Boulder – Officials with the Colorado Chautauqua complex, nestled under the Flatirons for more than a century, are pushing to make the site the metro area’s first National Historic Landmark.
Representatives plan to head to Washington, D.C., next month to make their pitch to the National Park System Landmarks Committee in hopes of adding the collection of more than 100 cottages and buildings to a list of the country’s most significant historical places.
“This is the highest honor a historical place can receive,” said Colorado Chautauqua Association executive director Susan Connelly.
If Chautauqua receives the distinction, it would join Pikes Peak, the Air Force Academy cadet area and the Rocky Mountain National Park administration building as National Historic Landmarks along the Front Range.
Connelly said National Landmark status gives a historical place the highest level of protection.
The final decision or Chautauqua, however, won’t come for months, but local National Park Service historian Lysa Wegman-French said she would not have encouraged the association to begin the process three years ago if she did not think it would succeed.
“We do not want people to waste time and money just to run into a brick wall,” she said.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton, a Coloradan, will make the final call.
The Colorado Chautauqua is a signature piece of an educational movement that swept the country in the first part of the 20th century. People gathered at Chautauquas all over the country to take in speakers and entertainerswith the simple goal of enlightenment.
“We realized how unique (the Boulder) site is,” Wegman-French said. “It is one of the few Chautauquas that are still existing. … Even when hundreds of Chautauquas were flourishing across the country, this was one of the most important ones.”
The site is best know for its cavernous, open-air auditorium where the association hosts shows and even silent movies. And the dining hall continues to be a popular spot for Sunday brunch.
The Chautauqua movement has largely faded, said Chautauqua historian Martha Vail, but at one point the gathering places were a well-known institution.
“It was like saying Microsoft,” Vail said. “It was enormous.”
The movement was a defining fixture of middle-class culture from the turn of the 20th century through the 1930s, Vail said.
“The Chautauqua Idea -,” reads Colorado Chautauqua’s proposal, “ordinary people gaining extraordinary exposure to education, to high and low culture and to new recreational forms.”
The movement began in 1874 when businessman Lewis Miller and Methodist bishop John Heyl Vincent started a summer school for Sunday -school teachers on Chautauqua Lake in western New York.
A group of Texas educators and Boulder city officials started the Colorado Chautauqua in 1898.
It quickly became a Western hub at the height of the movement.
“This is one of the most significant places,” Vail said. “It represents a theme in American history.”
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 720-929-0893 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
