The lyceum system concept that Holbrook started flourished in New England and the Midwestern United States. It branched out into the mid-Atlantic States and parts of the Western states and Southern states. It served as a platform for scientific techniques, scholar endeavors, religion, and politics. It helped promote a need for a uniform educational system in the United States that would include professional teacher training. Some notable speakers in these lyceum schools included Louis Agassiz and Daniel Webster Others of note were Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Nathaniel Hawthorne and Susan B. Anthony. From time to time William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass were speakers. He started the lyceum school system in the United States that at one time had 3,000 towns organized under the approach. Holbrook helped develop out the lyceum town of Berea, Ohio. He made a factory that was specifically designed to manufacture scientific apparatus and teach the technology. Eventually in time other formal teaching eventually took the place of his lyceum schools and the basic concept was discontinued in the early nineteen hundreds.