By Martha Davidson, Research Librarian
In the 1870s the Chautauqua movement came to Framingham. A meeting hall in the form of a Greek temple, an open air auditorium, a large dining hall, and tents and cottages, dormitories and classrooms sprang up in the Mt. Wayte area. Chautauqua was named for the lake in New York State where the original camp meeting developed under the sponsorship of the Methodist Church. It soon took on an interdenominational character dedicated to education and uplifting activities. The Chautauqua movement embodied the middle class longing for Culture with a capital “C” in the years after the Civil War.
There was a railroad station at “Lakeview,” where as many as thirty trains full of “Chautauquans” stopped each day during the summer months. A Chautauqua session lasted for ten days, and tickets for a single day cost 25 cents. Events included bird classes, Bible study, choral practice, physical culture for children, civic improvement, and of course lectures and “entertainments.” Among the speakers were President Rutherford B. Hayes, Booker T. Washington, and Framingham’s own poetess, Edna Dean Proctor.
A series of Chautauqua textbooks includes such titles as: Studies of the Stars, Greek History, A Brief Outline of the History of Art, Man’s Antiquity and Language, Asiatic History, and Assembly Bible Outlines. For those who were tired of studying there was boating on the pond, swimming in the Sudbury River, and slides and musical presentations, or the cartoons of a chalk artist. The New England Chautauqua in Framingham was the second largest in the nation, after the original one.
In the 1880s there were over 100 cottages. The Hall of Philosophy could seat 500 people, and the dining hall could serve 300 at a time. The largest crowd (3,500) came to hear a speech on “Temperance” in the canopied amphitheater. There was a telegraph and telephone office.
The bells which had summoned people to meetings and to meals rang for the last time on the first anniversary of Armistice Day in 1919. The railroad station had burned in 1905 and a fire in 1933 destroyed three of the houses. Gradually most of the buildings disappeared, though it is still possible to see the foundation stones of the Hall of Philosophy. The once-beautiful site became housing for welfare recipients in the 1930s and the town established a dump and then an incinerator in the area.
