For some 40 years, Santa Barbara was very much a part of the Chautauqua movement, which took the nation by storm in the early 1900s. When the traveling Chautauqua arrived in the summer of 1916, locals were treated to a dazzling week-long program of drama, dance, music, vaudeville, lectures, and literary readings, all presented inside a tent pavilion that seated 2,000 patrons.
The Chautauqua movement was named after Chautauqua Lake in western New York, and its origins harkened back to the lyceum movement of the early 1800s. The lyceum movement was a system to book lecturers for communities. Included among the participants during this early period were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Horace Greeley, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Later speakers included Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum. Lecture topics ran the gamut from literature to history to art to religion to morals to humor with occasional musical programs.
Chautauqua dates from 1873 when John H. Vincent and Lewis Miller staged programs of moral and spiritual uplift for Sunday school teachers on the shore of Chautauqua Lake. In the next few years these annual summer programs were opened to the public, and expanded to include a variety of entertainments. Within 50 years some 200 Chautauqua centers were established around the country. In 1904, the traveling or tent Chautauqua was founded.