Book Review: 

Review of Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Marissa C. Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik’s Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale, Three Hills, Cornell University Press, 2024. 240 pp. Hardcover (ISBN: ‎978-1501777264). Kindle (ASIN: B0CVR1WSD3).

Lily Dale is the most famous Spiritualist town in the world. Founded in 1879 as an intentional Spiritualist community, it has attracted visits from luminaries, including Susan B. Anthony, as well as attention from writers and documentarians. Today, the town remains a popular destination for spiritual seekers and tourists. Historians Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Marissa C. Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik provide a history of Lily Dale in their excellent book Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale. The book was collaboratively researched, but most chapters are authored by just one of the co-authors, which infuses the book with a distinct set of perspectives, voices, and forms of expertise. The authors, who are also the producers of the popular podcast Dig: A History Podcast, bring a deliberate, accessible style of history storytelling that results in an engrossing and highly readable book. Each essayistic chapter takes a particular place within Lily Dale as its focus and uses it to show how Lily Dale intersected with broader history. The result is a place-based history that shows how politics, spirituality, and regional culture shaped American Spiritualism.

Spiritualism’s Place opens by situating Lily Dale historically and culturally. “Welcome to Lily Dale” asks how the hub of U.S. Spiritualism ended up in a small town in western New York state. To answer this, Spiritualism’s Place contextualizes Lily Dale within New York State religious and political history. The region of New York State occupied by Lily Dale was originally home to the Haudenosaunee, “the most powerful Native American empire” of era (19) before the U.S. government eventually seized most of Haudenosaunee land by the end of the 18th century. The construction of the Erie Canal attracted new residents from New England to western New York state, and these new residents brought religious fervor and flexibility with them. These intersections of geography, infrastructure, and migration “facilitated a unique religious culture” (22) that prioritized personal conviction, experience, and flexibility. The Burnt Over District was home to many new religious movements, including Mormonism, Shakers, and, of course, Spiritualism. The chapter does an excellent job of tracing how Lily Dale drew on the cultural practices of other faiths, such as the camp model that sees people gather at the town each summer for Spiritualist experiences, from sects like Methodism.

In its early days, many of Spiritualism’s most celebrated mediums were women. As a result, the religion afforded women more political and spiritual power than many other religions, which historians like Ann Braude and Alex Owen have influentially documented in the past. Spiritualism’s Place meaningfully adds to such studies of Spiritualism and feminism by showing how Spiritualism, suffrage, and gender intersected in Lily Dale itself.  Chapter Two, “Little Victorian Cottages,” turns its attention to the Victorian homes that comprise much of Lily Dale. In both the past and the present, mediums would rent cottages at Lily Dale for the summer and then invite sitters into their home for readings. In doing so, Spiritualism challenged the gendered norms of the Victorian period, in which men occupied the public sphere while women remained sequestered in the private, domestic sphere. Spiritualism turned the home into a “space for connection” (45) rather than isolation. While male Spiritualists would later challenge women’s centrality both in the organization of the religion and in its theological interpretations, Chapter Two reminds us of how women’s participation in Spiritualism reconfigured gendered norms. Chapter Three, “The Fox Cottage,” turns to take a close look at the legacy of perhaps the most famous 19th century Spiritualists: the Fox Sisters, whose encounter with spirit rappings in their home in Hydesville, New York is commonly taken as the starting point of Spiritualism. While Maggie was the only Fox sister to visit Lily Dale, the house where the sisters first encountered the rapping was moved from its original location to Lily Dale in 1916 and billed as “the birthplace of modern Spiritualism.” The chapter charts the celebrity as well as the skepticism that Spiritualists like the Fox Sisters attracted. It traces how these debates over the legitimacy of Spiritualist practices, like physical mediumship, shaped the laws and culture of Lily Dale itself.

 “The Auditorium,” Chapter Four, moves from analyzing how spiritualism reconfigured women’s domestic spaces to analyzing how Spiritualism intersected with the suffrage movement in Lily Dale. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the town was a “destination in itself” (90) for “forward-minded individuals” (90) who wanted to change the world. Tracing how the luminaries and grassroots activists of the suffrage movement intersected the Lily Dale community reveals how Spiritualism and the suffrage movement changed and challenged each other.

One of the most engrossing chapters in the book, Chapter Five, “The Maplewood Hotel,” analyzes the place of alcohol within Spiritualism and shows how Spiritualism intersected with the temperance movement.. The chapter begins with a puzzle: contemporary Lily Dale, despite its “Woodstock vibes” (119), is a dry town. How does sobriety sit alongside the progressive political and spiritual history of the town? Much of Spiritualism was seen as disreputable by a skeptical audience: men were invited into women’s private spaces for séances, and mediums who practiced physical mediumship might become intoxicated through contact with drunken spirits. Beyond that, many female Spiritualists, such as the Fox Sisters, had well-publicized battles with substance abuse. All of this “tarnished” Spiritualism’s reputation. To counter this, Lily Dale embraced “public sobriety,” even after the demise of the temperance movement, as a means of protecting “Lily Dale’s reputation and shore up Spiritualism’s legitimacy” (122).

Spiritualism’s Place then shifts to the politics of Lily Dale’s relationship with Native Americans. Chapter Six, “The Indian Village,” takes its inspiration from a now defunct section of Lily Dale known as the “WigWam Indian Village,” and analyzes the complicated connections between Spiritualism and Native American people and spirituality.  “Bits of Native American spirituality and culture were everywhere,” the authors observe, “but there didn’t seem to be any Indians” (143). This paradox seems to define Lily Dale’s relationship with Native Americans. Lily Dale is home to Native American spirits and spirit guides, workshops on Native American spirituality run by “plastic shaman,” and Native American souvenirs, but has little relationship with nearby communities of Native Americans. The chapter charts how the 20th-century New Age interest in Native American religions, the Indian rights movements, and Spiritualism intersected to produce this troubling situation. This chapter raises important questions about how the practitioners of Spiritualism and forms of New Age spirituality understand these hybrid forms that I hope future anthropologists and historians examine further.

The concluding chapter, “The Lily Dale Museum,” reflects on the complexities of writing a history of an often-marginalized religion whose members can, rightly, be skeptical of outsiders. The writers demonstrate how collaborative research processes—like helping to digitize records and sharing archival organization resources—can engender trust and respect with communities. Beyond that, their highly sensitive, and at times personal, writing allows them to contend with the very real appeal of Spiritualism’s communication with the dead. Spiritualism is, as they note, fundamentally a “feeling religion” (15), and their personal, engaged writing style allows them to sensitively contend with that emotionality.

Spiritualism’s Place is an engrossing, analytically rigorous, and conceptually rich book.  It convincingly shows that a place-based approach to Spiritualist history provides a useful model for scholars interested in how politics, culture, and geography converge to shape esoteric practices. I hope it inspires additional research on the lived realities of contemporary Lily Dale. Ultimately, Spiritualism’s Place will be of interest to scholars of Spiritualism as well as casual readers curious about Lily Dale’s history.

-2 Oct. 2024