The founding story of Cassadaga is told the way the community has always told it. George P. Colby, a young trance medium working the northern camp circuit, was instructed by his spirit guide, Seneca, to travel south, where he would establish a Spiritualist community amid pine woods and lakes; guided through the Florida wilderness, the account continues, he recognized the promised place in the hill country of Volusia County and filed a homestead claim there in the 1880s.
Historians in the University Press of Florida's study of the community note what the documents show, a homestead, northern Spiritualists wintering in Florida, and organizational energy borrowed from the established camps, while recording the guide narrative as the community's own account of itself, which is how an atlas should hold it too.
The Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association was chartered in 1894, taking its name from the New York lake district around Lily Dale from which many of its founders came south; the two communities have been sister settlements ever since, linked by migration, winter residence and shared certification of mediums. Colby lived until 1933, long enough to see the tent camp become a village of cottages, and his name remains on the community's landscape, most visibly in the adjacent Colby Memorial Temple where its services are held.