Lily Dale

Lily Dale is a functioning village whose industry is mediumship. Inside its gate on Cassadaga Lake stand hundreds of Victorian cottages, a hotel, an auditorium, a museum, a library and two active Spiritualist churches, and on many porches hangs a shingle: registered medium, readings by appointment. Registration is the community's discipline; mediums who wish to practice within the Assembly must demonstrate their work to its satisfaction, and residency is limited to members of the Spiritualist religion.

The rhythm of the place is seasonal. In the summer program, visitors, tens of thousands across a season, come through the gate for workshops, healing services in which certified healers lay on hands, and the free message services held daily at Inspiration Stump, a tree stump in a old-growth forest clearing where mediums stand in turn and deliver brief messages from the dead to named members of the crowd.

Christine Wicker's reported account of the community describes the mixture that strikes every observer: matter-of-fact domesticity, real grief met with real kindness, commerce, showmanship and belief inseparably braided. Lily Dale calls itself the world's largest center for the religion of Spiritualism, and whatever one makes of the messages, the sociological claim is simply true: nowhere else does the movement born in 1848 survive at the scale of a whole town.

Lily Dale began as one of the summer camp meetings that organized American Spiritualism after the Civil War. Freethinkers and Spiritualists of the Cassadaga Lake district incorporated their association in 1879, and the tents of the first seasons gave way to cottages, an auditorium and the institutions of a permanent village, renamed over time from the Cassadaga Lake Free Association through the City of Light to the Lily Dale Assembly. The camp inherited the reform politics that ran through the movement's first generation: platforms for women's suffrage and other causes of the day, with Susan B. Anthony among the speakers the Assembly hosted.

The community's sense of its own descent was made concrete in 1916, when the cottage from Hydesville in which the Fox sisters heard the raps of 1848 was moved to Lily Dale and kept as the movement's birthplace shrine; the cottage burned in 1955, and a marker and museum materials keep its memory. The Assembly weathered the movement's long contraction, the exposures, the decline of physical mediumship, the deaths of the founding generation, by settling into what it remains: a chartered religious community with bylaws, membership requirements, a season calendar and a media profile that returns with every wave of popular interest in the afterlife. Its endurance, through boom, scandal and fashion, is itself the most instructive exhibit in the museum of American Spiritualism.