IN THE DECADES before the First World War, an organization called Chautauqua arose that was something like a summer camp for grown-ups.

People would take vacation time and travel to the Chautauqua center and stay there in tents, either brought from home or rented on site, for a week, or two weeks, or even longer. There, they’d take classes, attend lectures, listen to band concerts, play baseball, and generally try to make up for the previous year’s intellectual deprivation.

In Chautauqua’s heyday there were a number of these centers across the country, and President Theodore Roosevelt famously declared them to be “the most American thing about America.” And the biggest one west of the Rockies was in Gladstone, Oregon. (Gladstone, Clackamas County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/22-03.chautauqua-in-oregon-607.html)