Submitted by
Kent Mathewson
Jane Currie, local historian and photojournalist will present a “walking video tour” of Point Chautauqua at the Chautauqua Town Historical Society’s monthly meeting this Thursday, August 21st at 7pm. The Society meets monthly in the Veteran’s Memorial Meeting Room of the Chautauqua Town Hall, 2 Academy Street, Mayville.
Jane Currie is the co-author of five books on local Chautauqua history, including on: Chautauqua Institution and the Chautauqua Lake Region, as well as on Jamestown and Westfield, and most recently, Legendary Locals of the Chautauqua Lake Region (2013). The video tour was filmed in 1995, and narrated by her step-father Ford Cadwell, who lived at Point Chautauqua in his youth. His father Ward Cadwell had a livery stable at Point Chautauqua and built a number of the houses there. Ford later moved to a dairy farm in Dewittville and started Cadwell’s Cheese House in 1927. Currie is the current owner and operator of Cadwell’s Cheese House.
Today Point Chautauqua is a residential community with a storied past. It was originally founded as a Baptist counterpart, and some would say rival, to the Methodist Chautauqua Institution across the lake. The founders of Chautauqua, Lewis Miller and John H. Vincent initially envisioned a summer camp for Methodist Sunday-school teachers, living in tents, which they did starting in 1874 for a few seasons. However, it quickly morphed into a site with more permanent housing, and then within a decade, it began its current trajectory of becoming a renowned residential and cultural vacation resort. Attempting to match and out-do Camp Chautauqua, the next year the Baptists commissioned America’s premier landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmstead to plan a religious community. In accepting the commission, Olmstead designed the community but according to his own progressive ideology. This meant a design conforming to the natural lay of the land, with serpentine forms and a curving street plan, enhanced views and vistas, common grounds and a careful balance between public and private spaces. Like Chautauqua, the religious camp dimensions soon took a backseat to residential and vacation pursuits. At Point Chautauqua, this became abundantly evident when the monumental Grand Hotel was completed in 1880. It occupied land that had originally been set aside for camp grounds and a public park.
The Grand Hotel was burned down in 1902, by act of arson, having not met the expectations of the owners. But Point Chautauqua remains a testimony to the peerless planning craft of Olmstead. He was in mid-career when he planned Point Chautauqua. His very first commission was planning and building New York City’s Central Park in 1858, which remains perhaps his most famous creation. During the Civil War he served as head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission (precursor of the Red Cross) and worked tirelessly organizing aid for the wounded. After the War, he resumed his landscape architecture practice but also was an important advocate for environmental conservation. His sons joined him and together, with their subsequent firm, went on to plan some 6000 projects. The list is staggering in scope and import of the projects undertaken. They planned the campuses of over 70 of the nation’s most prestigious universities, colleges, and prep schools. They planned dozens of parks, parkways, recreation areas, city improvement projects, suburban communities, grounds of public buildings, including the U.S. Capitol Grounds, private estates such as the Biltmore Estate, cemeteries, memorials and monuments, country clubs, resorts, hotels, and clubs, church grounds, arboreta, gardens and zoos, including the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., exhibitions and fairs, including the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In each category, there are projects as prominent, as the examples cited here. It should be a major point of local pride that Lake Chautauqua has an Olmstead planned community on its shores. Please come join us, or perhaps your own, for a walking tour through Point Chautauqua.