Sunday School Beginnings.

The Chautauqua movement grew out of summer Sunday school institutes held by the Methodist Episcopal Church during the 1870s. At an 1873 camp meeting in upstate New York John Heyl Vincent, a minister and later bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, proposed that a secular as well as a religious education be offered at these institutes based on the earlier methods used by Josiah Holbrook and other educators. The Chautauqua Assembly started the following summer as a "Sunday School Teachers' Assembly," at Fair Point, New York, on Lake Chautauqua. It was organized by Vincent and Lewis Miller, a wealthy manufacturer and an inventor respectively, as an eight-week program in the arts, sciences, and humanities. In 1877 it became "Chautauqua" by legislative enactment of the Teachers' Assembly. The word came to mean different things:
Sunday schools, traveling tent shows, correspondence courses, educational innovation, lectures...