them through the forest over a well-worn path to a place where some pickets of the fence were loose and could be shoved aside. They squeezed through and soon were safely at their homes.

But their troubles were not over. Their tickets had been punched to go out of the grounds, but not to come in again. Technically, in the eyes of the Chautauqua government they were still outside the camp. This young man, however, was not lacking in resources. He knew all the officials from His Whiskers, the supreme chief of police, down the list. Making choice of one gateman whose nature was somewhat social he called upon him in his box, talked in a free and easy way, picked up his punch and began making holes in paper and cards. When the gatekeeper's back was turned, he quickly brought out the three tickets, punched them for coming into the grounds, and then laid down the nippers. The girls, now officially within the grounds, were grateful to their friend, and to manifest their regard wrought for him a sofa-pillow which decorated his room in college.

Something should be said just here concerning the ticket-system of Chautauqua. It was devised by the genius of Lewis Miller, to whom invention was instinctive, and was improved to meet every possible attempt at evasion. There were one-day tickets, good for only one admission, three-day tickets, week-tickets, and season-tickets, all providing no admission on Sundays. They were not transferable, and all except the one-day variety bore the purchaser's name. Two or three times during the season officers visited every house and every lecture and class, even stopping everybody on the streets to see that no single-day tickets were kept for longer periods. Provision was made for exchanging at the office short-stop tickets for the longer time desired. If one wished to go outside the gate on an errand, or for a sail on the lake, he must leave his ticket, unless he was known to the gate-keeper, in order to prevent more than one person from using the same ticket. When one left the Assembly for good, he gave up his ticket. Every ticket had its number by which it could be identified if lost or found; and the bulletin-board contained plenty of notices of lost tickets.

It is said that one careful visitor carried his ticket everywhere for a day or two, at each lecture-hall and tent looking vainly for a window where it might be shown. As it did not seem to be needed, he left it in his room, only to find when he wished to take out a boat, that he must go home and get his ticket. When the day arrived for him to leave Chautauqua, he placed his ticket in the bottom of his trunk, as it would be needed no longer, intending to take it home as a souvenir for his memory-book. But, alas, at the gate, departing, he found that ticket an absolute necessity. Without it, apparently he must stay forever inside the walls of Chautauqua. So once more he overhauled his trunk, dug up his ticket from its lowest strata, and departed in peace.

Old Hall of Philosophy

The Golden Gate
Prof. W. C. Wilkinson, Dr. J. H. Vincent, Lyman Abbott, Bishop H. W. Warren

One departure from camp-meeting customs at once wrought a change in the aspect of Chautauqua and greatly promoted its growth. We have noted the fact that in the earlier years no householder or tent-dweller was to receive boarders, and all except those who cooked at home ate in a common dining-hall. After the third Assembly, this restriction was removed and anyone could provide rooms and board upon paying a certain percentage of receipts to the management. The visitors who came in 1877 missed, but not in sorrow, the dingy old Dining-Hall, which had been torn down. But everywhere boarding houses had sprung up as by magic, and cottages had suddenly bulged out with new additions, while signs of "Rooms and Board" greeted the visitants everywhere. In fact, so eager were the landlords for their prey, that runners thronged the wharf to inform new arrivals of desirable homes, and one met these agents even at the station in Mayville. There was an announcement of the Palace Hotel, the abode of luxurious aristocracy. The seeker after its lordly accommodations found a frame building, tent-covered and tent-partitioned into small rooms for guests. But even this was an improvement upon the rows of cots in the big second story of the old lodging house, where fifty people slept in one room, sometimes with the rain dripping upon them through a leaky roof. Year by year the boarding cottages grew in number, in size, and in comfort. Fain would we name some of these hostelries, whose patrons return to them season after season, but we dare not begin the catalogue, lest by an omission we should offend some beloved landlady and her guests. In a few years the Palace Hotel, half-house and half-tent, gave place to the Hotel Athenæum, on the same site, whose wide balcony looks out upon the lake, and whose tower has been a home for some choice spirits. The writer knows this for he has dwelt beside them.

On the extreme southwestern limit of the old camp ground was a ravine, unoccupied until 1877. On the slopes of this valley the declivity was cleared and terraced, seats—this time with backs—were arranged upon its sides; toward the lake it was somewhat banked up to form a place for the speakers' platform. Over it was spread the tent, formerly known as "the pavilion," brought from the hill beside Vincent Avenue. This was the nucleus out of which grew in after years the famous Chautauqua Amphitheater. At first it was used only on rainy days, but after a year or two gradually took the place of the out-of-doors Auditorium.

Near the book-store on the hill stands a small gothic, steep-roofed building, now a flower-shop. It was built just before the Assembly of 1877 as a church for the benefit of those who lived through the year at Chautauqua, numbering at that time about two hundred people. The old chapel was the first permanent public building erected at Chautauqua and still standing.

The program of '77 began with a council of Reform and Church Congress, from Saturday, August 4th to Tuesday, August 7th. Anthony Comstock, that fearless warrior in the cause of righteousness, whose face showed the scars of conflict, who arrested more corrupters of youth, and destroyed more vile books, papers, and pictures than any other social worker, was one of the leading speakers. He reported at that time the arrest of 257 dealers in obscene literature and the destruction of over twenty tons of their publications. There is evil enough in this generation, but there would have been more if Anthony Comstock had not lived in the last generation. Another reformer of that epoch was Francis Murphy, who had been a barkeeper, but became a worker for temperance. His blue ribbon badge was worn by untold thousands of reformed drunkards. He had a power almost marvelous of freeing men from the chain of appetite. I was present once at a meeting in New York where from the platform I looked upon a churchful of men, more than three hundred in number, whose faces showed that the "pleasures of sin" are the merest mockery; and after his address a multitude came forward to sign Mr. Murphy's pledge and put on his blue ribbon. At Chautauqua Mr. Murphy made no appeal to victims of the drink habit, for they were not there to hear him, but he did appeal, and most powerfully, in their behalf, to the Christian assemblage before him. Another figure on the platform was that of John B. Gough,—we do not call him a voice, for not only his tongue, but face, hands, feet, even his coat-tails, were eloquent. No words can do justice to this peerless orator in the cause of reform. These were the three mighty men of the council, but the report shows twice as many names almost as distinguished.

On the evening of Tuesday, August 7th, came the regular opening of the Assembly proper, in the Auditorium on the Point. The report of attendance was far above that of any former opening day. Dr. Vincent presided and conducted the responsive service of former years—the same opening sentences and songs used every year since the first Assembly in 1874. We find fifteen names on the list of the speakers on that evening, representing many churches, many States, and at least two lands outside our own.

Is another story of Frank Beard on that evening beneath the dignity of history? When he came upon the platform, he found the chairs occupied, and sat down among the alto singers, where he insisted on remaining despite the expostulations of Mr. Sherwin. In the middle of the exercises, the steamboat whistle at the pier gave an unusually raucous scream. Mr. Sherwin came forward and told the audience that there was no cause for alarm; the sound was merely Mr. Beard tuning his voice to sing alto. Two or three speakers afterward incidentally referred to Mr. Beard as a singer, and hoped that he might favor the congregation with a solo. One of the speakers, an Englishman, prefaced his talk by singing an original song, set to Chautauqua music. That he might see his verses, Mr. Sherwin took down a locomotive headlight hanging on one of the trees, and held it by the side of the singer. The Englishman, short and fat, and Sherwin with dignity supporting the big lantern, formed a tableau. Immediately afterward Dr. Vincent called on Mr. Beard to speak; and this was his opening, delivered in his peculiar drawl.

"I was a good mind to sing a song instead of making a speech, but I was sure that Professor Sherwin wouldn't hold the lantern for me to sing by. He knows that he can't hold a candle to me, anyhow!"

With Professor Sherwin, in charge of the music in 1877, was associated Philip Phillips, whose solos formed a prelude to many of the lectures. No one who listened to that silvery yet sympathetic voice ever forgot it. It will be remembered that President Lincoln in Washington, after hearing him sing Your Mission, sent up to the platform his written request to have it repeated before the close of the meeting. Mr. Phillips ever after cherished that scrap of paper with the noblest name in the history of America. Another musical event of the season of 1877 was the visit of the Young Apollo Club of New York, one of the largest and finest boy-choirs in the country. They gave three concerts at Chautauqua, which in the rank and rendering of their music were a revelation to the listening multitudes.

While we are speaking of the music we must make mention of songs written and composed especially for Chautauqua. In Dr. Vincent's many-sided nature was a strain of poetry, although I do not know that he ever wrote a verse. Yet he always looked at life and truth through poetic eyes. Who otherwise would have thought of songs for Chautauqua, and called upon a poet to write them? Dr. Vincent found in Miss Mary A. Lathbury another poet who could compose fitting verses for the expression of the Chautauqua spirit. If I remember rightly her first song was prepared for the opening in 1875, the second Assembly, and as the earliest, it is given in full. In it is a reference to some speakers at the first Assembly who went on a journey to the Holy Land, and to one, the Rev. F. A. Goodwin, whose cornet led the singing in 1874, who became a missionary in India.

A HYMN OF GREETING

The flush of morn, the setting suns
Have told their glories o'er and o'er
One rounded year, since, heart to heart
We stood with Jesus by the shore.
We heard his wondrous voice; we touched
His garment's hem with rev'rent hand,
Then at his word, went forth to preach
His coming Kingdom in the land.
And following him, some willing feet
The way to Emmaus have trod;
And some stand on the Orient plains,
And some—upon the mount of God!
While over all, and under all,
The Master's eye, the Master's arm,
Have led in paths we have not known,
Yet kept us from the touch of harm.
One year of golden days and deeds,
Of gracious growth, of service sweet;
And now beside the shore again
We gather at the Master's feet.
"Blest be the tie that binds," we sing;
Yet to the bending blue above
We look, beyond the face of friends,
To mark the coming of the Dove.
Descend upon us as we wait
With open heart—with open Word;
Breathe on us, mystic Paraclete
Breathe on us, Spirit of the Lord!

Another song of the second Assembly, and sung through the years since at the services of the Chautauqua Circle, was written and set to music by Miss Lucy J. Rider of Chicago, afterward Mrs. Lucy Rider Meyer, one of the founders of the Deaconess movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church. It begins with the lines:

The winds are whispering to the trees,
The hill-tops catch the strain,
The forest lifts her leafy gates
To greet God's host again.

In the year of which we are writing, 1877, Mary A. Lathbury gave to Chautauqua two songs which have become famous, and are to be found in every hymnal published during the last generation. One is the Evening Song of Praise, "Day is dying in the West," written to be sung at the even-tide conferences beside the lake. The other, beginning, "Break thou the bread of life," was the study song for the Normal Classes. Another, less widely known abroad, but sung every year at Chautauqua is the Alumni Song, "Join, O friends, in a memory song." These were a few of the many songs written by Miss Lathbury at Dr. Vincent's request, and set to music by Professor Sherwin. Originally composed for the Normal Class, then the most prominent feature on the program, after the Chautauqua Circle arose to greatness in 1878, they were adopted as the songs of that widespread organization. For the C. L. S. C. a class song was written each year, until the Chautauqua songs grew into a book. Not all of these class songs have become popular, but quite a number are still sung at the Institution, especially at class-meetings and in the Recognition Day services.

At the Assembly of 1877 the Normal Class still stood in the foreground. Special courses of lessons were given to Primary Teachers, by Mrs. Emily Huntington Miller, Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts, and the ever-popular "Pansy"—Mrs. G. R. Alden. The record informs us that the average attendance at the four normal tents was more than five hundred. Thorough reviews after the course were held from time to time, and this year two competitive examinations, one on August 14th for those unable to remain until the close, but received examination on the entire course—fifty questions in number; the other on Tuesday, August 21st with three hundred candidates for the diploma.

From 1876 for a number of years it was the custom to hold an anniversary service on one evening, for the Normal Alumni. The graduates marched in procession, led by a band, a silken banner before each class, and every member wearing a badge, to the Pavilion in the ravine and afterward to its successor the Amphitheater, where Chautauqua songs were sung, and an address given by an orator, the President of the Normal Alumni introducing the speaker. It may have been in 1877, or maybe in a later year, that John B. Gough was the orator of the evening; and he began his address in this wise:

I don't know why I have been chosen to speak to the Alumni of Chautauqua, unless it is because I am an Alumni myself, if that is the right word for one of them. I am art alumni of Amherst College; M.A., Master of Arts. I have a diploma, all in Latin. I can't read a word of it, and don't know what it means, but those long Latin words look as if they must mean something great. When I was made an alumni I sat on the platform of the Commencement Day; the salutatorian—they told me that was his title—came up and began to speak in Latin. He said something to the President, and he bowed and smiled as if he understood it. He turned to the trustees, and spoke to them and they looked as wise as they could. He said something to the graduating class, and they seemed to enjoy it—all in Latin; and I hadn't the remotest idea what it was all about. I kept saying to myself, "I wish that he would speak just one word that I could understand." Finally, the orator turned straight in my direction and said, "Ignoramus!" I smiled, and bowed, just as the others had. There was one word that I could understand, and it exactly fitted my case!

On the lecture platform of 1877, the outstanding figure was the massive frame, the Jupiter-like head, and the resonant voice of Joseph Cook, one of the foremost men of that generation in the reconciliation of science with religion—if the twain ever needed a reconciliation. He gave six lectures, listened to by vast audiences. The one most notable was that entitled, "Does Death End All?" in which he assembled a host of evidences, outside of the Scriptures, pointing to the soul's immortality. Joseph Cook is well-nigh forgotten in this day, but in his generation he was an undoubted power as a defender of the faith.

If we were to name the Rev. James M. Buckley, D.D., in the account of each year when he spoke in the platform and the subjects of his addresses, there would be room in our record for few other lecturers. He was present at the opening session in 1874, and at almost every session afterward for more than forty years,—aggressive in debate, instantaneous in repartee, marvelous in memory of faces and facts, and ready to speak upon the widest range of subjects. Every year, Dr. Buckley held a question-drawer, and few were the queries that he could not answer; although in an emergency he might dodge a difficulty by telling a story. For many years he was the editor of the Christian Advocate in New York, known among Methodists as the "Great Official"; and he made his paper the champion of conservatism, for he was always ready to break a lance in behalf of orthodox belief or the Methodist system. Another speaker this year was Dr. P. S. Henson, a Baptist pastor successively in Philadelphia, in Chicago, and in Boston, but by no means limited to one parish in his ministry. He spoke under many titles, but most popularly on "Fools," and "The Golden Calf," and he knew how to mingle wisdom and wit in just proportions. Abundant as were his resources in the pulpit and on the platform, some of us who sat with him at the table or on a fallen tree in the forest, thought that he was even richer and more delightful, as well as sagacious in his conversation. Dr. Charles F. Deems, pastor of the Church of the Stranger in New York, also came to Chautauqua for the first time this year. He was at home equally in theology, in science, and on the questions of the day, with a remarkable power of making truth seemingly abstruse simple to common people. I recall a lecture on a scientific subject, at which he saw on the front seat two boys, and he made it his business to address those boys and simplify his message seemingly for them while in reality for his entire audience. But we cannot even name the speakers who gave interest to the program of 1877.

One event of that season, however, must not be omitted, for it became the origin of one noteworthy Chautauqua custom. Mr. S. L. Greene, from Ontario, Canada, a deaf-mute, gave an address before a great audience in the Auditorium under the trees. He spoke in the sign-language, telling several stories from the gospels; and so striking were his silent symbols that everyone could see the picture. We were especially struck with his vivid representation of Christ stilling the tempest. As he closed, the audience of at least two thousand burst into applause, clapping their hands. Dr. Vincent came forward, and said, "The speaker is unable to hear your applause; let us wave our handkerchiefs instead of clapping our hands."