Bill:

Chautauquas started out as travelling educational shows, I've always thought of them as the 19th century equivalent of PBS. But they were supplanted (or at the least augmented) by permanent sites at various places around the US (also I suspect in Canada.) Here's an old picture of the one I am familiar with up in Boulder, CO:

http://www.archives.state.co.us/tour/pcbl3.htm

Note the tents around the large building. People no longer camp there, but they still come to the big building for lectures, magic lantern shows, concerts by small groups, classes, etc. On Sunday they have a really nice buffet brunch.

There was a private school very near this site, and in 1897 the railroad decided to have a chautauqua there. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind lies a memory that tells me the railroads pushed these travelling education devices to increase ridership. The people of Boulder liked it so much they floated a bond issue and erected the building.

The railroads also financed travelling cycloramas, if I remember correctly. A cyclorama is a HUGE painting depicting an historical event. The artists painted them on canvas sections about 20 to 25 feet high, and I've forgotten how long. But the sections were sewn together so they could be unfurled to present a sort of theater in the round with the audience at the center. I've only seen one of them, and that is a painting of the Battle of Gettysburg painted from a viewpoint at The Angle, which was the point on the battlefield where the CSA came as close as they came to winning the war. It has 18 sections. Just a few yards away from the Angle, where you can see the fatal wound being delivered to the Confederate brigadier who made the greatest advance of any of those in Pickett's Charge, the artist Philippoteaux has painted himself into the picture. I can attest that standing at the center of this picture gives you a pretty good idea what hellfire was unleashed on July 3, 1863. It seems to me that the picture is somewhere around 75 feet in diameter, which gives it a circumference of over 200 feet. Multiply that times the height and you get a LOT of square feet of painting. But the more I think about it, I think it might be quite a bit bigger. I couldn't find any reliable statistics.

Somewhere I read recently that there were around 100 of these awesome artifacts remaining in the world. One by Philippoteaux is a vista of Jerusalem on the day of Christ's crucifixion.

Keiva might know something about the cyclorama of the Chicago Fire. It was over 20,000 square feet of canvas.

TEd





TEd