The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790–1830 (review)

Historian Richard H. Gassan has written a lovely little book concerning the earliest decades of American tourism, focusing on the Hudson Valley and the Fashionable Tour that connected New York City with the Catskills, Saratoga Springs, and Niagara Falls, among other places. Although parts of this story have been well told before, in this lively book Gassan convincingly argues that the American tourism industry emerged in the late 1810s, “decades earlier than has generally been thought” (6). Further, Gassan claims that tourism’s popularity in the 1820s and 1830s “marked a profound societal shift, as America firmly embarked on the road to a modern consumer society” (3). Although Gassan makes little of the fact, he also notes that Northerners—and especially New Yorkers—defined the idea of tourism in this early era, creating what became national norms for middle-class tourist participation and consumption.

Gassan is a cultural historian, and the bulk of this work involves close readings of literature, from tourist guides to novels and plays. Of particular interest is a smart and original analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, which Gassan connects to the nascent tourist literature, revealing how Cooper’s famed descriptions of Kaaterskill Falls and the Catskills Overlook included references that distanced the narrative, set in 1793, from the growing tourism of the early 1820s, when Cooper wrote the novel. Gassan also provides a deep reading of the earliest tourist guides, including Gideon Minor Davison’s The Fashionable Tour and Theodore Dwight’s The Northern Traveller. Gassan does not forget the important role of landscape painting in selling the Hudson River landscape, although his focus on the earliest years of tourism’s growth leaves him emphasizing William Guy Wall’s Hudson River Port Folio, first published in 1822, at the expense of the more important work of Thomas Cole, who makes little more than a cameo appearance here.

Although Gassan is largely concerned with the cultural side of tourism’s growth, business history does play a significant role in this story. Gassan covers changing transportation infrastructure, for example, and he quickly tells the story of the Clermont and the North River Steam Company, the development of which allowed tourism to expand significantly in the late 1810s. More important, a Supreme Court ruling in 1824 ended North River’s monopoly over Hudson River steam transportation, allowing for an explosive growth of travel up the river and into the tourist hinterland. Gassan also briefly covers the evolving marketing of tourist destinations, including the use of advertisements in New York City newspapers, where Saratoga’s Pavilion Hotel placed display ads as early as the summer of 1819. Indeed, Gassan describes how a variety of entrepreneurs—hotel owners and steamboat operators among them—sold tourism to the middle class. Interestingly, much of this selling came through the works of authors whose vested interests in tourism came only in the form of the guidebooks they wrote and, in most cases, continually updated over the years.

From the very beginning tourism was a business, of course, as Gassan makes clear in his description of Ballston, where Nicholas Low used “his extensive business network, his chain of acquaintances and friends, and his personal stake in Ballston” to help “this rustic little spa become somewhere,” (11) a process that was underway as early as 1803. Ballston Spa and its neighbor Saratoga were growing in popularity when the War of 1812 adversely affected business. After the war, advertising helped Saratoga recover quickly and surpass its older rival. Later chapters describe the growth of tourism at Niagara Falls and the Catskills, although neither of those locations receives as much attention as do the early spa resorts.

This book contains all the benefits of brevity but also its drawbacks. In its ten short chapters, squeezed into 160 pages...