Monteagle: The Chautauqua of the South

Interstate Twenty-Four climbs the Cumberland Plateau through one of the most dramatic stretches of highway in the mid-South, a long grade that trucks labor up and runaway truck ramps punctuate on the descent. At the top, perched on the narrow spine of the plateau, sits the small town of Monteagle, and inside it an institution that has been quietly operating since eighteen eighty-three.

John Moffat, a temperance organizer, purchased more than a thousand acres of plateau forest here in eighteen seventy, naming the place Moffat Station. A decade later, a group of Tennessee Sunday school workers looking to create a southern version of the famous Chautauqua Assembly in New York selected the site as their home. The railroad and Moffat each donated five thousand dollars and the railroad threw in roughly eleven hundred acres of land. The Monteagle Sunday School Assembly drew its charter on October thirty-first, eighteen eighty-two, and opened its first season the following summer to more than one thousand attendees.

The Assembly became exactly what the founders envisioned: an educational retreat community where lectures, debates, religious programs, and artistic performances ran through the summer months. Families built cottages on the grounds and returned year after year. A self-contained village of frame houses grew up inside a gated perimeter, its streets lined with porches and surrounded by oak forest.

That village still exists. The Monteagle Assembly today encompasses ninety-six acres, one hundred sixty-two historic residential cottages, and a meeting hall where lectures and performances still take place each summer. It is one of the oldest continuously operating Chautauqua assemblies in the United States, a piece of Victorian intellectual culture that survived the automobile age by sitting still and letting the mountain do the work of slowing people down.