Colorado Chautauqua

In 1897 University of Texas officials went looking for somewhere cool to hold a summer school for the state's teachers. Boulder wanted it badly enough to pass bonds for land, promise an auditorium and a dining hall, and run transit up from the depot, and the Texans incorporated the Texas-Colorado Chautauqua Association. Construction began on May 12, 1898. The dining hall was finished in early June, and the auditorium, a cavernous wooden hall, went up in under eight weeks.

On July 4, 1898, about 4,000 people packed the auditorium for opening speeches by Boulder's mayor, the president of the University of Colorado, the governor of Texas and Colorado's governor, Alva Adams. The first season scheduled dozens of classes and lectures, and William Jennings Bryan, the movement's star, filled the hall in July 1899. The Chautauqua movement had begun on a New York lake in 1874 and before radio brought lectures and music to thousands of towns; nearly all of those assemblies are gone. The money never worked for the Texans, and the association reorganized with Boulder people in charge and dropped Texas from its name.

What survives is a small village from 1898 on: the auditorium, the dining hall that still serves meals, the 1900 Academic Hall that held the first college-level summer school in Colorado, the Community House, and cottages let by the night. The Colorado Music Festival has played the auditorium every summer since 1978. The grounds became a National Historic Landmark in 2006, the only Chautauqua west of the Mississippi still at work, and the meadow above them is a trailhead for the Flatirons.