Lewis Miller was born on July 24, 1829, at Greentown, Ohio. He received in his childhood the limited education in "the three R's—reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic," usual in the country school; and at the age of sixteen was himself a school teacher. In 1849, twenty years old, he began work at the plastering trade, but at the same time was attending school. He became a partner in the manufacturing firm of Aultman, Ball and Co., which soon became Aultman, Miller and Co., and was removed from Greentown to Canton, Ohio. Here, about 1857, Mr. Miller invented and put into successful operation the Buckeye Mower and Reaper, which made him famous, and with other inventions brought to him a fortune. His home was for many years, and until his death, at Akron. From his earliest years he was interested in education, and especially in education through the Sunday School. He became Sunday School Superintendent of the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Akron, and made it more than most of the Sunday Schools in that generation a school, and not merely a meeting for children. He organized a graded system and required his pupils to pass from grade to grade through the door of an examination in Bible knowledge. He was one of the earliest Sunday School superintendents to organize a Normal Class for the equipment and training of young people for teaching in his school. At a certain stage in the promotions every young man and young woman passed one year or two years in the Normal Grade; for which he arranged the course until one was provided by Dr. Vincent after he became Secretary of Sunday School work for the denomination in 1868; and in the planning of that early normal course, Mr. Miller took an active part, for he met in John H. Vincent one who, like himself, held inspiring ideals for the Sunday School, and the two leaders were often in consultation. It was an epoch in the history of the American Sunday School when Mr. Miller built the first Sunday School hall in the land according to a plan originated by himself; its architectural features being wrought out under his direction by his fellow-townsman and friend, Mr. Jacob Snyder, an architect of distinction. In this building, then unique but now followed by thousands of churches, there was a domed central assembly hall, with rooms radiating from it in two stories, capable of being open during the general exercises, but closed in the lesson period so that each class could be alone with its teacher while studying.
Mr. Miller was also interested in secular education, was for years president of the Board of Education in Akron, always aiming for higher standards in teaching. He was also a trustee of Mount Union College in his own State. Two men such as Vincent and Miller, both men of vision, both leaders in education through the Sunday School, both aiming to make that institution more efficient, would inevitably come together; and it was fortunate that they were able to work hand in hand, each helping the other.
These two men had thoughts of gatherings of Sunday School workers, not in conventions, to hear reports and listen to speeches, not to go for one-day or two- or three-day institutes, but to spend weeks together in studying the Bible and methods of Sunday School work. They talked over their plans, and they found that while they had much in common in their conception each one could supplement the other in some of the details. It had been Dr. Vincent's purpose to hold his gathering of Sunday School workers and Bible students within the walls of a large church, in some city centrally located and easily reached by railroad. He suggested to Mr. Miller that his new Sunday School building, with its many classrooms opening into one large assembly hall, would be a suitable place for launching the new enterprise.
One cannot help asking the question—what would have been the result if Dr. Vincent's proposal had been accepted, and the first Sunday School Assembly had been held in a city and a church? Surely the word "Chautauqua" would never have appeared as the name of a new and mighty movement in education. Moreover, it is almost certain that the movement itself would never have arisen to prominence and to power. It is a noteworthy fact that no Chautauqua Assembly has ever succeeded, though often attempted, in or near a large city. One of the most striking and drawing features of the Chautauqua movement has been its out-of-doors and in-the-woods habitat. The two founders did not dream in those days of decision that the fate of a great educational system was hanging in the balance.
An inspiration came to Lewis Miller to hold the projected series of meetings in a forest, and under the tents of a camp meeting. Camp meetings had been held in the United States since 1799, when the first gathering of this name took place in a grove on the banks of the Red River in Kentucky led by two brothers McGee, one a Presbyterian, the other a Methodist. In those years churches were few and far apart through the hamlets and villages of the west and south. The camp meeting brought together great gatherings of people who for a week or more listened to sermons, held almost continuous prayer meetings, and called sinners to repentance. The interest died down somewhat in the middle of the nineteenth century, but following the Civil War, a wave of enthusiasm for camp meetings swept over the land. In hundreds of groves, east and west, land was purchased or leased, lots were sold, tents were pitched, and people by the thousand gathered for soul-stirring services. In one of the oldest and most successful of these camp meetings, that on Martha's Vineyard, tents had largely given place to houses, and a city had arisen in the forest. This example had been followed, and on many camp-meeting grounds houses of a primitive sort straggled around the open circle where the preaching services were held. Most of these buildings were mere sheds, destitute of architectural beauty, and innocent even of paint on their walls of rough boards. Many of these antique structures may still be seen at Chautauqua, survivals of the camp-meeting period, in glaring contrast with the more modern summer homes beside them.
At first Dr. Vincent did not take kindly to the thought of holding his training classes and their accompaniments in any relationship to a camp meeting or even upon a camp ground. He was not in sympathy with the type of religious life manifested and promoted at these gatherings. The fact that they dwelt too deeply in the realm of emotion and excitement, that they stirred the feelings to the neglect of the reasoning and thinking faculties, that the crowd called together on a camp-meeting ground would not represent the sober, sane, thoughtful element of church life—all these repelled Dr. Vincent from the camp meeting.
Mr. Miller had recently become one of the trustees of a camp meeting held at Fair Point on Lake Chautauqua, and proposed that Dr. Vincent should visit the place with him. Somewhat unwillingly, yet with an open mind, Vincent rode with Miller by train to Lakewood near the foot of the lake, and then in a small steamer sailed to Fair Point. A small boy was with them, sitting in the prow of the boat, and as it touched the wharf he was the first of its passengers to leap on the land—and in after years, George Edgar Vincent, LL.D., was wont to claim that he, at the mature age of nine years, was the original discoverer of Chautauqua!
| Old Amphitheater | Old Auditorium in Miller Park |
It was in the summer of 1873, soon after the fourth session of the Erie Conference Camp Meeting of the Methodist Episcopal Church, that Dr. Vincent came, saw, and was conquered. His normal class and its subsidiary lectures and entertainments should be held under the beeches, oaks, and maples shading the terraced slopes rising up from Lake Chautauqua.
A lady who had attended the camp meeting in 1871, its second session upon the grounds at Fair Point, afterward wrote her first impressions of the place. She said that the superintendent of the grounds, Mr. Pratt (from whom an avenue at Chautauqua received its name some years afterward), told her that until May, 1870, "the sound of an axe had not been heard in those woods." This lady (Mrs. Kate P. Bruch) wrote: