Cassadaga

The founding story of Cassadaga is told the way the community has always told it. George P. Colby, a young trance medium working the northern camp circuit, was instructed by his spirit guide, Seneca, to travel south, where he would establish a Spiritualist community amid pine woods and lakes; guided through the Florida wilderness, the account continues, he recognized the promised place in the hill country of Volusia County and filed a homestead claim there in the 1880s.

Historians in the University Press of Florida's study of the community note what the documents show, a homestead, northern Spiritualists wintering in Florida, and organizational energy borrowed from the established camps, while recording the guide narrative as the community's own account of itself, which is how an atlas should hold it too.

The Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association was chartered in 1894, taking its name from the New York lake district around Lily Dale from which many of its founders came south; the two communities have been sister settlements ever since, linked by migration, winter residence and shared certification of mediums. Colby lived until 1933, long enough to see the tent camp become a village of cottages, and his name remains on the community's landscape, most visibly in the adjacent Colby Memorial Temple where its services are held.

Cassadaga today is a village of a few dozen acres of wood-frame cottages, moss-hung oaks and quiet lanes, wholly surrounded by the ordinary sprawl of central Florida and wholly unlike it. The Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association owns the land and governs the community; residents lease their homesites, and the mediums and healers who practice within the camp are certified by the Association, a discipline the community regards as its guarantee of seriousness against the psychic storefronts that cluster at its edges. Services follow the Spiritualist pattern of hymns, healing and message work, and visitors come year round for readings, the camp's bookstore, and evening orb tours that the Association tolerates with varying enthusiasm. The historic district of the camp, with buildings running back to the 1890s, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the community styles itself, with fair claim, the oldest active religious community in the American South.

The scholarly collection on Cassadaga edited by Guthrie, Lucas and Monroe treats it as something rarer than a curiosity: a living institution of American Spiritualism outside its northern homeland, negotiating tourism, real estate, media attention and its own aging membership while keeping a nineteenth-century religion in continuous practice under the Florida pines.