Category Archives: Heritage tourism

Looking to summer

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Gettysburg, Heritage tourism

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McPherson Barn, Gettysburg

McPherson Barn, Gettysburg

The Hayfoot and I started talking earnestly over the weekend about our annual pilgrimage to Gettysburg. Maybe it was the 20 degree February weather that got us thinking about late June. Last night I pulled out the booklet sent to me a few months back by a Civil War preservation group to which I am a member. It will be a busy season at Gettysburg to put it mildly. The Antietam anniversary last September was a huge deal, and this should be even bigger. It is always good seeing people soaking up their history and culture. We were happy to see the packed rooms at the National Portrait Gallery over Presidents Day Weekend. For one thing higher attendance at our museums and national parks means potentially better budgets, or at least fewer cuts. If you don’t stay relevant what have you got? Many of the activities at Gettysburg will be better than others. Some will be thought provoking, and some will be crass. It may surprise you to know that, unlike some, I don’t get too worked about the commercialism at Gettysburg or at any historical site. People have been cashing in on the Battle of Gettysburg since approximately July 4, 1863.

I first visited Gettysburg in July 2008, three months after the opening of the new visitor center, and so have no firsthand knowledge of the town as a tourist site prior to the new clubhouse. I do know that many business owners on Steinwehr Avenue were concerned about tourists finding their way to the commercial strip. These are not unreasonable concerns. The stakes are high, especially during the sesquicentennial. When I was in library school I volunteered in a small history museum that stood on a courthouse square in a small town in Texas. Surrounding the courthouse museum, on all four sides, were a number of restaurants and antique shops. The revenue they generated for the town in tourists dollars was considerable. What does 2013 mean for Gettysburg? The Hanover (PA) Evening Sun offers some insight.

The crossroads of the Mississippi Delta

26 Sunday Aug 2012

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Late this past week we were doing the New Student Orientations on my campus, meeting the incoming freshmen and giving them an overview of how and what our library can do for them. It is one of the signals that a new semester is about to begin. The fall is especially busy because the incoming body is always larger in August than January. The groups came in waves over an hour long period and in the five minutes or so between incoming sections we were b.s.ing about what we had done over our summer. I mentioned how if my father were still alive the Hayfoot and I almost certainly would have gone to Memphis for a few days during our visit. The River City is special not just for its own cultural importance–which is significant–but for its proximity to so much else. The first time I ever “visited” was in 1997 when I was passing through during my drive from Texas to New York during my move to Brooklyn. Needless to say,with all of my worldly possessions crammed into one automobile, a 1,500 mile drive, and a deadline to make to start a new job there was not much time or inclination to do any sightseeing. I vowed to make it back when time and circumstances allowed. Thankfully I did.

One thing I never realized until visiting Graceland was how close it is to the Mississippi line it is. These are the things you discover when you’re out there seeing it for yourself. In a piece written in recognition of Elvis Week Patrick Teegarden explains how Memphis is “an ideal ‘base camp’ for learning the ambiguities that are America.”

Enjoy your Sunday.

(image/DavGreg)

Riding Ellis ferry

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Ellis Island, Heritage tourism

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From the “You never know what will enter your in-box” department:

  • Josh Rasp lives on Yankee Ferry, the only remaining Ellis Island Ferryboat
  • Step 100 years into the past and feel the history of this iconic boat
  • Tour the boat during sunset and discover the on-board vegetable garden

If you were an immigrant coming to New York at the turn of the century, Yankee Ferry would have been the last boat you’d have seen before stepping onto New York soil. Though she was originally built as a ferryboat for the Calendar Islands off of Maine, she moved to Boston Harbor during WWI under the command of the U.S. government as a watch point for German U-boats. After that, she spent time in WWII and off the coast of Block Island before making her way back to New York in the hands of a private buyer.

Yankee Ferry has definitely seen her fair share of interesting characters, heard more than a few crazy stories, and outlived all others of her kind to claim the title as the only surviving Ellis Island Ferry. These days, she’s home to Josh Rasp, a self-described nomad, who’s been living on Yankee for over a year. The current owners, Richard and Victoria, have turned Yankee into housing for a chicken coup and a sustainable garden as the next stage of her life begins.

Visit Yankee at sunset and learn about her incredible history over dessert with the boat team. You’ll take in amazing views of the Manhattan skyline while you tour the 4 original decks that used to hold up to 2000 passengers. You’ll also see the 120 tires that are geometrically placed to look like polka dots from the top, but are actually filled with vegetables and plants including heirloom tomatoes and summer squash. A true step back into the past, this experience will leave you eager to learn more about New York’s deep and interesting history.

The tour is Sunday August 12 and leaves from Hoboken, New Jersey.

(image and text courtesy of Sidetour)

Watergate at 40

17 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Heritage tourism, Washington, D.C.

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. I have seen surprisingly little about this in the news. I suppose a reason is that it was never the break-in, but the cover-up, that was considered the big crime. It could be, too, that the Watergate scandal has reached that intermediary stage where it is no longer a current event and not quite yet history. Demographically, Washington has changed a great deal in the past several decades as well. Gentrification has brought many younger people–young twenty- and thirty-somethings–who are too busy building their careers to think about it. We know the least about the decade just before and the decade after we are born.

The area around the Watergate Building Complex is off the beaten path and visited by very few tourists taking in the sights. We ourselves go to DC fairly frequently and I must say we have never gone out of our way to see it. Cultural Tourism DC is planning to install signage in the neighborhood. I wonder if the 50th anniversary of this event will be a bigger deal. We’ll know just a short decade from now.

(image/Watergate Building Complex, Allen Lew)

“One tank. 400 years of history.”

30 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by in Heritage tourism

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There are certain aspects of heritage tourism that make me queasy. Re-enacting, excuse me, living history, and the kitsch of such places as Colonial Williamsburg are two that come to mind off the top of my head. When done well, however, heritage tourism can be a boon to educators, families, and local communities who have much to gain socially and economically from the exploitation (in the good sense) of historic places. No one is doing this better than the people who have put together the Journey Through Hallowed Ground, which the Hayfoot and I have now been traveling for years. Jonathan Jarvis and Cate Magennis Wyatt explain.

The new siege of Petersburg

05 Thursday Apr 2012

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Grant’s Cabin, City Point, VA; Petersburg National Battlefield

How much can a Civil War battlefield mean monetarily to a local community? A lot. Visitation has been increasing at sites for the past several years, and is cresting now with the sesquicentennial. The best evidence of this is when trying to park at the new visitors center at Gettysburg, where the Hayfoot and I have often had to park in the far off auxiliary parking area on our way to the building. Crowds aside, you would hardly know you were in Pennsylvania what with so many of the cars having license plates from across the country. Roughly speaking, the typical visitor to the Civil War parks is a white male between 30-65. Slowly but surely this has been changing in recent years as the NPS and their state and local partners have actively reached out to a wider constituency. The best way to do this is to focus not merely on the minutaie of battle tactics and troop movements, but to interpret the causes and consequences of the war and discuss why the Civil War era matters today. Few places have done this as well as Petersburg National Battlefield. The hard work has been paying off. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been the local economy.

(image/Smallbones)

Animating Monticello

04 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Heritage tourism, Media and Web 2.0, Museums

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf5fenxqJ40

Monticello’s Mulberry Row was the focal point of Thomas Jefferson’s estate. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, visitors paid little heed to this important part of the plantation. Most visitors wanted to see the main house. With the rise of African-American and social history in the past five decades, that has changed. Archaeologists and curators have done great work there to literally unearth the past. The trouble was that visitors could still do little more than imagine what life was like in the working parts of Monticello, especially those parts where the slaves lived and toiled. Professor Earl Mark of the University of Virginia is now trying to help us visualize what life was like there.

A new freedom trail?

22 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by in Heritage tourism, New York City

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People are often unaware of the rich history of New York City. Part of this is due to the nature of life here, which for centuries has been to tear down the old and build anew. (A friend visiting from out of town last week was mortified when we entered the current Penn Station for a train ride to Long Island; she was expecting something akin to the original.) Nowhere is this truer than in Lower Manhattan, which is the part of the city settled the longest by European inhabitants. Every day millions of people arrive from New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York itself, taking mass transit to the steel and glass office towers and hurrying home at 5:00 pm. About the only major tourist activity in the area is the site where the World Trade Center once stood. The Harlem Historical Society is hoping to change this by creating a Freedom Trail similar to the one in Boston. The trail would focus on abolitionist and nineteenth century civil rights activity in New York City. When people think of New York and African Americans the first thing that jumps to mind is the Great Migration that brought people to Harlem in the twentieth century. The story is deeper than that. Hopefully the Freedom Trail will become a reality in the near future and more people will be aware of this history. The local community board has signed off. Funding from disparate sources will hopefully come next.

Above: Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in New York State in 1797 and lived in Lower Manhattan in the late 1820s and early 1830s.

(image/Wright’s New York Gallery (MI), Cowan’s Auctions)