Paging Through History
- Margaret Hopkins
- Oct 8
- 4 min read
The story of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle building.
by Margaret Hopkins
[Originally published in the Fall 2025 issue of Mount Gretna Magazine. View the full issue to see this story in its designed layout, complete with additional images.]
Four years after its founding in 1874, the New York Chautauqua Institution (upon which Mount Gretna’s Pennsylvania Chautauqua is based) opened a new chapter in American education with a novel four-year program, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC).
Sharing Chautauqua’s mission to broaden access to education, the CLSC was open to all — whether an individual was a shop girl, farm boy, mechanic, or those with leisure time — at a cost of about two cents a day. Its goal was simple but ambitious: to develop people’s God-given gifts of intellectual capacity, invention, and reason through reading and study.
“I am going to college, my own college, in my own house, taking my own time; turning the years into a college term; turning my kitchen, sitting-room, and parlor into college halls, recitation rooms, and laboratory,” wrote John H. Vincent, Chautauqua and CLSC co-founder, describing what program enrollees might have said about the experience.
Neither John nor Lewis Miller, also a Chautauqua co-founder, had formal schooling beyond early grades. Lewis was a businessman and successful agricultural inventor; John started teaching when he was 15, according to Chautauqwhat? A Short History of a Place and an Idea by Chautauqua archivist and historian Jon Schmitz.
The men met in the national Sunday Schools movement that promoted literacy for reading the scriptures. As devout Christians, they shared a passion for investigating new teaching methods and techniques. With support from the Sunday School Union of the Methodist Church, John and Lewis developed the Chautauqua Institution, a multi-week program of study and instruction featuring well-known speakers and preachers.
The first assembly drew thousands. It confirmed the men’s convictions that education was the best means to not only glorify God but also to enrich individuals.
With the CLSC, John and Lewis expanded the Institution with a curriculum of structured and comprehensive readings, rigorous assignments, and written exams. Readings in science, history, and literature were included with religious texts. The blending of secular with the sacred was novel and not without critics, prompting John’s response: “All things that are legitimate are of God. The human intellect belongs to God and is to be cultivated for him.”
When he introduced the CLSC in 1878, John anticipated a few hundred people might enroll. By 1886, the CLSC had more than 100,000 students in the United States and beyond, according to John.
Six of those students came to Mount Gretna in 1892 to celebrate their completion of the program and receive their diplomas at the Pennsylvania Chautauqua’s first Recognition Day. In contrast to that low-key event, the second and subsequent Recognition Days included flower girls, poems, recitations, band and choral concerts, and processions through decorated arches and the “Golden Gate” of knowledge, according to news reports.
While the heart of the CLSC program was individual study, John and Lewis encouraged local circles where students could gather to discuss their assigned readings and hear from invited speakers.
Rev. H. C. Pardoe, dean of the Pennsylvania Chautauqua’s CLSC department, organized the “Hall of the Grove” circle in 1893. By 1899, this CLSC had 80 members who annually trekked to Gretna for the three-week, face-to-face sessions with fellow students and professors during summer assemblies, according to the Daily News.
In 1901, fundraising began for a permanent home for Gretna’s CLSC. That next April, the Chautauqua board approved construction of a one-story building of Grecian architecture with meeting, reading, and reception rooms. John H. Cilley, who designed the auditorium, was awarded the contract for $2,500, according to board minutes.
By mid-June, the CLSC house was ready for the 10th Pennsylvania Assembly. Wooden steps led up to the three-sided veranda ringed by stately chestnut columns, and the 40-by-60-foot meeting room was set for lectures, classes, and roundtable discussions. The June 18, 1902, edition of the Daily News declared, “The CLSC has erected a very handsome building … where every comfort will be provided for its members and strangers visiting the grounds and in which thirty-minute noonday lectures will be given by prominent speakers.”
Until the Hall of Philosophy was completed in 1910, the CLSC house provided the primary meeting space for the Chautauqua board and for classes and lectures not suited for the auditorium. At one time, the building also became home to a community library with seven daily newspapers, maps, and 500-plus books. A librarian was hired to monitor the collection, according to Chautauqua board minutes from the 1920s.
Although membership in CLSCs started declining during the mid-20th century, the New York Chautauqua kept the program running by selecting literature for reading and discussion at its annual summer assemblies. Participation in the Chautauqua CLSC is stable, with approximately 200 people joining each year.
But membership numbers do not begin to tell the story of CLSCs’ impact on models of informal education. Continuing education classes offered by university extension services — along with lunch-and-learns, self-paced trainings, and reading and book groups — owe much to the CLSC’s core belief in adults’ capacity and desire to learn.
As John Vincent wrote, “Show people, no longer young, that the mind reaches its maturity long after the school days end, and that some of the best intellectual and literary labor is performed in and beyond middle life.”
Margaret Hopkins is a fourth-generation member and full-time resident of the Mount Gretna Campmeeting Association. She enjoys learning about Mount Gretna’s history and has written stories for the Mount Gretna Area Historical Society newsletters.