Lily Dale is a hamlet connected with the Spiritualist Movement in the Town of Pomfret in Chautauqua County, NY. It’s been a home for Spiritualists attempting to make contact with the dead, as well as a gathering place for reformers, a refuge for seekers looking for alternatives to established paths of knowledge, and a target for skeptics since the late 19th century.
Lily Dale was incorporated in 1879 as Cassadaga Lake Free Association, a camp and meeting place for Spiritualists and Freethinkers. The name was changed to The City of Light in 1903 and finally to Lily Dale Assembly in 1906.
The Fox Cottage of Fox sisters fame was moved to Lily Dale in 1915 although it was destroyed by fire on September 21, 1955. The hamlet is home to the headquarters of The National Spiritualist Association of Churches, founded in 1893.
Today, the community’s year-round population is about 275, but each year an estimated 22,000 visitors come for classes, workshops, public church services and mediumship demonstrations, lectures, and private appointments with mediums. Th community is one of several intentional spiritualist communities still active in the United States.
In Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale (Cornell University Press, 2024), four friends and scholars who produce the Dig: A History Podcast, share their curiosity and enthusiasm for uncovering stories from the past as they explore the history of Lily Dale.
Their history reveals the role that Lily Dale has played in the history of Spiritualism, as well as within the development of the women’s suffrage and temperance movements, and the world of New Age religion.
As an intentional community devoted to Spiritualist beliefs and practices, Lily Dale brings together multiple strands in the social and religious history of New York and the United States over the past 150 years: feminism, social reform, utopianism, new religious movements, and cultural appropriation.
In Spiritualism’s Place podcasters and historians Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Elizabeth Garner Masarik, and Marissa C. Rhodes each identify one site in Lily Dale and one theme that its history illuminates.
They use those sites and themes to approach Lily Dale not as debunkers but as inquisitive researchers and storytellers. At the same time, they also reflect on their own relationships contending that it’s never quite possible to separate grief, hope, faith, and friendship from understandings of the past.
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