Spend an hour on the shore with a view of the Purple Martins and Chautauqua Institution's Miller Belltower.

The Miller Bell Tower presides over the lake as a Chautauqua icon and has done much in its singular way to represent and promote the Institution — just as did the man it memorializes.

Of Chautauqua co-founder Lewis Miller, Thomas A. Edison once said, “I never knew anyone whose eyes reflected so much light as Mr. Miller’s.”

In Lewis Miller: A Biographical Essay, Ellwood Henderick wrote that Miller had good looks, “vitality, health, and an amazing fund of energy, coupled with the princely quality of good fellowship.”

Furthermore, “He was remarkably ingenious in factory planning, in arranging machinery, in the organization of factory-practice, and in the control of the flow-sheet. Above all he was valuable on the human side.”

Such characteristics served Miller well in business and in life and contributed to the origin and vision of the first Chautauqua Assembly, a vision that has been maintained more than 100 years after his death.
--Credit George Cooper, August 2, 2011, The Chautauquan Daily available at https://chqdaily.wordpress.com/

Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. Learn more at www.chq.org