The 2025 Chautauqua Institution officially opens on June 21. Much has changed at the institution in the last 151 years, but thanks to Isabella Alden and her contemporaries, we can piece together what it was like to spend a summer at Chautauqua in its early days.

Before there were cottages and meeting halls, Isabella and her family spent their summers sitting on rough wooden benches as they listened to lectures in the open air, and sleeping under the stars or in tents.

The photo below was taken about 1876, which was the second year of Chautauqua’s existence. Isabella was only thirty-five years old, but she was already quite famous.

She was the best-selling author of over a dozen novels, including the first four books of her “Ester Ried” series. And The Pansy magazine was in its third year of publication, with Isabella as editor and chief contributor of stories and articles.

In those early years The Pansy magazine was sent every month (it later became a weekly magazine) to thousands of children. Isabella called each of her young subscribers her “Pansies.”

While at Chautauqua one day that summer of 1876, Isabella was walking through the grove, which was one of her favorite spots at Chautauqua. She wrote:

Chautauqua is so beautiful this year. Don’t you know, I met today one of the little Pansies! As I was walking through the grove, there came a sweet-faced little girl to me, and she said in a low, sweet voice:

“If you please, I live in Ohio, and I’m going home today, and I’d like so very much to kiss you, then I could tell all the little girls that I kissed Pansy.”

You may be sure that I gave her the very warmest kiss I had, and told her to tell all her little Pansy friends that part of the kiss was for them.

A ladies’ magazine once printed an article about Isabella and commented that one of the strongest and most attractive elements of her character was her humility in regard to the great good she accomplished through her writing. But in truth, she was keenly aware of the power she had over her readers, and she always used that power to help them come to know and love the Lord Jesus Christ. Just think of the story the little girl in the grove told to her friends back in Ohio! How many of her little friends do you think were influenced to know and love Jesus, all because of Isabella’s kindness to a child and that one little kiss?