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Books: by Title: Around Chautauqua Lake

50 Years of Photographs 1875 - 1925

A photographic history of Chautauqua Lake and its surroundings reveals a community blessed with physical beauty and an energetic spirit determined to exploit it. By the mid 1870s, when the earliest of the photographs in Around Chautauqua Lake were taken, the area was only just emerging from virtual isolation.

The opening of the Methodist summer camp at Fair Point in 1874 and President Ulysses S. Grant's visit there the following summer brought the Chautauqua region national recognition. Commercial interests, specifically the railroads, succeeded through the next quarter century in making Chautauqua Lake one of the mid-Atlantic's premier resort areas. Touting Chautauqua's healthy and bracing climate, as well as its serene beauty, local developers built large and extravagant hotels around the lake to accommodate a growing number of vacationers. In the days before the automobile, the well-to-do often spent the greater part of the "season" at a resort.

The best of Chautauqua's hotels, like the fashionable Kent House at Lakewood and the magnificent Grand Hotel at Point Chautauqua, provided their guests not only with solicitous service but with recreational activities including dancing, sailing, fishing, and billiards. And always, the graceful and majestic steamboats of the "great white fleet" were available to ferry passengers from one lake site to another.

Around Chautauqua Lake ought very well to contribute to the image of romance and simplicity one often holds of the late Victorian and early twentieth century years. Romance aside, however, the photographs also depict the results of an aggressive energy and industry among Chautauqua's movers and shakers who understood opportunity. A random selection of turn-of-the-century photographs from around Chautauqua Lake provides ample evidence of a vigorous entrepreneurial spirit.

- excerpted from Paul Leone's introduction

Paul Leone and Mary Poshka, with the assistance of Victor Norton, Jr., have assembled a set of evocative photographs which tell the story of a region in full flower, as it began to eagerly show off its blooms.

ISBN: 0-9658955-0-5
$17.95

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