Chautauqua Hall of Brotherhood

Circle the western curve of Lake DeFuniak on foot and you will come upon a white, colonnaded facade that looks more like a state capitol than a small-town landmark. That is the Chautauqua Hall of Brotherhood, the surviving grand entrance to what was once a 4,000-seat auditorium built for the Florida Chautauqua Assembly. The hall has stood at 95 Circle Drive since 1909 and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972, the only structure on the old Chautauqua grounds to carry that individual designation. Visiting the exterior costs nothing, and an informational panel across Circle Drive fills in the history for anyone walking the loop.

DeFuniak Springs hosted the Florida Chautauqua Assembly for 42 years, from 1885 to 1927, drawing thousands of visitors each winter for lectures, concerts, and religious gatherings modeled on the adult education movement that began in Chautauqua, New York. The Hall of Brotherhood and its auditorium were the centerpiece of those gatherings, a two-story frame building with steam heat and electric lights rigged for color effects, built at a cost of about $28,000. Its five ground-floor entrances and rows of four-over-four windows opened onto a T-shaped hall large enough to stage productions with more than 100 actors on the platform.

The building was deliberately designed to resemble the United States Capitol, right down to its central dome and colonnades. Wealthy patrons sponsored individual columns as a fundraising gesture, and the roster of donors reads like a Gilded Age guest list: Cornelius Vanderbilt, U.S. Senators George Wetmore and Chauncey DePew, and Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the assassinated president, all put their names behind a column. The dome itself was dedicated to “the Soldiers and Sailors of the Republic,” the lantern above it to “the Light of Christian Truth,” and the exterior columns to a procession of American presidents, a set of symbolic gestures aimed squarely at postwar national reconciliation.

That theme of brotherhood was not just architectural. Confederate Lieutenant General John B. Gordon laid the cornerstone and spoke of “American brotherhood, a reunited country” at the ceremony, and the assembly went on to host speakers with national reach, including Vice President Thomas Marshall, Red Cross founder Clara Barton, and orator William Jennings Bryan. Concerts by touring orchestras filled the same hall. For four decades this small Panhandle lake town was a genuine stop on the national lecture and performance circuit, pulling in crowds that dwarfed its year-round population.

The run ended with the weather. A tornado spun up by Hurricane Eloise tore through in September 1975 and destroyed the auditorium wing, leaving only the entrance hall standing. Disaster relief funds approved the following January covered removal of the wreckage, a process finished by February 1977. The City of DeFuniak Springs had already taken ownership of the property in 1934, and the surviving Hall of Brotherhood has been a municipal responsibility ever since, currently the subject of a multi-phase restoration.

Today the hall anchors the Circle Drive Historic District, itself part of the larger DeFuniak Springs Historic District added to the National Register in 1992 and encompassing 172 historic buildings between Nelson and Park Avenues. Walking or driving the circle past the hall, the Walton-DeFuniak Library, and the string of Victorian-era houses that ring the lake is one of the simplest, most rewarding ways to spend an hour in DeFuniak Springs. Pair a stop here with a lap around Lake DeFuniak itself, one of only two perfectly round natural lakes in the world, and you get a compact lesson in both natural and civic history in a single visit. Bring a camera for the columns and the reflection of the white facade in the lake, and budget time to read the historical markers that line the drive; they cover a surprising amount of the town’s Gilded Age story in just a few short paragraphs apiece.