Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History

Introduction

1 Introduction Karen L. Cox The American South, long perceived as the most primitive and exotic of regions in the United States, has been a destination for tourists since the country was founded. Since settlement, tourists have visited the region in an effort to better understand what set it apart from the rest of the country. Throughout the antebellum period, northerners made treks to the South not only to escape harsh winters but also to explore regional differences of the American landscape—taking home with them examples of the flora and fauna to share with friends back home. While the Civil War halted the flow of tourists temporarily, wealthy tourists resumed their visits to the region , especially to Florida, and Union veterans organized trips to revisit the sites of battle and to personally meet their former foes in more peaceful times. Railroads and steamboats brought more tourists to the region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the second decade of the twentieth century the mass production of Henry Ford’s Model T meant that many middle-class Americans were able to make the trip South. As roads improved an intraregional tourism made it possible for southerners to visit sites in their home region. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, tourism to the American South developed into a bona fide regional industry.1 For most of the last two centuries, one of the most valuable commodities the South has offered tourists has been its unique place in the history of the United States. Southern states and locales have made it their business to promote the region’s role in the founding of the nation, beginning with the very first house museum to be preserved in the United States—George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia. America’s fascination with the Old South, especially during the first half of the twentieth century, meant that 2 Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History across the South antebellum mansions have been preserved for purposes of heritage tourism. The most cataclysmic event in the nation’s history—the Civil War—was primarily fought on southern soil. That, too, has shaped the South’s tourist trade as non-southerners who had only read about the war in their hometown newspapers traveled to the former sites of battle. Tourism has long played an important role in the development of the South’s cultural identity.2 It has helped both outsiders and native southerners to define the region’s qualities and the character traits of its people. Nineteenth-century writers often linked southern culture to its landscape, especially its plantations, but also to its flora and fauna and other natural features. During the late nineteenth century, Civil War battlefields became tourist attractions and served an important purpose in the culture of reconciliation . As James Sears has argued, “tourist attractions are the sacred places of a nation or people,” and by that definition, battlefields were especially sacred places because they “provided points of mythic and national unity.”3 In sum, even as tourism contributed to a national identity, it was also important to defining regional culture.4 The South’s tourist trade during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was made possible by improvements in transportation, and the development of a travel industry spawned by the region’s entrepreneurs. They certainly recognized that tourism represented an opportunity to make them money, but they also saw that tourism could boost the regional economy. Owners of steamships, railroads, and local companies who took tourists on local outings via an omnibus or horse and buggy reached out to potential visitors through advertising and brochures. These entrepreneurs recognized that the South’s people, history, and landscape represented a valuable cultural commodity, and they emphasized those regional features and characteristics that enamored northern and European travel writers who shared details of their visits to Dixie in books and popular magazines. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the South was considered picturesque and antimodern well into the 1930s—and Yankee tourists could enjoy in the region an exotic location and a pastoral America that was visibly absent in the urban-industrial landscapes of the North and Midwest where they lived. And, as Rebecca McIntyre argues in Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology (2011), these same northerners played an important role in shaping a “southern” identity for the region, which had repercussions especially for African Americans.5 In the period following the Civil War...