Evansville Chautauqua's tent meeting on Coal Mine/Reitz Hill. The Chautauqua Institution, or just Chautauqua, is a place in southwestern New York State along the shore of beautiful Chautauqua Lake. It is a place with a smorgasbord of activities over a nine-week season each summer. It is at once a community, a learning center, a retreat, a vacation destination, and an American Utopia. All of that comes together to create the magic of Chautauqua. The Institution, originally called the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly, was founded in 1874 as an educational experiment in out-of-school, vacation learning. It was successful and broadened almost immediately beyond courses for Sunday school teachers to include academic subjects, music, art and physical education. The Institution spawned a whole movement called the Chautauqua Movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Independent 'Chautauquas' fashioned after the original sprung up around the country. At the peak of the Movement in the 1920s, several hundred of these communities existed. Further, traveling 'Chautauquas' brought culture, entertainment, reading groups, theater, opera, lectures/speeches, etc. to the newly-settled towns and cities in the midwestern, southern, and western parts of the United States during a time before broadcast media was invented. For these communities, a visit from a 'Chautauqua' was like a traveling carnival or circus for thinking people. These tent festivals would be conducted over the course of several days outside of towns and the pick up and move to the next venue. Eventually the advent of radio and television,as well as permanent libraries, arts and cultural venues in cities and towns obviated the need for the traveling shows.