Lily Dale began as one of the summer camp meetings that organized American Spiritualism after the Civil War. Freethinkers and Spiritualists of the Cassadaga Lake district incorporated their association in 1879, and the tents of the first seasons gave way to cottages, an auditorium and the institutions of a permanent village, renamed over time from the Cassadaga Lake Free Association through the City of Light to the Lily Dale Assembly. The camp inherited the reform politics that ran through the movement's first generation: platforms for women's suffrage and other causes of the day, with Susan B. Anthony among the speakers the Assembly hosted.
The community's sense of its own descent was made concrete in 1916, when the cottage from Hydesville in which the Fox sisters heard the raps of 1848 was moved to Lily Dale and kept as the movement's birthplace shrine; the cottage burned in 1955, and a marker and museum materials keep its memory. The Assembly weathered the movement's long contraction, the exposures, the decline of physical mediumship, the deaths of the founding generation, by settling into what it remains: a chartered religious community with bylaws, membership requirements, a season calendar and a media profile that returns with every wave of popular interest in the afterlife. Its endurance, through boom, scandal and fashion, is itself the most instructive exhibit in the museum of American Spiritualism.