The Birth of American Tourism

New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1835

Richard H. Gassan

Publication Year: 2008

Today the idea of traveling within the United States for leisure purposes is so commonplace it is hard to imagine a time when tourism was not a staple of our cultural life. Yet as Richard H. Gassan persuasively demonstrates, at the beginning of the nineteenth century travel for leisure was strictly an aristocratic luxury beyond the means of ordinary Americans. It wasn't until the second decade of the century that the first middle-class tourists began to follow the lead of the well-to-do, making trips up the Hudson River valley north of New York City, and in a few cases beyond. At first just a trickle, by 1830 the tide of tourism had become a flood, a cultural change that signaled a profound societal shift as the United States stepped onto the road that would eventually lead to a modern consumer society. According to Gassan, the origins of American tourism in the Hudson Valley can be traced to a confluence of historical accidents, including the proximity of the region to the most rapidly growing financial and population center in the country, with its expanding middle class, and the remarkable beauty of the valley itself. But other developments also played a role, from the proliferation of hotels to accommodate tourists, to the construction of an efficient transportation network to get them to their destinations, to the creation of a set of cultural attractions that invested their experience with meaning. In the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and the paintings of Thomas Cole and others of the Hudson River School, travelers in the region encountered the nation's first literary and artistic movements. Tourism thus did more than provide an escape from the routines of everyday urban life; it also helped Americans of the early republic shape a sense of national identity.

Published by: University of Massachusetts Press

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I could not have written this book without the friendship, guid�ance, and assistance of a host of friends and colleagues. First, I am grateful to Stephen Nissenbaum, who helped me clarify my intentions early on. I am indebted to Gerald McFarland, whose sage advice, calm help, and warm encouragement were critical to the completion of this book, and I owe...

Introduction

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pp. 1-8

Francis Dallam took only two weeks of vacation in the summer of 1827. He could have taken much more: he was from an old-line Maryland family, with solid wealth; rents from land holdings in Maryland, Tennessee, and Kentucky; several slaves; and a position as the collector of taxes for the city of Baltimore.¹

Chapter 1 - Laying the Foundation

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pp. 9-33

One day in 1792, Nicholas Low, one of America’s richest men, began an unusual project. He ordered that a substantial inn be built, complemented by a bathhouse, on one of his poorer and more remote properties, a tract of sandy, forested land in upstate New York. What made this even more unusual was that the inn was to be located near another inn, one that had itself just been improved at consider...

Chapter 2 - Inventing the Resort: Saratoga Springs

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pp. 34-51

While Ballston Spa was being built, the nearby springs at Saratoga remained quite rustic, despite the higher regard in which connoisseurs held the waters.¹ The springs had first come to the attention of outsiders after a legendary 1771 visit by Sir William Johnson, when one of the springs, High Rock, supposedly cured him of the lingering consequences of an old war wound, a cure so efficacious that the previously crippled hero purportedly walked the fifteen miles back to...

Chapter 3 - The Revolution of Seeing: Tourism and the Founding of the Hudson River School

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pp. 52-69

A trip up the Hudson River to Albany reveals a series of spectacular sights. Once clear of the New York City metropolitan area, the river cuts between steep mountains and sharply cut valleys. At times it opens into large bays, at others the cliffs close in tight to the water. Parts of the journey, even today, closely resemble what a traveler of 1820 might have seen, particularly at the river’s wildest parts. To our modern eyes, this seeming wilderness is spectacular and exciting; we revel...

Chapter 4 - Travel Literature, the Fashionable Tour, and the Spread of Tourism [Includes Image Plates]

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pp. 70-84

By the 1820s, a huge change had begun among those who could afford to travel. In Great Britain, the idea of travel for leisure had been widespread among the prosperous classes for more than thirty years. For a number of reasons, however, it had been very slow to gain any ground among Americans of that class. There were a number of reasons for that. In the 1790s...

Chapter 5 - Expanding Tourism beyond the Springs: The Catskills and Niagara

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pp. 85-104

As other writers noticed the Catskill references in Irving and Dwight and Cooper, they, too, began incorporating references to the area in their works. For example, James G. Percival, a minor poet, issued his second book of poetry, Clio (volume 1), in 1822, and in it was “A Picture, Catskill Valley,” which in turgid lines described a storm-tossed night as witnessed by an overheated, sensitive youth...

Chapter 6 - Tourism and Literature: James Fenimore Cooper and Others

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pp. 105-111

During the summer and fall of 1825, the same year that Thomas Cole made his seminal journey up the Hudson, James Fenimore Cooper’s career hit a rocky patch. The Pioneers had been as big a success as he had hoped for when it was published in 1823. The following year, his next book, The Pilot, was also a success. When the editor and poet William Cullen Bryant first met Cooper in April 1824, he described him as “a little giddy.”1 At that point, Cooper’s next book, Lionel ...

Chapter 7 - The First Tourist Guidebook War

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pp. 112-134

Had Gideon Minor Davison’s 1822 tourist guide, The Fashionable Tour, not faced any competition, it would have been just a novelty and curiosity, destined to land into the dustbin of history. For three years, it was just about that.¹ But the tourist fad in literature led others to Davison’s guide, and by 1825 two competitors had appeared. Like the authors of travel and tourism-related fiction, the new guidebook authors hoped to create...

Chapter 8 - Tourism’s Broader Audience

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pp. 125-133

Nathaniel P. Willis’s “The Vacation,” published in the 1828 Atlantic Souvenir, begins predictably enough. The narrator is a wealthy young man just freed from the bonds of study at Yale. Standing in the yard of the college, “twirling my empty purse round my forefinger,” he is the image of leisure and fecklessness. Why not...

Chapter 9 - Skeptics

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pp. 134-156

Even as tourism crested in the late 1820s, it raised the hackles of critics. Skeptics saw tourism from a variety of negative angles: some felt it exemplified the commercial and consumerist changes the United States was experiencing in the 1820s, changes that would come to shape American culture profoundly; others viewed tourism as typical of the worst of their times, artificial, manufactured, superficial. And one ob�server, the Virginian Anne Royall...

Chapter 10 - The Next Big Thing

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pp. 157-161

The cumulative discontent with the Hudson Valley route—its overexposure, the rising crime, the large number of “would-be ultra-genteels”—meant that some began to look for new fields for tourism, for places that could deliver the promise of...

Notes

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pp. 163-208

Index

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pp. 209-213

Back Cover

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E-ISBN-13: 9781613760925
E-ISBN-10: 1613760922
Print-ISBN-13: 9781558496644
Print-ISBN-10: 1558496645

Page Count: 240
Publication Year: 2008