MONTEAGLE SUNDAY SCHOOL ASSEMBLY

This gallery tells the story of Monteagle Sunday School Assembly. Southern leaders in the Sunday School movement selected Monteagle in 1882 for a southern Chautauqua patterned after the one established in 1874 at Lake Chautauqua, New York by a Methodist Bishop, John Heyl Vincent, and Lewis Miller, a Methodist layman who was an inventor and manufacturer.  Both had a passion for education strengthened by circumstances that deprived them of the education they would have liked to have completed. Initiated as a place where Sunday School teachers could come to learn how to teach, the movement influenced the cultural history of United States in education, in religion, in concern for reform, in discussion of important issues, in the arts, and in entertainment.  Those who partook of the movement were largely middle class people who came for a summer day, or a week, or an entire season, to study, to enjoy idyllic surroundings, to be fortified and instructed in their Protestant faith, or to be innocently amused. The first Chautauqua program was held on the grounds of Monteagle Sunday School Assembly on July 17, 1883. Assemblies for programs have been held every summer since then. In 1982 the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly was placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Secretary of the Interior.