DeFuniak Springs, Chautauqua on the Perfect Circle

DeFuniak Springs was built around one of only two naturally round lakes in the world, a spring-fed circle roughly a mile in circumference that may have been formed by a meteor. The town was founded in the early eighteen eighties when the Louisville and Nashville Railroad came through, naming the stop for Frederick DeFuniak, a vice president of the railroad. What really put it on the map was the Chautauqua movement.

In eighteen eighty-five, educators from the famous Chautauqua Assembly in upstate New York chose this perfectly circular lake as the site of Florida's winter Chautauqua, an annual gathering of lectures, concerts, and cultural programs that ran through the nineteen twenties. At its peak, thousands of visitors arrived each winter to hear speakers, musicians, and thinkers at the lakeside pavilions. The Victorian homes built to house them still ring the lake today, making DeFuniak Springs one of the best-preserved Chautauqua towns in the American South.