Lights Along the Shore: Lakeside Origins and Tradition
On a warm Wednesday, August 27, 1873, a group of Methodist preachers unloaded axes and shovels and began clearing a tract of land near Lakeside's present-day Central Park. They built a podium, plank benches and improvised several platforms of timber and stone upon which fires would light the meetings to come. On the edge of the clearing twenty or so tents provided shelter for the preachers and their families.
That same evening down a lane that is now Maple Street, people from the surrounding countryside arrived on foot and in wagons. Lakeside's first public event was about to begin. It was, even by the standards of that time, an old-fashioned camp meeting revival with rousing hymns and preaching that matched the surrounding bonfires.
Tradition says the idea for that first Lakeside meeting had been born at a Fourth of July picnic when a group of Methodists decided their lake shore picnic site would be ideal for rekindling the spirit of the camp meeting revivals of frontier days.
Like many Americans of the time, the picnickers feared the country had lost its spiritual sense of direction. The civil war had preserved the union, but at terrible human cost made all the more evident by the Johnson's Island prison camp only a few miles to the East. Slaves had been emancipated but Black American lives were still blighted by racism, under-education, unemployment and poverty, and many veterans from both sides of the war were not much better off. Portions of the South remained under military occupation and 1873 had seen a major financial panic. Abraham Lincoln had been martyred; Andrew Johnson barely escaped impeachment; and war-hero Ulysses S. Grant of Ohio seemed incapable of dealing with, or resisting, scandals bred by wartime procurement and ill-managed reconstruction.
Camp meeting revivals had been at the center of rural religious life in Ohio during the early nineteenth century. Offering powerful preaching and spiritual renewal, they also provided social and courtship opportunities to isolated rural families. As towns grew and churches were founded, camp meeting revivals waned, but some Methodists missed the fervor of earlier days. Maybe revival was what the country needed.
Lakeside's official history began under the sponsorship of the Central Ohio Conference of the Methodist Church. A deed was registered to part of the land now owned by the Lakeside Association. Among the early organizers and financial backers were Alexander Clemons, the octogenarian patriarch of one of the peninsula's leading families, the Reverend Richard P. Duvall, a local Methodist minister and ex-missionary to relocated Fox and Sac Indians in Oklahoma, B. H. Jacobs, an immigrant from Denmark, civil war veteran and Port Clinton store owner, and twenty-seven year old Samuel R. Gill who had grown up on the peninsula.
For the rest of that summer of 1873 and the next, revivals continued and the crowds grew. Methodists predominated but other denominations were present and welcomed. Soon a large shelter with a permanent roof and open sides was built near the site of today's Hoover Auditorium. Members of the German-speaking Methodist church joined in 1874 and would eventually build their own auditorium for programs in the German language. That building still stands as Lakeside's South Auditorium.
A few cottages rose on the cleared lots overlooking Lake Erie, but throughout the late 1800s for most people going to the camp meeting meant camping. Sanitation was basic and beds were not much more than piles of straw covered with quilts and blankets. Cooking was usually done outdoors.
Permanent wooden tent frames soon became cottages. A dormitory-style building, called Pilgrim's Rest, with women on the second floor and men on the first was built in 1874. But increasing crowds demanded more comfort and in May 1875 the first unit of the Hotel Lakeside was built.
Lakeside's reputation quickly spread throughout Northern Ohio. Until fairly late in the nineteenth century, the Marblehead Peninsula, separated from the mainland by Sandusky Bay to the South and the Great Black Swamp to the west, had been seen by many as just one more Lake Erie island. There would be no bridge over the bay for many years. Fortunately, lake transportation by steamboat was already well-established. The first crowds disembarked at a makeshift wooden dock built by founder Alexander Clemons. Lakeside quickly became a major summertime port of call. One Sunday in 1874 as many as 5,000 people visited the grounds.
Throughout the nineteenth century Ohio Methodism had been evolving from the emotional evangelism of the frontier into a church that founded influential colleges like Ohio Wesleyan, Ohio Northern, Baldwin Wallace and Mount Union. Since sound, faith-based education was seen as essential to a growing church and community, Sunday schools had become a major part of church life. At a time when many people received only the most rudimentary formal schooling, Sunday schools provided much of the education most people got. But who was to train the teachers?
In 1874 an Akron, Ohio manufacturer, Lewis Miller, and John Heyl Vincent, a Methodist minister, had an answer. They founded the Chautauqua Institution at Lake Chautauqua, New York near the shore of Lake Erie. While its initial mission was to train Sunday school teachers, the Chautauqua venture soon expanded into a summertime center for adult education and cultural enrichment.
That powerful notion -- a faith based summer resort offering both religious and secular education -- was to blossom into the chautauqua movement. By the early nineteen hundreds more than three hundred chautauqua-style resorts associated with various Christian and Jewish congregations had been established from New Jersey to California.
The word chautauqua became, and is today, the generic descriptive term for resorts that blend summer recreation with religious observance, education, culture and recreation. Most chautauquas shared similar financial arrangements combining donations with admission fees. The fee entitled the visitor to most if not all the organization's recreational, educational and cultural offerings. While there were always some disadvantages to fencing off a small town, the savings realized in administrative costs went a long way toward paying for quality talent.
A nationwide circuit developed as the chautauquas learned to share performers, preachers and lecturers. At a time when small towns and farms predominated, the chautauquas often represented the only chance many Americans had to go to a concert, see a play, or hear the great lecturers and preachers of what was a golden era of the spoken word.
The growing chautauqua movement was a natural for Lakeside. Influenced by Rev. Vincent's experiment in New York, Lakeside had held its first Sunday school training sessions in 1877. During the 1890s Lakeside completed its transformation from the original camp meeting site into a booming chautauqua by adding a full program of education, wholesome entertainment, music and greatly expanded facilities for sports and exercise. The elements that form today's Lakeside program were essentially in place.
Perhaps the real breakthrough that pushed Lakeside toward its rebirth as a chautauqua was the 1875 performance of Amanda Smith, an African American evangelist and singer with a commanding presence and a voice so big that one of her fans said that with the right wind she could be heard on Kelly's Island. Her music attracted record crowds and Lakeside saw its future.
Over the next century and more, Ms. Smith would be followed by a host of great classical and popular musicians. Ernestine Schuman-Heink, Eileen Farrell, Marian Anderson, Jerome Hines, Richard Tucker, William Warfield, Ferrante and Teicher, Victor Borge, Al Hirt, Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles, Bill Monroe, Shirley Jones, the Ohio State Alumni Band, the Dukes of Dixieland, Peter Noone and a well-kown Elvis impersonator have all graced Lakeside's various stages -- from the outdoor venues of the early years, through the open-sided Central Auditorium, to the present 3,000 seat Hoover Auditorium.
Throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century, Lakeside evening programs were preceded by a fifteen to twenty minute concert by a resident orchestra playing the mix of waltzes, marches and opera overtures popular at the time. They were eventually replaced by visiting symphony orchestras and popular music ensembles from around the region. In 1973 Lakeside founded its own symphony which has grown into today's Lakeside Summer Symphony. Conducted by Cleveland's Robert Cronquist, it offers seven or eight concerts every August. Choral music, with special emphasis on church choirs and sacred choral literature, received very early attention at Lakeside. As early as 1895, a Lakeside chorus performed Haydn's Creation and choral music has remained on the Lakeside scene. In recent years, the Lakeside Choral Festival choir has presented Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, John Rutter's Gloria and, of course, Handel's Messiah.
In a television and Internet age it is hard for us to appreciate how important public lectures used to be. Mark Twain may have made more money from lectures than he did from books, and for many politicians the chautauqua circuit was the equivalent of network television. Over the years such speakers as Jane Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Gov. William McKinley, Speaker of the House Champ Clark, Amelia Earhart, Sgt. Alvin York, Sen. Robert La Follette, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gen. Smedley Butler, J.C. Penney, Branch Rickey, Lowell Thomas, and Drew Pearson entertained and challenged Lakeside audiences.
Sometimes the famous just dropped by for a visit. In the 1870s Ex-President Grant joined fellow civil war veterans in an annual reunion and, in 1891, Ex-President Rutherford B. Hayes was a guest at the Hotel Lakeside. In 1933, with lights blazing Graf Zeppelin, predecessor of the ill-fated German dirigible Hindenberg, cruised over Lakeside on its way to the 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair.
During the chautauqua transition, Lakeside expanded its early Sunday school training sessions into a varied program of adult and youth education. Courses were offered in foreign languages, bookkeeping and shorthand, oil painting and watercolors, mathematics and the natural sciences. Educational needs today are of course much different, but Lakeside continues its educational tradition with seminars ranging from health through personal finances to music appreciation. And at a time when music and arts education is being eclipsed in American schools, the Fun with Music program for young people and the Rhein Arts Center for all ages offer a summertime alternative.
Underlying all the change, Lakeside's identity as a church-related institution remained the bedrock of all its efforts. The early revivals and bible studies have evolved into a modern program of Sunday worship, daily study groups, evening vespers on the lake shore as well as special offerings for children and teenagers. Clergy and musicians of all faiths continue to inspire and guide Lakeside audiences with both traditional and contemporary services.
As transportation improved and universities and colleges proliferated, and above all with the advent of the movies and radio and television, many of the chautauquas succumbed to modern times. But some, including Lakeside and the original chautauqua in New York, managed to adapt and survive. They continue to serve those who still feel a need to combine family vacations with spiritual renewal, continuing education and live music.
Every year, toward the end of August, Lakeside people have a brief ceremony to mark the end of the season. They sing a hymn which has special meaning for those who live near Lake Erie. It was written in Cleveland toward the end of the nineteenth century and begins with these words:
Brightly beams our father's mercy;
From his lighthouse evermore.
But to us he gives the keeping
Of the lights along the shore.
Perhaps those words as well as any express Lakeside's pride in a tradition that now goes back more than one hundred thirty years. It is our way of keeping the lights along the shore.
"I am indebted for much of the information in this article to two books published by the Lakeside Heritage Society: O. L. Shepard's The Story of Lakeside and James Allen Kestle's This is Lakeside 1873-1973. Both books can be purchased from the Heritage Society.
William Jeffras Dieterich
February 14, 2004"