Fountain Park Chautauqua

Just outside Remington, Indiana, Fountain Park has been hosting a Chautauqua gathering since eighteen ninety-five, making it one of the oldest continuously operating Chautauqua camps in the United States. The Chautauqua movement swept the Midwest in the late eighteen hundreds, bringing lectures, concerts, and religious revivals to communities that otherwise had little access to cultural life. Families would pitch tents for weeks at a time around a central fountain, listening to speakers on everything from temperance to astronomy. Fountain Park's wooden tabernacle, cottages, and grounds are on the National Register of Historic Places, and the camp still holds its annual summer gathering today, a small but living relic of the era when a lakeside tent meeting was the Netflix of rural America.