Wishing they were here
How a rising middle class hit the road and put New England on the tourist map
Postcards courtesy of Bailey Howe Special Collections
“There have always been travelers, but there have not always been tourists,” says Dona Brown, associate professor of history and director of the Center for Research on Vermont. As the wealth of the American middle class grew in the nineteenth century, they began to vacation as tourists, defined by the sites they visited and the economy that sprang up in support of their rush to the must-see peaks, chasms, and waterfalls. Brown’s study of the development of tourism and its role in New England’s regional identity has been a focus since her graduate school years and was the subject of her book Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). As summer vacation season neared, we sat down with Brown to discuss the history of the beaches and mountains many of us will flock to this summer. Here’s one thing to think about while you’re sitting in a line of cars approaching the Sagamore Bridge: Henry Thoreau said the Cape would never make it as a tourist destination. Read on for more.
SUBLIME FOR SALE
“In the very first waves of tourism in the 1820s and the 1830s, tourists were looking for specific kinds of experiences with nature. The White Mountains were one of the areas that developed fastest, but there were others—Nahant, the Isles of Shoals, then, of course, Niagara Falls, outside of New England entirely.
The White Mountains, in particular, were developed to appeal to vacationers really interested in experiencing scenery, experiencing nature in categories they had become familiar with by reading poetry and by looking at paintings. They had certain kinds of notions about what they were going to see and how they were going to feel about it when they got there, like we all do. The White Mountains worked very well for those experiences because the tour that was created goes through the kind of scenery that creates an experience of the sublime—over-hanging cliffs; huge, towering mountains; a sense of insignificance; a sense of maybe even a little bit of danger. The latter is particularly true after the famous Willey Slide of 1826 when a family was destroyed by a rockslide in what is now called Crawford Notch. That association of danger and mortality with landscape, I think, was part of the appeal.
That is why New Hampshire develops this kind of tourist industry much more quickly than Vermont, because Vermont is essentially cleared by then and is a distinctly more pastoral landscape, a more human-influenced landscape. Although there are tourist industries in Vermont, they don’t develop into major attractions the same way the ones in the White Mountains do.”
MIDDLE-CLASS MONEY
“Vacationing in New England was a certain aspect of middle class formation in the early nineteenth century. The tourists were folks who wished to see themselves and portray themselves not just as people who had made a lot of money, but as people who had access to the cultural advantages that they associated with upward mobility. So they would buy the right paintings, go on the right tourist trips, bring home the right representations of that trip. It might be books for your parlor table. It might be painted landscapes or some type of produced lithographs, but it’s also the experience itself that you can refer to in conversation. All those things are part of that expression.
These first tourists were looking for scenery that they could respond to in certain ways. If it was sublime then they would react with certain kinds of expressions, they would quote certain kinds of poetry, they would refer to certain kinds of paintings. If the scenery was a little more tame, then that it was ‘picturesque.’ The whole deal was about how you felt, how you responded. And because people vacationed in groups, rather than the more private way we travel now, you were expected to show that with other people around.
It said everything about you as a person—your educational level, your class status, your money, but also your refinement, your innate poetic nature.”
MEANWHILE IN VERMONT
“In the early years there were some springs, spas, watering holes that became really popular. In the 1860s there’s a big boom of resort hotels across New England and Vermont takes part in that. From my standpoint, Vermont comes into its own in the late nineteenth century as people begin to value farm landscapes, pastoral landscapes. That begins in the 1870s and hits its stride in the 1890s when there are state-sponsored programs to develop farm-based tourism. The state begins to market itself as a pastoral landscape, which is interesting, because by that time the trees are starting to come back.
Today, if you look at our landscape, it’s really not that much of a pastoral landscape. Yet in the mind’s eye of a lot of our vacationers, people still see us as a largely open pastoral landscape filled with cows, even while our landscape is now over two-thirds reforested.
It still has that kind of advantage. I think you see the remnants of the belief that Vermont is a more pastoral state in foliage season. Vermont is more associated with foliage season than other northern places and people will come to Vermont who have pretty tolerably good leaves themselves back in Massachusetts or Connecticut. I think that in foliage season people associate the leaves with the pastoral and the village landscape. So they want to see maples in an open field or maples on a street with white buildings.”
GOD WANTS YOU TO HAVE A VACATION
“What makes people who have gotten themselves to where they are, to their prosperous and secure positions by hard work and by self-denial and by the virtues of a producer class, throw that all away and say—‘now we’re going to spend all our money on pianos and carpets and vacations’? That’s the $64,000 question in the history of the nineteenth century: What makes a producer culture a consumer culture? There is a shift right in the middle of the nineteenth century.
You can see the change in the religious community when key figures begin to agitate, key ministers and leaders begin to tell people, ‘God wants you to be happy, God wants you to have a vacation, it’s good for you to have a vacation, you can do your good work better if you take time off.’ There is an ideological shift and a lot of protestant religious leaders begin to not just condone leisure but to praise leisure as something that is good for you spiritually and psychologically and physically. I traced it in my book to a key moment in the 1850s when the Martha’s Vineyard Methodist campground transforms itself into a resort.
So, this sort of ideological permission is given at about the same time that people have more money to spend. It is hard to know which triggers the rise in tourism, which is the chicken or which is the egg.”
ESCAPING THE NEIGHBORS
“In the nineteenth century most cities were not segregated by class and race very distinctly. People were trying to segregate their neighborhoods, but they weren’t having all that much success. So factory owners in major urban areas lived right next to factory workers. The landscape of the city was still very mixed socially. There are exceptions to that, but most people’s experience in most cities was of a pretty mixed environment.
So when people went on vacation they gravitated toward places that could absolutely guarantee them very homogeneous class, ethnic, religious communities. On Martha’s Vineyard, for example, Methodists from around New Bedford and Providence would stay in the central community and people who had a little bit more money than that began to build a separate community outside of that. The class lines became very clear. My favorite example of this is Old Orchard Beach in Maine. There was an entire neighborhood of people of Irish descent whose men in the family had become lawyers. There was a Jewish settlement. A Unitarian settlement. There were two French Canadian settlements of different sorts of class backgrounds.
Segregation for us means that somebody has made a law and forced people into these communities, but that’s not what I mean. The segregation is largely voluntarily. It is not only rich people trying to get away from poor people. On Martha’s Vineyard, for instance, some people very clearly tried to separate themselves out from well-to-do resorts because they didn’t want their kids corrupted by rich people’s ideas about gambling and drinking and dancing, all kinds of corrupt ideas that they associated with wealthy people’s leisure time.
Part of the appeal of summer vacationing becomes that you find these very homogenous companions for your kids and for yourself. In some places that turns into very clear policies of exclusion. Most of the great vacation resorts in New England from the end of the nineteenth century into the 1940s were ‘restricted,’ by which they meant that they didn’t allow Jews. There were various different methods they used to do that. Most of them were very clearly discriminating on the basis of religion.
There was a big argument in the early twentieth century, a huge fight when they were trying to decide how to invite more tourists into Vermont and which kinds of tourists they should be. The Vermont Commission on Country Life published Rural Vermont, a book with essays written by a huge committee of Vermonters on what the future of the state should look like. It had a eugenics component. What should we do to increase the quality of the people who are reproducing here? It looked at how to bring new people in, which people to bring in, and specifically, what kinds of people. That tends to mean, ‘Do we want Jews or not?’ Dorothy Canfield Fisher weighed in on this at some length with the sentiment—‘Well, the right kind of Jews are good’—meaning professors, people of our class. It is all very shocking when you look back on it. All of this talk drops off sharply, as you can imagine, after about 1943.”
WILDER THAN WALDEN
“Henry Thoreau was a kind of anti-tourist. I think he’s very conscious of it. Sometimes he uses the language of guidebooks from this time period, but he says the exact opposite thing of what a guidebook would say. Especially the Cape Cod stuff, that famous case where he talks about the Cape as the “bare and bended arm” of Massachusetts. That’s very much the way a lot of guidebooks open with a kind of poetic analogy like that.
A lot of guidebooks begin with a sentence like ‘the name that the Indians gave to this place was blah-blah-blah, which means beautiful sun of the morning’ or something along those lines. Thoreau does this with the words Cape Cod, which is utterly ridiculous. What does “cod” mean? He goes on for a whole paragraph. I think it’s just designed to joke about the way guidebooks are written. People tend to think that everything he wrote was serious, but there were a lot of little digs.
Thoreau went to places that weren’t fashionable for tourists—Cape Cod, Mount Katahdin in Maine. In these wilder landscapes, he takes the sublime and goes beyond the sublime. The sublime assumes that landscape is in some sort of relationship to humans. Although it is frightening and alien, people think it is there because God created it to teach a moral lesson about your own smallness, or that you should be humble, or that God is great.
Writing about the area of the present-day Nauset Light, Thoreau describes it as “a place where famished dogs range in packs.” It is completely savage, it is completely inhuman. The same with Katahdin. The language he uses emphasizes that this is a place that is not responding to human categories. Thoreau takes that language and goes one step beyond and says this landscape teaches us nothing, it is not there to teach us anything. It is there on its own terms. It is fascinating to read because I think he is alone in his generation in the degree to which he went to describe the wild.”
NICE PLACE TO VISIT, YOU WOULD WANT TO LIVE HERE
“At least in Vermont, I think the state had its eye on using tourism as a springboard for other economic development from very early on. When the state first began to get into the business of promoting tourism in the 1870s, they put out a pamphlet called “Vermont: Its Landscape and Opportunities” or something like that. It promoted Vermont as a beautiful place, detailing the different lakes, mountains, and resorts. Then it had a section on industrial opportunities, farming opportunities, mining opportunities. It was perceived as being all in one package.
I think that continued through the early twentieth century, although by the 1930s some people began to feel some kind of tension between the tourist industry and the rest of the possible industrial development. And that really becomes more fraught as time goes on. You could probably imagine that there might be a conflict between calling Vermont ‘Unspoiled Vermont,’ which was the slogan of the 1930s, and yet inviting people to come in and do more development. And then skiing comes in during the 1930s and kind of muddies the waters even more. It is a kind of development, but also a kind of tourism. I think that right along people have perceived the possibility of combining a tourism pitch with other kinds of marketing of the place.”
WELL-WORN PATHS
“If you look around at New England tourist areas, some of them still show signs of the clientele they first attracted. Nantucket was always a more exclusive crowd than Martha’s Vineyard. And it shows that now with the restrictions on the development and the incredible inflation of the land values there. Martha’s Vineyard has lagged behind that. Although it’s now caught up, the Vineyard used to be much more middle class. York, Maine shows the same kind of exclusivity that it had when it was originally developed as a resort. It still kind of drips money the way it did in the 1890s.
I think Vermont looks more like what was marketed in 1890 than any of these other places do. Though a lot of changes are happening very quickly, Vermont still has a lot of what was appealing to people in the 1890s—the village streetscapes and the overall landscape.
In a broader sense, it is difficult for to say whether these places throughout New England still provide the same kind of appeal, because so much of what we do is so different now. In the nineteenth century people really traveled in groups and they experienced vacations in groups, not just with families. We travel in private.
If you went to a nineteenth-century resort, the upstairs bedrooms were very small and very minimal. But the downstairs public space is very elaborate and beautiful and that is because people expected their vacation to be largely in public, a social experience. So, that’s why I’m hesitating on whether it still delivers what it promised then, because I don’t think that people even want what it promised then. That’s one problem that great hotels have now in marketing themselves. People don’t want to sit around in the great rooms talking to other people.
In terms of my own reactions, I like the emptier places better. Highly developed resorts with lots of social crowding, like Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket or the coast are not as appealing to me as apparently empty landscapes or rural landscapes. Right about the 1860s or 1870s, people started to write criticisms of resorts – ‘Why do you want to go on vacation? It’s too crowded. You have to dress up for dinner.’ I’m part of 140 years of reaction to that, I guess.”
(for UVM staff)