In this early stage, tourism was, for the most part, spatially concentrated in the Northeast. Prior to the Civil War, there were only a few Southern resorts; they were hard to reach, relatively small in scale, and primarily catered to the regional gentry. In contrast, the transportation infrastructure was more developed in the North, allowing greater accessibility, especially among the large potential tourist market in the more densely populated cities. This accessibility also helped reduce travel costs, and some resorts offered lower-cost options, both of which allowed greater opportunities for the middle classes to participate.
Some of the earliest destinations in this region were spas based on mineral waters. Beliefs about the curative properties of mineral waters carried over to American society. One of the first spas was Ballston Spa in Saratoga County, New York, which boasted the first hotel in the country built outside of one of the major cities. As travel opened up in the nineteenth century, these spas began to develop in much the same fashion as earlier British spas. New accommodations and entertainments drew ever more tourists, who came for leisure and socialization rather than health. As these spas became overrun with visitors, the original and wealthy tourists sought newer, more exclusive resorts, and they were replaced at existing resorts by the middle classes.
Travel was disrupted by the Civil War, but subsequent opportunities for travel in the United States continued to increase through the end of the century. There was a steadily growing middle class that had more leisure time and disposable income to travel. The national transportation infrastructure was constantly being expanded, not the least by the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. This was a key factor in making nature, particularly in the West, more accessible. In fact, the railroad was a crucial mediator of scenic tourism experiences in the American West. Until the tourism infrastructure could be more fully developed, early tourists may have only had the opportunity to view the landscape from railroad passenger cars; landscapes lying outside of the rail corridor often remained inaccessible.
Box 4.3. Case Study: Tourism at Niagara Falls and Taming the Sublime
Reports of Niagara Falls began to circulate by the beginning of the seventeenth century, describing the scene as simultaneously beautiful and frightening. For more than two centuries, few Europeans and Euro-Americans would have the opportunity to see the falls for themselves. It was a difficult journey through often uncharted territory controlled by the Iroquois Nation until the Revolutionary War. Accessibility increased slowly with the development of paths and roads that would allow for horse and later carriage traffic. This brought the development of inns to accommodate those making the trip, which could last over ten days. While both roads and inns remained of questionable quality, only the most determined and intrepid travelers would undertake the journey. However, those who did felt that they were rewarded by the experience of the awesome and spectacular nature of the site.
As tourism continued to grow in the United States, more people from the upper and middle classes looked to the nearby mountains as an escape from the city during the summer months. With the increasing accessibility brought by steamboats and railways, and changing attitudes toward the natural environment, new destinations emerged in the Catskill, White, and Adirondack Mountains. Niagara Falls emerged as one of the most popular of these destinations in the 1830s. Americans had a growing desire for sublime experiences, and Niagara was considered one of the finest examples in the still-growing nation. As a result of this demand, the tourism infrastructure was quickly developed. The completion of the Erie Canal, followed by new rail connections, helped increase the site’s accessibility. Likewise, construction began on hotels to accommodate visitors.
As more people visited the falls, its reputation continued to grow. The sublime thrill of the experience soon became equated with feelings of passion and romance, and Niagara emerged as a popular destination for honeymooners. This marked a significant change in the site’s tourist demographic, which brought further changes to the destination. New sightseeing platforms were built to make the experience of the falls easier, especially for women constrained by the norms of fashion. Moreover, as it was now considered a fashionable social spot, new entertainment facilities were also built. By the end of the nineteenth century, Niagara Falls was the country’s most popular destination among not only domestic tourists but foreign ones as well.
Yet, as Niagara became increasingly popular as a distinctly American tourism destination, there was also a growing dissatisfaction with the experience. The experience of a sublime landscape was intended to be thrilling because of the sense of adventure it involved, as well as the potential danger. Yet, the developments of tourism at the falls irrevocably changed the nature of the experience. Tourists of all ages, genders, and physical abilities could arrive at the site with relative ease on a steamship or in a passenger rail car, stay in the comfort of a nearby hotel, and “experience” the falls from designated paths and strategic platforms. The peace and solitude of the experience was lost in competition with not only countless other tourists but also the many vulgar developments brought to the site by opportunistic entrepreneurs.
Niagara Falls is considered to be one of the first examples of over-commercialization of a tourism destination in the United States. Both the sheer volume of tourists and the nature of tourism developments contributed to the dissatisfaction and, for perhaps the first time, began to generate concerns about the negative impacts of tourism. On the one hand, people had the desire to experience sites with spectacular natural features. On the other hand, in order for people to be able to experience these sites, some developments were necessary but would also necessarily alter the experience. This tension would subsequently become an issue for many of the country’s other leading tourism destinations as well.
Discussion topic: What lessons can modern tourism destinations learn from the historic case of Niagara Falls?
Sources
Gassan, Richard H. The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790–1830. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.
Löfgren, Orvar. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
After the war, ideas of the Romantic Movement had firmly taken hold. This was particularly true among the upper-class urbanites of the large Northeastern cities that already saw the problems of congestion and pollution and craved the experience of the strange, remote, and wild parts of the country. Intellectuals and writers began to argue that the country’s unparalleled natural features were—or at least should be—the basis of America’s unique identity and compensated for its lack of history. This argument was successful, and the first national park, Yellowstone, was created in 1872.
From that time on, domestic tourism was advocated as a sort of ritual of American citizenship in which Americans could see, know, and appreciate the nation in which they lived. This ritual became increasingly important with the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914. With traditional European destinations temporarily unavailable to American tourists, they looked to their own emerging destinations (figure 4.3). With the explosion of automobile ownership and highway construction that took place during the interwar years, this tourism experience was increasingly accessible. With the popularity of autotouring, a park-to-park tour was promoted as a new type of Grand Tour.
Figure 4.3. The development of automobile transport created new opportunities for tourism, especially in early-twentieth-century America. Personal cars allowed this family to get together for a reunion in 1916. (Source: Carolyn Nelson)
From the 1920s to the 1960s, resort tourism experienced a resurgence. These resorts served the primary purpose of getting out of the city during the hot summer months. Women and children would relocate to cabins in resort communities, while men would spend weekends there but continue to work in the cities during the week. As with earlier health spas, the Catskill Mountains provided one of the primary locations for these resorts. The
y were a reasonable distance from New York City but provided a vastly different environment. There was often a distinct ethnic component to these destinations: Germans, Czechs, and Jews each established their own resorts. In fact, the area was sometimes referred to as the Borscht Belt or the Jewish Alps, due to the presence of several large Jewish resorts. Similarly, Idlewild was a significant destination in Michigan because it was one of the few resorts available to blacks until discrimination was prohibited.
As more Americans took to the road for travel after World War II, a host of new tourism destinations emerged across the country. Unlike many of the earlier destinations that were built on natural attractions, such as spas and national parks, these destinations were often built around human features. For example, there was a growing interest in American history, such as Revolutionary War sites. However, many new destinations were designed expressly for the purpose of tourism. Disneyland—opened in 1955 in California—became a prominent tourism destination that set the precedent for other destinations solely oriented around entertainment and pleasure.
Box 4.4. Experience: A 1950s Family Road Trip
Some of my oldest memories are of the annual family road trip. It was the early 1950s, and I was only about five or six years old. We were living in Central Ohio at the time, and every summer, our family vacation would involve a trip down to South Carolina to visit my grandmother. Today, that trip is no big deal. Although it is a good day’s drive, our cars are efficient, reliable, and comfortable. We have air conditioning for when it’s hot, and we can plug in an iPod for a steady supply of music or even pop in a DVD to keep the kids entertained. It’s all highways with at least four lanes of 65 mph traffic or better. We’re never far away from a gas station, fast food restaurant, or roadside rest stop to take care of any of our needs. But back then, the experience was quite different.
The family car was a 1950 Chevrolet. It had a good-sized trunk for our luggage and plenty of room for me and my brother in the backseat. We might play games along the way, but I remember standing on the floor in the backseat for much of the trip. Cars didn’t have seat belts then, and I liked to look over the front seat to watch where we were going. There were roadside rest stops where we could pull off of the road for a while and possibly have lunch if we’d packed a picnic for the first day, but there were no facilities. If we needed to use the toilet, we had to stop at a gas station and get the bathroom key from the attendant. There were no fast food restaurants, only local diners and truck stops. We usually ate at the truck stops because my dad always swore that wherever the truckers went would have the best food.
To start the trip, we had to leave home first thing in the morning and begin the drive south. We crossed the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River at the border between Ohio and West Virginia (that bridge collapsed in 1967). We would then spend the rest of the day in West Virginia crossing the Appalachian Mountains. This was the longest and most difficult part of the trip. At that time, the only road was a treacherous, winding, hilly, two-lane road that essentially followed the path of least resistance through the mountains. On the best parts of the road, I don’t think we averaged better than 30 mph. For this part of the trip, my parents gave us Dramamine to keep us from getting motion sickness, but that just made us sleepy. I know my dad was happy when the West Virginia Turnpike was built. Even though we had to pay tolls to use the road and it was still only two lanes, the trip became a little bit easier and safer.
We had to make it to Bluefield, West Virginia, that first night. There were no motels along the way, so our only option was to stop in the city of Bluefield where there was a hotel. It was a typical, although now old-fashioned, hotel with a proper lobby, elevator, and inside access to rooms. In the morning, we would eat breakfast in the hotel’s dining room, and then set out for another long day. We were able to cover more distance that day, as the roads leveled out in Virginia and North Carolina, and we would arrive in Whitmire, South Carolina, by dinnertime. We would stay there with my grandmother for about a week. The main things to do were to go swimming at the municipal pool or to hang out at the local drugstore, where I would sit on the floor and read their comic books.
Sometimes, we would continue on to Myrtle Beach. Crossing South Carolina to reach the coast took another whole day of driving. We would spend another four or five days there. Back then, it wasn’t much more than a fishing village that was just starting to attract tourists. None of the resorts had been developed yet, and there weren’t even any hotels—only “guest cottages” for visitors. These were essentially individual, self-contained cottages near the beach. My mom cooked for us in the cottage’s kitchen, and occasionally we would go out to one of the town’s chicken or seafood restaurants. We spent our days at the beach or fishing off the pier, and at night we went to the Pavilion Amusement Park, which had been built only a few years before and has now been torn down.
I hated the long drive home. At least at the beginning of the trip we had the beach to look forward to. I suppose the lack of traveler’s conveniences that we have today makes the trip back then sound like an ordeal, but we didn’t know any better, and it was the only vacation away from home that we took. Chevrolet had a slogan, “See the USA in your Chevrolet.” Well, that was the part of the USA that I saw in our Chevrolet.
—John
Conclusion
Much research on tourism in past periods has focused on several key eras considered instrumental in the evolution of modern tourism. In particular, the Grand Tour is often cited as the origin of modern international tourism. In fact, some scholars argue that the Grand Tour lives on:
The true descendants of . . . the Grand Tour tradition, however, consist of the young interrailers who roam the city in search of other interrailers and the groups of American and Japanese college students doing the modern version of the Grand Tour. Just as in the seventeenth century, they are here with the blessing of their parents. A season of interrailing or a European tour is still supposed to be a good investment in a middle class education.6
The historical geography of tourism is a fundamental component in the geography of tourism. Historical geography provides the framework for examining the geographic patterns of tourism in past periods and the changes that have taken place over time, which is the foundation for the patterns that we see today. Although it is often hard for us to imagine tourism in earlier periods, clearly many parallels may be seen. Moreover, starting from the early nineteenth century, we can trace the evolution of infrastructure, organization, experiences, and even many of the problems of tourism directly to the patterns that we see today and will be exploring in greater depth in the remaining chapters.
Key Terms
beautiful
historical geography
picturesque
picturesque tourism
romantic
romantic tourism
sublime
Notes
1. Charles R. Goeldner and J. R. Brent Ritchie, Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies. 9th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006), 41.
2. Loykie Lomine, “Tourism in Augustan Society (44 BC–AD 69),” in Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, and Conflict, ed. John Walton (Clevedon, UK: Channel View Publications, 2005), 69; Maxine Feifer, Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present (New York: Stein and Day, 1986), 8.
3. Gareth Shaw and Allan M. Williams, Critical Issues in Tourism: A Geographical Perspective, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 30.
4. James Buzzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
5. Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 49–51.
6. Löfgren, On Holiday, 160.
Sources
Aitchison, Cara, Nicola E. MacLeod, and Stephen J. Shaw. Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies. London: Routledge, 2000.
Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the
Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1880. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.
Baum, Tom. “Images of Tourism Past and Present.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 8, no. 4 (1996): 25–30.
Beckerson, John, and John K. Walton. “Selling Air: Marketing the Intangible at British Resorts.” In Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, and Conflict, edited by John Walton, 55–68. Clevedon, UK: Channel View Publications, 2005.
Berghoff, Hartmut, and Barbara Korte. “Britain and the Making of Modern Tourism: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” In The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, edited by Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie, 1–20. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Buzzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate. Nineteenth-Century European Art. New York: Abrams, 2003.
Cohen-Hattab, Kobi, and Yossi Katz. “The Attraction of Palestine: Tourism in the Years 1850–1948.” Journal of Historical Geography 27, no. 2 (2001): 166–77.
Feifer, Maxine. Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present. New York: Stein and Day, 1986.
Gassan, Richard H. The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790–1830. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.
Goeldner, Charles R., and J. R. Brent Ritchie. Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies. 9th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006.
Higgins-Desbiolles, Freya. “More Than an ‘Industry’: The Forgotten Power of Tourism as a Social Force.” Tourism Management 27 (2006): 1192–1208.
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