Guest Blogger: Stephanie Grace Whitson

CHAUTAUQUA!

To tens of thousands of Americans in the late 19th century, that word meant FUN. Chautauquas were a combination of adult education, entertainment, and religious events all rolled into one. By the early twentieth century, there was even a “circuit” that performers followed from place to place, where communities pitched tents and put up stages and invited surrounding residents to gather for a week or ten days. It was a chance for “regular” Americans to hear and see former presidents, famous orators, elocutionists, and renowned preachers for as little as a fifty-cent ticket to enter the grounds.

The 1891 program for one such event reads, “To those longing for a wider outlook on the world and its work, and who because of the rough ways of life are denied much time for study, and whose opportunities for improvement are limited because of narrow and unfavorable surrounding, the Chautauqua Assembly comes like a benediction.”

I personally tend to think that most of the farm wives who were able to go for the full week or ten days felt blessed because it was a season of NO cooking, NO housecleaning, and NO gardening. Although I’ve also wondered if, when they got back home, they wondered if it was worth it as they stared at the weeds in the garden that had cropped up while they were gone!

Several communities in my home state of Nebraska hosted Chautauqua events over the years. Two weeks ago I attended a revival of Chautauqua at Homestead National Monument near Beatrice, Nebraska (pronounced bee-AT-rus, not BEE-a-trice). Mark Twain scholar Warren Brown [photo at left] made it seem that Mark Twain himself was on stage and inspired me to read Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc. Professor Taylor Keen brought Standing Bear to life (our entire city is reading Joe Starita’s book I Am a Man as our “One Book One Lincoln” read) [book cover below right], and Karen Vuranch introduced me to a Laura Ingalls Wilder I knew very little about. It was a rich event and one I won’t soon forget—as was undoubtedly the case for those who attended Chautauqua events in the late 1800s.

My next novel, The Message on the Quilt, will be set on the grounds of the Beatrice, Nebraska, Chautauqua in 1890, and I’ve had a wonderful time poring over folders of old photographs and programs and newspaper articles to learn more about that time and place. I will definitely have to have Emilie take a moonlight cruise on the Queen of the Blue. I don’t know that I’ll have the heart to have her slip in the mud and ruin her white dress (as happened to one attendee), but she’ll definitely be wooed by one particular member of The Swedish Quartette—much to her overbearing father’s consternation.

Most of the people I try to tell about this “big event” in the lives of so many 19th century people have never heard the word “Chautauqua.” Imagine a chance to see a former President “in the flesh” in the days before the internet and television. Imagine hearing gifted musicians in the days before MP3 players … when to hear music you had either make it yourself or go somewhere to hear it performed. Imagine your first ice cream cone … and an evening in the shade of a giant tree, when back home you were watering seedlings in hopes of shade someday.

We are so very blessed in American in 2012.