The View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape

The View from Vermont is an interesting new addition to a growing literature on the history of rural tourism—a topic rich with implications for environmental history, the history of consumer culture, and the social history of the interactions between city and countryside. Harrison focuses on Vermont, that most quintessentially rural state, in order to explore the ways in which the cultural meanings of "rural" have been constructed (and marketed) during the twentieth century and to show the impact of those processes on the landscape.

Vermont's identity as a rural place has been central to its appeal to tourists since the second half of the nineteenth century. As Harrison points out, though, the meanings of that rural identity have been a moving target, affected by shifting interests, priorities, and technologies. One common theme that persists throughout the time period he examines, however, are the tensions between rural realities based on productive work and the desires of tourists to embrace a different and leisure-based vision of the countryside.

Harrison begins his discussion of rural tourism in Vermont with the lakeside resort hotels and exclusive fish and game clubs that catered to wealthy urban tourists during the late-nineteenth century. In addition to providing a boon for the local economy, however, these elite sportsmen's clubs began posting their land against hunting by local inhabitants, violating local customary practices and creating visible markers of class distinction.

More middle-class tourists vacationed on the farm, either by boarding with a farm family or by purchasing an abandoned farm as a summer home, and the emergence of clusters or colonies of urban professionals, writers, and academics ensconced in their vacation homes also complicated social relations in Vermont communities. As Harrison put it, "Vermont's abandoned landscape became a palimpsest on which vacationers inscribed a new rural aesthetic based on leisure and consumption rather than on productive agricultural work. As the scale of their efforts grew, as summer homes spread into communities statewide, vacationers exerted an increasing degree of power over landscape and identity in rural Vermont" (69).

The growing prevalence of the automobile after the 1920s extended that influence and power by bringing more tourists to Vermont for day and weekend trips, and they increasingly expected views from the roadside that conformed to their notions of a pristine or "unspoiled" rural landscape rather than the nitty-gritty of working farms and villages. State government accommodated them by promoting highway beautification and regulating roadside billboards, and they actively advertised the appeals of the Vermont countryside in terms of such icons as the pristine village green and church steeple or a new posterboy for rural life, the covered bridge.

The automobile also made year-round tourism more feasible, so the rural landscape took on a multi-seasonal cast that extended from maple sugaring in the spring, to apple harvests and bright foliage in the fall, and winter sports, especially skiing. Harrison ends his study with a chapter on the rise of skiing in Vermont, which exacerbated many of the tensions and contradictions of his earlier story. The appeal of skiing owed little to Vermont's rural identity, and this led to a series of conflicts and regulatory battles against expansive ski villages and capital intensive snow-grooming and snow-producing equipment that marked the landscape in new and environmentally disruptive ways.

Harrison's well-researched and well-written study has much to recommend it. A few of his themes and findings extend and amplify earlier studies of rural tourism in New England as well as other areas, but the particular claim that Vermont has on rural identity in American culture makes this an important work to consult.