The Chautauqua That Survived: A Texas Idea in a Colorado Meadow

At the foot of the Flatirons, in the long grass of a meadow that slopes gently toward the slabs of rock above, there is a collection of wooden cottages and a large auditorium with a tin roof. It looks like a summer camp that got very serious about culture. That is essentially what it is.

The Colorado Chautauqua opened on July fourth, eighteen ninety-eight, as the Texas-Colorado Chautauqua, a collaboration between the University of Texas and the city of Boulder, intended to give Texas schoolteachers a wholesome summer of lectures, music, and mountain air. The Chautauqua movement was already a generation old by then, a distinctly American institution for adult education and civic enrichment that had swept the country since the eighteen seventies. What made the Boulder version unusual was the setting: not a lakeside meadow in upstate New York, but the base of a mountain range.

The auditorium was built in fifty-three days and dedicated on opening day. It seated nearly a thousand people in wooden chairs on a dirt floor, with the peaks visible through the open sides.

Nearly every other Chautauqua in the country eventually closed, victims of radio, automobiles, and the changing pace of American life. The Boulder assembly survived. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight and designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand six.

Today it remains the only Chautauqua west of the Mississippi River still operating without a break. The auditorium still books concerts through the summer, the cottages still rent to families, and you can still hear a folk singer against the backdrop of the Flatirons at dusk, much as they did in the summer of eighteen ninety-eight.