Imagining a Pure Michigan Landscape: Advertisers, Tourists, and the Making of Michigan's Northern Vacationlands

The Michigan Historical Review 42.2 (Fall 2016): 31-51©2016 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved Imagining a Pure Michigan Landscape: Advertisers, Tourists, and the Making of Michigan’s Northern Vacationlands By Camden Burd In 2008 Michigan launched a rebranding of its tourism industry. The state’s politicians, and Governor Jennifer Granholm, supported an unprecedented budget centered on advertising Michigan’s forests, rivers, and lakes. This “Pure Michigan” campaign attempted to connect with the audience’s sense of nostalgia, a longing for tranquility, and the restorative potential of a communion with nature that was untouched, uninhabited, and idyllic. In the midst of economic recession, the campaign succeeded by tapping into a larger, cultural construction of the natural world that required onlookers to imagine a pure Michigan landscape.1 Though advertisers encouraged audiences to imagine Michigan’s landscape as an unspoiled tourist destination, this was not always the nature of the relationship between residents and the state’s environment. Vacationing only developed in the years following the Civil War when Americans began to romanticize Michigan’s nature and gave it the transcendent qualities that remain in tourists’ imaginations today. But then, as now, tourists never entered untouched landscapes, for there is no such thing as a “pure” landscape—all are imagined. Sometimes overly optimistic, ironic, and even misleading, a history of environmental imaginations tends to tell us more about the mindsets of human actors than environmental realities. As tourists flocked to Michigan’s vacationlands in the late nineteenth century, they did so as a reaction to the urbanized landscapes of their daily lives. Boosters, advertisers, and tourists constructed vacationland landscapes to answer larger cultural concerns of the era. Like today’s “Pure Michigan” advertisements, nineteenth-century Americans imagined a Michigan 1Ellen Creager, “30-Million Ad Blitz Aims to Ease the Tourism Slump in Michigan,” Detroit Free Press, 13 September 2008. 32 The Michigan Historical Review environment where they could escape the perceived stresses, anxieties, and troubles of the modern world.2 Historian Aaron Shapiro’s Lure of the North Woods: Cultivating Tourism in the Upper Midwest effectively illustrates the ways in which local, state, and federal organizations hoped to rejuvenate the economies in sections of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula throughout the twentieth century. Shapiro argues that “the market’s intrusion into the nineteenth-century countryside . . . exploited natural resources, altered lives, and transformed the landscape,” concluding that “twentieth-century advocates hoped tourism could diversify the economy and address landuse concerns.3 Though Shapiro believes this environmental transformation was a product of both environmental reality and economic necessity in the twentieth century, he overlooks the earlier cultural transformations that both enabled and supported the economic diversification he outlines. The cultural roots of this environmental transformation took shape decades prior due to Americans’ shifting attitudes about nature. An examination of advertisements and tourist activities indicates that the landscapes of northern Michigan came to represent an idyllic respite from the urban landscapes of the industrial Midwest. Thus, it is first necessary to grasp this cultural transformation in order to understand Michigan’s broader, tourism-based economy of the twentieth century. Advertisements, and the tourists who consumed them, helped to redefine Michigan’s northern landscapes. In turn, both advertisers and tourists began to imagine that the act of heading north erased anxieties, boosted health, and provided opportunities to connect with, what many believed to be, a disappearing “primitive” landscape. The northern portion of the Lower Peninsula differs from its southern portion in both soil and climate.4 Because much of the state lies in northern latitudes, many portions of northern Michigan have short growing seasons—as short as 70-100 days in some regions. These short 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread and Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Eric D. Olmanson, The Future City on the Inland Sea: A History of Imagined Geographies of Lake Superior (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 9-16. For a literature-based study of the writings regarding Michigan and the Upper Midwest, see John Knott, Imagining the Forest: Narratives of Michigan and the Upper Midwest (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). 3 Aaron Shapiro. The Lure of the North...