Lily Dale

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.  About halfway between Buffalo, New York and Erie, Pennsylvania, is the small gated community of Lily Dale, a hamlet of Pomfret, New York. Lily Dale's year round population is estimated to be around 275 people. Lily Dale was founded as the Cassadaga Lake Free Association in 1879 as a Spiritualist community. Before that, Spiritualists had already been holding summer camp meetings in the area for several years, on a farm belonging to fervent Spiritualist, William Alden, and the 20 acres they purchased after his death were near his farm. In Spiritualism, one of the many religious traditions born of 19th century New York state, practitioners believe they can communicate with the spirits of people who have died, often through a medium. At the Cassadaga Lake Free Association summer camps, believers and mediums gathered together for readings and for talks. Within a decade after the founding, they had also built permanent structures, such as a large lecture hall, a grand hotel, a post office, and 100 cottages. Lily Dale still has a public summer camp season. In 2025, that season will be held June 20 to August 31, but there are also people who are permanent residents at Lily Dale. According to the Lily Dale website, "Lily Dale is a quiet, close knit community with approximately 169 leaseholds, located in a three mile walking radius." You may have noted the word leasehold in the passage above. Further down, the same website notes, "Purchasing a home in Lily Dale is not a typical real estate transaction." In fact, in Lily Dale, individuals can purchase homes, but not the land on which the homes stand. The Lily Dale Association owns all of the land and leases it out to the home owners. The homeowners themselves must be members in good standing of the  Lily Dale Assembly, and they have to apply to the Lily Dale board of directors for approval to purchase. The Lily Dale Association is a corporation, which, in their 1879 charter said they were, "devoted to benevolent, charitable, literary, and scientific purposes, and mutual improvement in religious knowledge." That broad membership corporation was more narrowly defined in 1957 when the board added language to the charter regarding the "mutual improvement in the religious knowledge of Spiritualism." In 1933, Lily Dale had formally affiliated with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, NSAC, meaning that applicants who are not members of the NSAC can be formally prohibited from purchasing homes in Lily Dale. Among the people who live in Lily Dale full time are licensed mediums who operate out of their homes. At Lily Dale, mediums must be vetted and tested before being registered with the assembly, as well as with the mediums' league. By 1949, physical mediumship, exemplified by things like loud noises or raps or materialized objects or bodies, was outlawed in Lily Dale. Prior to that, physical mediumship had been quite popular, and one of the reasons visitors came to Lily Dale, and in fact, tourism did drop off when physical mediumship was banned. However, as early as 1903, the Lily Dale board had recognized the danger posed the whole community by fraudulent mediums, writing, "We believe that through the different phenomenon of Spiritualism, a large number of seekers receive ocular proofs of the truth of Spiritualism, and we therefore desire to encourage and endorse honest mediumship; but as we have found by repeated experiences, that a large number attending seances and having private sittings have received fraudulent manifestations, we would recommend that all physical and other manifestations of mediumships shall be given under the auspices of the trustees and in buildings as may be designated by them, that all manifestations be held under such conditions as may be agreed upon by the mediums and the trustees with a special view to guard against fraud." Spiritualism did not, of course, begin in Lily Dale, but Lily Dale was for a while, the physical home of the birthplace of Spiritualism. Modern Spiritualism traces its roots to Hydesville, New York, where in 1848, 14 year old Maggie Fox and her 11 year old sister Kate began to hear raps on walls and furniture that they believed was communication from the spirit of a peddler named Charles B. Rosna, who had been murdered and was buried in their cellar. 68 years later, in 1916, long after the Fox sisters had risen to fame and Spiritualism was an established religion, Benjamin F. Bartlett purchased the Fox family's Hydesville home and moved it 150 miles to Lily Dale, donating it to the Lily Dale Assembly. Although only one of the Fox sisters, Maggie, had ever even visited Lily Dale, and then only for one summer, the Fox cottage became a key attraction of Lily Dale, which advertised it as the birthplace of modern Spiritualism. In the 1930s, Lily Dale started charging 25 cents admission to visit the cottage, and in 1939 the Lily Dale program described the Fox house as,  "One of Lily Dale's outstanding Diamond Jubilee attractions, the most noted memorial of Spiritualism." Unfortunately, in 1955 the Fox house burned down with no reason ever determined. All that remains in Lily Dale now is a clearing with a plaque memorializing the Fox sisters and their home. Today, the National Spiritualist Association of Churches is headquartered in Lily Dale. They define Spiritualism as, "the science, philosophy, and religion of continuous life, based upon the demonstrated fact of communication by means of mediumship with those who live in the spirit world," and they list associated Spiritualist churches in 19 states and DC. Joining me now to help us learn more about Lily Dale and about Spiritualism more generally, is Dr. Averill Earls, Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College, Executive Producer of "Dig: A History Podcast," and one of the authors of, "Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale." 

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:06  
Hi, Averill. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Averill Earls  11:09  
Thanks for having me, Kelly.

Dr. Averill Earls  11:10  
Yes, always a pleasure to speak with another podcaster. So I would like to start by asking actually just a little bit about the Dig History Podcast, how that got started, what you do with that and that one, of course, is a very academic podcast, so I'd just like to hear a little bit about that.

Dr. Averill Earls  11:31  
Yeah, great. So Dig History Podcast started because my co producers and I, co founders and I, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Elizabeth Garner Masarik, and Marissa Rhodes were grad students at University at Buffalo. In 2015, we founded a different podcast in part, because we just sort of wanted to feel out the medium. And then as we got our sort of sea legs under us, we realized that there was this sort of disconnect in podcasting, history podcasting in particular, between academics who do podcasts and the history podcast world, because it's mostly done by, you know, amateur mostly men, mostly white, and it was sort of saturated that way. So we wanted to sort of shift that a little bit and become a podcast that would bridge the gap between academic work and the public facing element of that, and by creating these sort of narrative podcasts that are informed by both our feminist pedagogies and identities and our academic training. And so that's sort of the the founding story, myth, whatever you want to call it, of the of the show. And we've been doing it now, since 2017, so seven years. We've got like 200 plus episodes, and yeah, the main goal is always to sort of take the cutting edge research that's available to us because we're academics with academic jobs, so we have access to academic libraries, which is not something that everybody has access to, which really sucks, because there's some really cool, interesting, new stuff being produced that you know, if it's $150 hardback, regular person is not going to buy that, and they're also not going to have access to it, because they don't have access to academic libraries. So it's yeah, so that's sort of the goal, and that's what we've been we've been doing all these years.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:08  
But of course, producing a podcast episode is very different than writing a book. So how did this project come about, writing this book?

Dr. Averill Earls  13:25  
Yeah, so the book actually came out of sort of the podcast because Michael McGandy, who was at the time executive editor of Cornell University Press's Three Hills imprint, approached us and asked if we'd ever thought of leveraging our identity as podcasters under sort of our popularity to write a book, and we were sort of like, no, because we do a podcast. But then, like, as soon as he floated the idea, our brains started working, and we're like, well, this would be really cool. And also, there's this place that's not far from Buffalo, which is where we were all based at the time, Lily Dale, New York, which there aren't really any academic histories about or and really not even any particularly well received, I would say, or deeply researched public history or popular histories. So this seemed like a really great opportunity for us to explore the crossover genre, where this is like a peer reviewed book, but also it's aimed at sort of a general audience, much the way that our podcast is. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:30  
So I have done podcasts with another person before, so a two person podcast. Even that is unwieldy, so I'm impressed that you guys managed to have a you know, four people on a podcast. Four people on a book seems like a lot. So talk me through the process, how you figured out who was gonna do what, how you were gonna write this, you know, without all devolving into a mess.

Dr. Averill Earls  14:55  
Well, at times it was messy, so let's not, let's not, you know, sugar coat that at all. It was, I think it comes out of our again, our grounding as feminist historians, in that feminist pedagogies in history are collaborative, and really all history is collaborative, even when we as historians pretend that it's not right, because we're working with archivists, we're getting peer review feedback from friends and and from formal outlets, and that's all part of the process. But in this project, it was collaborative on another level, like we went and did all of our research trips together. We went in to the archives and sat there at the Lily Dale Museum, rifling through materials and showing each other things and collecting things for each other and putting them in folders saying, "Oh, this would be something good for Marissa's chapter, or for for what Sarah is working on right now." And so in that way, it was collaborative feminist work from the go. And as we were, we were sort of workshopping the proposal and thinking, well, I could write a chapter about this, because it sort of has roots in what I do for my my own independent work. And Marissa could do this because she has these personal and also academic connections to that. And Sarah is from here and has this like deep she's, she's the first of us to have ever gone to Lily Dale. So there's all of these personal connections, and then sort of academic connections that we, that we established and built over the course of outlining and sort of brainstorming and dreaming what the project could be. And then the writing process, you know, we had like, oh, everybody was going to write two chapters. And then, you know, Marissa and Elizabeth got really busy at the time when our deadlines are coming up. So then I took on a little more, and Sarah took on a little more, and that's how it just worked out. But then that also meant that, you know, Marissa and Elizabeth wrote really incredible chapters and got sort of pulled deeply in there. And then Elizabeth now is like growing out of this project and developing a new project that is based on the research from her chapter. So it's been like this beautiful, evolving tree of life that just sprung out of our collaborative friendship and academic partnership.

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:08  
So you've mentioned a couple times your identity as feminist historians, and I think that's one of the really important things to understand about Spiritualism and Lily Dale is that it comes out of of course, women, really girls, and the experience of girls. So I want to talk some about that, and how, how it starts there, and then, of course, like many things, you know, doesn't necessarily, the the girls don't get to stay in charge forever. So can you talk a little bit about that background, how that is the beginning of things and and where it kind of goes from there?

Dr. Averill Earls  17:50  
Yeah, absolutely. So for those of you who are listening and unfamiliar, Spiritualism is founded, or at least Spiritualist historians and Spiritualists themselves identify the founding sort of myth or story or moment of Spiritualism as the moment when Kate and Maggie Fox, who were an 11 and 13 year old sisters, started hearing rappings in their home in Hydesville in western New York, which is just outside of Rochester, New York. And they started hearing these rappings. And then they started, like responding to the rappings. And eventually, with help of their older sister, Leah, developed a code to sort of decipher what the raps meant. And then through all this process, they discover that he was a peddler who was murdered in their house and is is buried in the basement. And then that sort of becomes a flash point in which then they are sort of tested, first by Amy and Isaac Post, who are sort of wealthy Rochesterians. And I, I always say it's not Rochesterians, but we'll just pretend it's Rochesterians. And I'm sorry, people from Rochester don't come for me. They're also Quakers. So they're in, they're deeply involved in the abolitionist movement and feminism, and so their early feminism, and so they're, they test these girls because they had lost a child when the child was young, and they wanted, you know, a chance to connect. And so they test the Fox girls, and they they decide that the proof that they offer is real. And then the Posts sort of introduced, then the girls to all of these other wealthy, connected people in the area. And then they put them up in and put them on stage at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, which is like a really big deal. And Rochester, in the 1840s was a booming town because of the Erie Canal. So it was this like nexus of tons of religious reformers, right? Joseph Smith finds the golden tablets at the Hill Cumorah, which is just not far from Hydesville itself, and from Rochester either. It's not far from Oneida, the Oneida community, which was founded by John Humphrey Noyes, was like, all about the Fourierian model philosophy for, you know, sexual and spiritual development and family. There's all these religious revivals happening in this area, known later but as the Burned Over District, because there's so many waves of religious revivalism, just like burning through this area. And so they go on stage at Corinthian Hall, and they demonstrate their ability to communicate with spirit, in 1849, just a year after they first start experiencing these, these raps and these communications with spirit. And so that becomes a sort of founding moment of Spiritualism. And not long after, right? Like, there's just 1000s of mediums who identify themselves, and most of them are women, right? So this becomes, this is, this is made possible in part by a burgeoning, growing feminist movement and a number of other sort of elements of everyday life that sort of open people to the possibility that this was, this was real, right? That first things like technological advances were sort of outpacing people's understanding of science, like things like the telegraph, right? That that that's suddenly now you can communicate with someone instantaneously, who lives 1000s of miles away. That was like, "Well, if we can communicate with someone instantaneously, 5000 miles away, why can't we communicate with spirit," right? Like those two things don't seem so different to regular people. It's also a period when, when in the in the nexus of this burden of a district, people are like, playing with new religions all the time, like they they hear a new preaching like, oh, this sounds actually. This speaks to me, so I'm going to do and then the next week they go to another oh, this actually speaks to me more. So Right? Like lots of movement in religious experiences. And then in terms of feminism, 1848 in Seneca Falls, which is again not far from Rochester, is the first International Women's Rights Convention, right? So this is a moment when women are seizing some authority, some power, and a mediumship is a way for women to do that, because people listen to mediums, because they want to hear from, you know, famous, you know, people like Erasmus or or Thomas Paine might come through, or John Locke might speak through one of these mediums, one of these teenage girls, one of these women, or the you know, the opportunity to connect with your own dead loved one. So that sort of power and and political footing is something that women don't always have access to, but Spiritualism, which is woman centered in its especially in its early formative decades, it is. But as you say, right, there's this. this is not the long term, necessarily, trajectory of the movement in the 1870s. And in the 80s, it formalizes as a church. And then, while it's still in those early years, a feminist church, right? And like founding, founding members of the church will write these like histories of Spiritualism. They're like, "Oh, and women should be leaders because of all these reasons that they're better than men. And there's, you know, we should put them at the fore of governments and and everything, because of their purity and their goodness and their and their openness to spirit, right?" But then, over time, men take more positions of power. They reshape and reformulate what Spiritualism means, and what Spiritualist organizations or places like Lily Dale should look like, how they should operate. So that sort of really shifts, especially by the 1920s and 30s, places like Lily Dale become male dominated. So where once the president of the board was always a woman, now it's a man and women are like auxiliary members of the board, or they are the secretary. And so it becomes, it becomes, very much like many of the other Christian or or religious movements of the United States. But that said, then I think we see another shift back right in the in the 60s and 70s and 80s, which is not something we get too much in the book, but it's certainly the sort of wave that we see. It mirrors much of American history, I would say. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:27  
And those connections, like Seneca Falls, that's not just a geographic connection, but there's real there, there's actual connections there. People like, there's

Dr. Averill Earls  24:36  
Susan B. Anthony is  regular. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:38  
Susan B. Anthony, yeah, so, like, suffragists are coming to Lily Dale and people from the temperance movement. There's lots of interconnections there between suffrage and temperance and Spiritualism. 

Dr. Averill Earls  24:52  
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So, like Susan B. Anthony is not a believer, as far as we know, in Spiritualism, but she understands the power and popularity and the movement of Spiritualism as a place that can and will and does support suffrage. So she utilizes that platform really effectively. She comes to Lily Dale like, almost every year for 10 years, or something ridiculous to speak. And Spiritualism, right? It you, as you say, like there are real, tangible connections. And I think in part, that's because Spiritualism is a religion of learning, right? Like, part of the experience of going to someplace like Lily Dale or Cassadaga, Florida today even, is, yeah, you're gonna go for the medium. You're gonna go to be read, to have this, this spiritual, emotional experience, but you're also gonna go to lectures, much as you would at the Chautauqua Institute not far from Lily Dale. You're gonna go to workshops to learn a new skill, or to to learn maybe it might be a physical mediumship skill, or it might be something in something you know, interesting, like about a book, it's so there's this element of learning that is embedded in in Spiritualism. And it's not just just learning about Spiritualism and mediumship, it's learning about the world, which is, I think, one of the reasons too, that people like Susan B. Anthony see this as a really valuable place and platform for advancing the cause of suffrage.

Kelly Therese Pollock  26:20  
So one of the other things I found interesting about Lily Dale, and really all of Spiritualism, but you see it in Lily Dale is is this like self policing nature, like they they know that there are fraudsters and con men in Spiritualism, people taking advantage of this, people, you know, and anyone who's watched a lot of murder mysteries like I have knows that there are people who have abused things like Spiritualism and seances to, you know, in the murder mysteries I watch, it's always to like murder someone, but, you know, in in real life, it's, you know, it's just to con people out of their money, right? And so, so they want to make sure, in Lily Dale that that they're not that those people are not giving Spiritualism a bad name. And so over time, they limit the amount of, I believe it's called, like physical, physical mediumship that's allowed to be done, and then reduce it all together. Can can you talk about the ways that that that happens, the reasons that they are doing that? 

Dr. Averill Earls  27:22  
Yeah. Absolutely. So, first and foremost the founding, again, story of of Spiritualism is, is physical mediumship, right? Like the girls the Fox sisters, they hear raps and knocks, or produce raps and knocks really and that, that is a physical demonstration, because you're hearing, like the people in the hall are hearing the raps and knocks as well. It's not just something like the the non physical mediumship is just sort of a medium might receive a message and then tell you that message from spirit, whereas a physical manifestation is going to be something like producing sounds, table tipping, spirit trumpets, sort of playing themselves, or the manifestation of ghosts and ectoplasm, like figures, these kinds of physical like, oh, you can see and touch and almost experience yourself as a as a spectator, the medium's power, okay. So that is very much a part of Spiritualism. And Spiritualism, in addition to being a religion of learning, is also in many ways, it considers itself a scientific religion in that Spiritualists, from very early on, from from the Fox sisters, right? They invite people to test them, to scientifically test them, so that they can prove a.) that what they're doing is real, and b.) that there is like proof, scientific proof of the afterlife, which is something that people really crave, and which is one of the reasons that this is such a popular religion in the 19th, early 20th and even mid 20th century, right, especially in moments when we have huge deaths, like Civil War, World War I, World War II. There is always in those, in those particular moments, an upsurge in popularity of Spiritualism in the US and Britain in particular. So with that in mind, right, in places like Lily Dale, which is founded in 1879, and from the get go, there are going to be people coming in and setting up shop to do physical demonstrations, whether those be slate, automatic slate writing, or table tipping demonstrations or spoon bending or seances, where something will happen, whether it be a spirit trumpet is going to play, or ghosts are going to touch you on the shoulder in a dark room and whisper in your ear, right? So that is part of the Lily Dale experience, particularly between 1879 and say the 1940s. If you, if you go there, you're probably going there for that experience. That said, the Lily Dale Assembly, like the board, the people who oversee everything about the town, including who gets to buy and sell land or houses there, because they own the land as a private corporation, and then they sell, they have to approve anyone who wants to buy or sell houses or live there, basically. But also they approve who are the official mediums of Lily Dale. And those are the people who are going to do the messages at the stump, which is where you go to this place in the in the leyland woods, which is, it's just like a beautiful, I'm, I don't know, uncut wood with this like stump in the middle of a clearing. And that stump has, you know, significance to the Spiritualists there, and people will get up and do readings to a crowd, um, like, it's like two or three times a day, something like that. So those mediums have to be officially approved by the board. But people who are just mediums from anywhere, who do these physical manifestations, they can rent houses and cottages from the people who own them and set those up, and that's what they do. So the Lily Dale board is really like, careful about saying no one who is an official Lily Dale medium has ever been investigated for fraud or accused of fraud, I should say. Lily Dale has been investigated a couple of times. The first big one being, sort of in 19, I think it's oh five or 1910 with Hereward Carrington, who comes from, um, he's a, he's a well known at the in the, you know, the early, early 19 oughts as a paranormal psychology investigator. This is what he does. He goes around and sort of, he does, like real official scientific investigations and but he went, when he went to Lily Dale, he was just sort of pretending to be a regular visitor, and only writing down his his observations, and then reporting those in the American parapsychological journal type thing. And so he he's like, yeah, obviously I feel like this person was just making it up, or like I saw the little ghost child running in and out was obviously like a regular child, but I didn't conduct a full scientific investigation, so I'd have to come back to really just prove these things. But yeah, again, Lily Dale is really careful in saying, well, those people are just like doing what they want to do. They're not our official mediums. So there's that like semblance of respectability, for sure. And then in the 1940s, as there's like, more and more scandals, I will say, that end up shutting down other camps, like Lily Dale, they just like the onset, like vampires, that one gets shut down because they have a big scandal in Massachusetts. They decide in Lily Dale, well, we're going to just ban physical mediumship entirely, because this has become too much of a problem, because the people who are doing physical mediumship can and sometimes are doing it with ill intentions or to make money. And it's, it is fraud, but the people who we have vetted here and do the mediumship that we've approved, they're real they're the real deal. And we want to make sure we protect that right? And we want to make sure that this is a respectable place where people can commune with their dead, basically, yeah. So it's, it does. It's a shift too. But that doesn't mean that physical mediumship goes away even after Lily Dale bans it, and it certainly Marissa was just telling me, because she lives down in Florida, that she visited Cassadaga and that they're experimenting with physical mediumship again, so you can go places and still experience the physical mediumship element. Yeah. 

Dr. Averill Earls  33:39  
I want to ask about the archives themselves. So in Lily Dale, there is the Lily Dale Museum. And Lily Dale has its own historian, who you write about in the book. Can you talk some about that, what, what is available, in general, what you were able to access? And then some about the the process of as a historian, what you can give back to the archives? 

Dr. Averill Earls  34:07  
Yeah. Absolutely. So Ron Nagy is the current historian and archivist of Lily Dale. He doesn't have formal training, neither did his predecessor. So archives is probably, you know, it's not an institutional archive, like if you visit the National Archives, where they have, like, intense boxes and rules about which, you know, you fill out a slip of paper and you turn that in, you say, here, I want this piece, and then they give it to you, but then you have to get a slip that you'd return with it, right? So it's very organized and and is intended to protect those materials long term, right? That is not necessarily the case. They don't have the funds, they don't have the means, they don't have the training to provide that at Lily Dale. So it's the museum, and the museum has all kinds of physical ephemera, which is really cool, right? Like they have the the hotel registry books and and Ron has noted all the famous people who sign their names on the registry books, like Susan B. Anthony and some famous actors from the 1920s is it Mae West? I think Mae West was there at some point and paid for something to be built. And so there the museum is, like the main part of the art, the archives. It's this room or two rooms, I guess, like a little back room that has some spirit photography and some other mementos. And then the archive is the other back room, which is not very, not very big. It's just like a bunch of filing cabinets and some shelves with some plastic boxes that just have stacks of things in them. So, yeah, it is a system that only Ron can navigate, really, because he holds it in his mind. So hopefully he trains his successor at some point, or communicates with that successor from the afterlife. Yeah, and when we got there, you know, Lily Dale has been burned before by people who've come in and use their collections and studied this town, like Christine Ricker, who wrote, who was a journalist, who wrote a sort of unflattering portrait of Lily Dale as, you know, a bunch of kooks and weirdos and maybe a little bit crazy whatever. And so they're kind of wary of outsiders who want to study the place, but Ron eventually warmed up to us, and so helped us to find the things that we were looking for. Like, you know, we'd have conversations with them, oh, I want to know about this, and I want to know about this, and Ron has a pretty incredible sense of what is there and what isn't there. And even, like a regular person might come and be like, "My grandmother visited here in 19 something. Do you know?" He's like, "How do I know your grand? But here's her registered name in the book, right?" Like, so he's, yeah, he's a character and wonderful. And ended up it, you know, took us a couple of visits and promises that we were not trying to write an expose  of Lily Dale, for him to warm up to us and then help us give us access to some of the things that are in, like locked cabinets. And then that was really, really helpful. And what we ended up doing was, you know, we had short trips that we would go down to Lily Dale, which is about 50 minutes from Buffalo, where we were all living, and we would photograph everything and take it home so that we could do our work, you know, in the off season of camp, of camp season. So that was those, all those records we ended up sending to Ron, so that he would have the sort of digitized records saved, which is, I think one way that we as historians working with a in some ways, vulnerable collection can be helpful, right? And, you know, we're just using our phones with a scanning app, but that is going to preserve something that has the potential of being lost, you know, forever. We also got access to thanks to the the board president, the meeting minutes of the board, which, you know, wasn't easy, because it's a private corporation, so they don't have to let anyone in, but they were really gracious, and gave us access to those and some of them were in really rough shape. And again, we made some recommendations for preservation, like what archival boxes to get and how to store them and where to store them, and that kind of stuff. So hopefully that, I mean, I know that they're making those, those adjustments after our visit, and hopefully that will ensure the longevity of the collection, because it's really, you know, it's like, fascinating stuff, and like we, you know, we stopped at however many chapters, six chapters, but could have written, you could write multiple books just on the happenings at Lily Dale and the sort of intersections of various different histories in this place, which is a place out of time in many ways, but is still a thriving and interesting community.

Dr. Averill Earls  35:40  
So speaking of a place out of time, I think the final question I want to ask is just, you know, you were very deliberate about writing a history and not a sort of sociology of the present. Of course, you're all historians, so that makes sense in some ways. But just want to ask about how you sort of balance that as you're writing, this place still exists. There are still people living there and working as mediums there, and how you think about that, it's very sensitive to write a history of religion always, anytime you do that. So just sort of how you reflect on that?

Dr. Averill Earls  39:32  
Yeah, I mean, I think the we, you know, we had many conversations about this, from our very first research trip there, when we retired after a long day collecting materials in the archives to the Victorian B&B that we were renting, you know, the top floor of for the purposes of our research trip, we're sitting in the little living room and chatting about, like, What is our goal here? How do we deal with the issue that you're talking about? Like. Do we write this history in a way that is respectful, even as we are ourselves, not believers, or in some cases, like me, like extremely unbelieving and distrustful of any organized religion, Spiritualism notwithstanding. So I think the main way we approached it was, well, we don't actually care what people believe, or it doesn't matter to us if they believe and not believe, or sorry, it doesn't. It doesn't matter to us if this is real, right? Like, we're not here to prove whether Spiritualism is real and it has proof of the afterlife. What we care about actually, is that people believe it and that that belief then moves them to do X, Y and Z, and then how those X, Y and Zs that intersect with these other issues, whether it be things like appropriation of Native American spiritual healing and culture, whether it be advancing the cause of suffrage right in hosting things like Women's Day in, in hosting talks like like Susan B. Anthony in, in advocating for and pushing for getting women the right to vote. And you know, ultimately successfully, so that there are all of these ways that that their belief in Spiritualism made those other things possible for better or worse, right? And so our goal was not to shy away from the sort of cringier moments of of the history. And some of those histories are are very recent, right, and ongoing in many ways, but also to do so as respectfully as we could, right and empirical evidence all these kind of things are the ways that we do that, but with the sort of sensitivity and empathy that it is a living community. And so that means that we have to be aware of that and and remind ourselves again and again it doesn't matter if it's real or not. It matters that it's that people believe it is, and that history is is important.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:07  
All right. Well, please tell listeners how they can get a copy of the book. 

Dr. Averill Earls  42:11  
Oh, absolutely. So our book is available in a number of bookstores across New York state. So if you're in New York you can easily get it, but if you're not, then you can order it online, or on Amazon, or on the Cornell University Press website and enter the code 09BCARD, you will get 30% off, which then sort of makes it slightly cheaper than Amazon, but then you're ordering from, you know, not Jeff Bezos, so highly recommend, and it's a beautiful book. So 10 out of 10 you want a hard copy. It's obviously also on Kindle, and we're working on an audio book now, but this is a book you want on your shelf.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:48  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Averill Earls  42:52  
Let's just make sure also, if you're interested in learning a little bit more about Spiritualism or any of those sort of rabbit holes that we tease at in the book, we've done a bunch of episodes about that that are connected to chapters and threads that we tugged on in the book. And you can find those all @DigPodcast.org.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:11  
Averill, thank you so much for speaking with me. This was really fun. 

Dr. Averill Earls  43:15  
Yeah,thank you too. It was really nice to meet you, Kelly. Thanks for having me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:19  
You too. 

Teddy  43:33  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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