Welcome to Lily Dale

This chapter presents a very brief history of the notorious Burned Over District, considering radical religions and movements founded in Rochester, Buffalo, and Lily Dale in the nineteenth century. These include Shakerism and the Public Universal Friend. While the Shakers and the Society of Universal Friends were examples of how the New York frontier appealed to experimental religions, most western New Yorkers during the early 1800s were not drawn to the most radical sects. The man who best exemplified the Protestant revivalism of the Second Great Awakening was Charles Grandison Finney. It was the revivalism along the Erie Canal that inspired the nickname “the Burned Over District,” suggesting that western New York was literally smoldering with the fires of religious fervor. The chapter then looks at Millerism, Mormonism, and Oneida. The founding of the Cassadaga Lake Free Association in 1879 marked the tail end of these movements, but it proved to have much more staying power than most other nineteenth-century utopian communities. Still smoking with the fires of revival and reeling from the rapid change of the canal days, this home of religious and political radicals, free lovers, and feminists brought forth one more radical faith: Spiritualism.