Lewis Miller Cottage

The Lewis Miller Cottage is a historic house on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, standing at the corner of Whitfield and Vincent Avenues. It was built in 1875 as the summer residence of Lewis Miller, the Ohio inventor and manufacturer who co-founded the Chautauqua movement, and it is regarded as one of the earliest prefabricated structures in the United States, since Miller brought the cottage from Akron, Ohio, and erected it on the lakeside grounds. The building is a two-story wood-frame house with a broad gabled roof, large supporting brackets in the Stick style, a symmetrical front facade, and a first-floor porch and second-floor balcony with gingerbread balustrades. Miller entertained President Ulysses S. Grant here in the summer of 1875, and his daughter Mina Miller Edison later spent summers at the cottage with her husband Thomas Edison and renovated it in 1922. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 21, 1965.