INVENTING NEW ENGLAND: REGIONAL TOURISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Dona Brown, Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995.
If you summered on the Vineyard, leaf-peeped in the White Mountains this fall, or are looking forward to a cosy winter stay at a Vermont B & B, you are following in some well-trodden footsteps. The mountain ranges, shores, farms, and forests of New England have been tourist destinations for over 150 years. This book charts the course of how tourism came to be an integral New England industry. Author Dona Brown '83 M.A. '89 Ph.D. leads a fascinating tour of such fundamental questions as what makes a vacation spot a vacation spot? What makes scenery scenery? And what makes New England New England?
In the late 1700s, travellers to this region carried letters of introduction; often stayed with relatives, friends, or friends of friends; gravitated to cities as hubs of industry and enterprise, as well as society; and joined local congregations for worship on the sabbath. Trips to the hinterlands to see the scenery and the sites became more popular as the middle class grew, and as the locals developed the infrastructure -- hotels, restaurants, transportation -- to accommodate them. And it worked both ways: tourists came because there was something to come to, and there was something to come to because natives saw that the number of dollars flowing into town could be increased through development and promotion.
Mt. Tom Summit House, Holyoke, MA
Hand-in-hand with the building of shops and cog-railways came the elaboration of local histories. Dramatic vistas, colonial jails, crusty old salts, wholesome farm girls: all were grist for the myth-mill that encouraged people to visit Maine or Nantucket for not just a vacation but an experience. That experience might be uplifting or relaxing, a return to one's roots or a retreat from the city. But whatever tourists felt, it was probably at least a little of what promoters promised them they would.
Those promises live on. Today people come from all over the world to see a place called New England, a region of five states and a wealth of emotional associations. In this well-researched and well-written history, Dona Brown, a professor at the University of Vermont, has held these associations and assumptions up to a bright light. New Englanders reading it will see their home, and their ideas of home, in a new and even surprising way.
THE NATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS
Christopher Leahy, John Hanson Mitchell, and Thomas Conuel, illustrated by Lars Jonsson. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1996.
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. The watercolor of an American redstart that graces this volume's jacket is as lyrical as its subject, and the text and illustrations within are equally winning. The Nature Of Massachusetts, a commemoration of the centennial of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, is certainly luscious enough to be called a coffee-table book. (Christmas shoppers take note: it's a natural for under the tree.) But the lucid, informative prose gives this book intellectual heft as well.
Thomas Conuel `69, one of the three authors, wrote the section describing most of the society's wildlife sanctuaries. A regular contributor to Sanctuary magazine, Conuel got his start as a sportswriter for the Collegian. He lives with his wife and two young children in Petersham, from which he traveled, "east to west, from Nantucket to Lenox," to research the preserves. (One of them, High Ledges in Shelburne Falls, was the gift of retired UMass professor Ellsworth "Dutch" Barnard `28.)
Conuel's research got him off the beaten paths, which suited him just fine. "I love to walk, I am an ambler," he told us. Some of his personal favorites among the sanctuaries: High Ledges ("on a clear day, you can see Mt. Greylock"); Wellfleet Bay ("great trails, you can take your time and see a million things"); and Sesachacha Heathland on Nantucket ("the last remnant of the Midwestern grass prairies").
Lucky Conuel, he gets to amble as well through the marvelous lexicon of natural history, to use precise, unusual words like "estuarine," "escarpment," "arboreal," "drumlin," "esker," "kame." He gives us the chance to chew on terms like "surf scoter," "bufflehead," "Harris checkerspot," "tussock sedge," and "phragmite." (Writers seeing such words in print know how birders feel when they see a rare southern hairstreak.) And when Conuel writes of "an abandoned apple orchard" and "downy goldenrod," of how "wild grapes grow in great tangles" and "migratory tree swallows fill up on blue-gray bayberries," we see that he sees with an accurate and poetic eye.
A SMALL BIT OF BREAD AND BUTTER, LETTERS FROM THE DAKOTA TERRITORY 1832-1869
Edited by Maida Leonard Riggs, Ash Grove Press, 1996.
To Mary Ann Clark Longley Riggs, living in Minnesota 150 years ago, a letter from home was as sustaining as "a small bit of good bread and butter" might be to "a very hungry child." Writing letters, it seems, was a form of sustenance for her, a means of keeping faith by keeping in touch. Over the years, Mary Ann stole moments from her labors as a missionary and mother of eight to write more than 250 letters. Her great-granddaughter, retired faculty member Maida Riggs `36, has arranged them in an absorbing, sometimes heartbreaking account of life on the frontier.
Mary Ann's life was full of hardships and setbacks. The prairie climate was often punishing, the living arrangements primitive; society of the sort she was used to, coming from civilized Massachusetts, was scarce. A fire, then the Sioux uprising of 1862, left her without much more than the clothes on her back. Most painful were the loss of small keepsakes, such as a daguerrotype of her late, beloved brother Alfred.
Mary Ann struggled gamely with it all. Her sensibility is not a modern one, but her words manage to bridge the gaps of time and place. A year before her death, she wrote about a visit from a man selling shells. She and two daughters each bought "one of the less expensive." She wrote, "I love beautiful things just as intensely as when I was young."
In reading this collection, one realizes how fragile is personal history -- how little we can know even when the record is extensive. Did Mary Ann's friends back east ever send the mountain-ash seeds she asked for several times? What happened to Mrs. Denton, a fellow missionary's wife, who travelled two days by canoe to her sick husband, and slept on the snow along the way? Did Mary Ann's troublesome son Henry grow up to be a responsible citizen? We do know that he lived to be 87. And apparently, the stories he told his granddaughter were the seeds of this book. Perhaps personal history is not so fragile, after all.
