Historic Assembly Point By Patricia & Robert Foulke Tuesday,
December 7, 2010 Over our thirty-six years of living on Dark Bay
we have enjoyed alternating our fitness walks between the
village shore, Cleverdale and Assembly Point. We wondered how
“the Point” got its name and surmised that it might have had a
Chautauqua history. It does. The Chautauqua Movement, with roots
in both 19th century revival meetings and secular education,
began, flourished and waned for half a century between 1874 and
1924. Founded by John H. Vincent, a New Jersey minister who
created a summer camp to train Sunday School teachers, it soon
expanded on the shores of Lake Chautauqua to include a variety
of subjects, ranging from literature and music to science,
attracting prominent ministers and speakers from all over the
country. By the turn of the 20th century there were 200 assembly
grounds in 31 states. Back in the 1950s we looked at buying a
house in an assembly ground on the shores of Lake Minnetonka
near Minneapolis that grew out