Betty and Arthur Salz spent six years researching short biographies of the people for whom the streets of Chautauqua are named. Chautauqua: The Streets Where You Live contains maps of Chautauqua from its beginning and photos of the people who contributed to the growth of Chautauqua. Photo by Lauren Rock.
A Chautauqua grounds map from 1880.
Joanna Hamer | Staff Writer
Who put the Bliss in Bliss Avenue? What did Mr. Massey do to get his name on a street that runs half the length of the grounds? And why are so many streets named after poets — did they all visit Chautauqua?
Those questions started to nag at Betty and Arthur Salz about seven years ago, after having spent their summers at Chautauqua for more than 40 years.
“We lived on Morris, on Roberts, and then we bought a house on Ames in 1971, and had no clue about any of these men, and nobody else seemed to know,” Betty said.
She bought a book of index cards and labeled each with the name of a street, and then she set off to the newly opened Oliver Archives Center.
“It was a haven for anybody doing research,” Betty said, and also the place where the Salzes found someone to help with their search. While researching street names, Betty came across Sam Hazlett and asked an archivist who he was.
“She pointed to Mary Lee (Talbot), who was sitting in the Archives, and she said, ‘That’s the person — her great-grandfather was Sam Hazlett,’ ” Betty said. “So I interviewed her then and there.”
The research project went on for many years, with the Salzes spending their summers at Chautauqua poring over 20 years of early issues of The Chautauquan Daily and traveling to the Drew University Methodist Library during the rest of the year.
“It was a great journey of learning,” Betty said.
The personalities they researched, and the amazing life stories behind each street name, struck them.
“The general pattern was that Betty did the tough research, amassing a large amount of information, and then she’d hand it over to me, and I would cull through it and put together a life story on each one,” said Arthur, a semi-retired professor of education at the City University of New York Queen’s College.
Arthur found that he became invested in each biography.
“They all lived exciting, interesting lives,” he said. “It made the writing about them fun, and in some ways easy, because each person had done so many interesting things.”
“Not only were most of them self-educated,” Betty said, “particularly the early bishops, but almost all of them worked in the Methodist Church against slavery in the 20 years before the Civil War. They had some real living behind them and took stands on issues.
“There’s a big environmental thrust to it. You look at the earliest map, there are so many parks that they designated. There was a tremendous emphasis on the natural environment.”
When the two realized they wanted to translate those stories into a book, the Salzes went back to Mary Lee Talbot and asked her to be their editor. While working together, they discovered several connections — Talbot and Betty had been in the same Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle class, and Talbot had interviewed Betty for The Chautauquan Daily in 1974 about her job as a teacher for the blind. Talbot and Arthur had also studied under the same professor at Teachers College at Columbia University.
“Last summer when we decided together that we were going to do a book, we thought of Mary Lee because she’s so perfect for this job,” Betty said. “She’s got the religious background, she’s got the Chautauqua background and the writing background.”
Talbot had experience in editing books before but never one quite like this.
“I’ve never had as much fun editing a book,” she said.
During her dissertation research about the CLSC, Talbot had taken a brief interest in the street names, but had never found the opportunity to pursue the interest until she began working with the Salzes.
“The maps to me are the most exciting pieces — that early map of the camp meeting ground, superimposed with what it looks like today,” she said, “but then also to find out the life stories of some of those people — they’re so poignant.”
The outcome of all the research and writing is a new book available in the Chautauqua Bookstore, called Chautauqua: The Streets Where You Live. The book is arranged in sections according to chronological maps of the grounds, so as Chautauqua grew and added more streets, the stories of the street names tell its history.
“We really stop at streets and envision the stories now,” Betty said.
“We came to like these people that we were writing about,” Arthur said. “We were fascinated.”
The Salzes hope their book will provide Chautauquans with information about the people who gave their names to the avenues on the grounds, and an excuse to explore the history embedded in the very streets where they live.
Update: This story has been updated with a correction. Betty Salz heard of Sam Hazlett while she was reading The History of American Methodism, but did not get his name from the book.
The Chautauquan Daily 
