Tourism, farm abandonment, and the ‘typical’ Vermonter, 1880–1930

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Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 478e495

Tourism, farm abandonment, and the ‘typical’ Vermonter,1880e1930

Blake Harrison

190 Nicoll St., New Haven, CT 06511, United States

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between tourism, abandoned landscapes, and the construction of‘typical’ identity in rural Vermont. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, Vermonters were both celebratedin the popular press as archetypal Americans and depicted as a people in decline. With the state’s reputa-tion plagued by rural out-migration, many reformers, state officials, and rural residents tried to shore upand reproduce the identity of the so-called typical Vermonter through the sale of abandoned farms assummer homes. The promise of summer tourism as a means for reproducing typicality in rural Vermont,however, was complicated by the contingency of the category typical and by persistent fears that a newleisure-based economy and allegedly ‘wrong kinds’ of visitors would undermine the integrity of the state’straditional rural identity. As a result, visitors and residents negotiated an ideal of rural typicality accordingto changing tourist circumstancesda process revealed in this essay largely through published commentariesand promotional works. What this story traces, then, is landscape’s role in the production of ‘ideal’, tourist-based notions of rural identity in American culture.� 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In December of 1937, a journalist from the Boston Herald sent an eight-part questionnaire tothe secretary of the Vermont State Chamber of Commerce, James P. Taylor, meant to capture theessence of ‘typical’ rural Vermonters. Exactly who, the questionnaire asked, was the rural Ver-monter? What were his ‘leading characteristics?’ What was his future? Taylor passed the question-naire along to a handful of leading Vermont citizens and intellectuals, all of whom responded in

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479B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 478e495

similar ways by turning to a very specific cluster of characteristics. Citing Vermont’s homogenous,Anglo population, its revolutionary heritage, Puritan-inspired piety, and rugged, character-build-ing environment, they defined Vermonters as all-American models of ‘self-reliance’, ‘individual-ism’, ‘independence’, ‘thrift’, ‘honesty’, and ‘ruggedness’.1

During the 1930s, responses such as these would have come as no great surprise to anyone fa-miliar with Vermont’s identity in the popular press. For decades, journalists and promoters haddepicted the so-called typical rural Vermonter as an American cultural ideal, an enduring exampleof all that made New England, in Joseph Conforti’s words, an ‘American cultural homeland’. Aspart of an anti-modern, 19th century invented tradition based on nostalgia for ‘Old New Eng-land’, the region’s rural residents enjoyed widespread popularity among many promoters, tou-rists, and urban residents. To be considered a typical Vermonter, at least in some circles, wasa true compliment, indeed.2

Yet for all the virtues associatedwith typical Vermonters, the actual identity of rural residents wasnever quite as ideal, never quite as homogenous, never quite as established asmanywouldhave liked.Just as some observers lauded rural Vermonters’ apparent rock-solid stability, others lamented theirdecline, citing out-migration from rural Vermont during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as adebilitating blow to the state’s otherwise-privileged cultural identity. Following the American CivilWar, thousands of struggling Vermont farmers fled the state in search of better prospects elsewhere,leaving behind uncounted abandoned farms, and hollowing out the heart ofmany rural communities.For many observers, the state’s abandoned landscape signaled a social and economic tailspin thatposed an immediate challenge to the identity of the so-called typical Vermonter.

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, this ideological tension between Vermonters as paragons andVermonters as problems shaped popular attitudes and actions towards the state’s abandonedlandscape. While some reformers, intellectuals, and state officials lamented the seemingly inevita-ble extinction of the typical Vermonter, others argued that out-migration need not signal an endto the state’s cherished cultural image. Among these optimists, the abandoned landscape itselfprovided an opportunity and a context through which they would attempt to revive the state,both economically and ideologically. Turning to tourism during the 1890s, promoters toutedthe state’s abandoned farms as ideal summer homes for urban visitors, redefining the state’s rurallandscape according to new leisure-based perspectives. The response was as strong as anyonecould have imagined: Between the 1880s and the 1930s, thousands of non-residents purchasedabandoned farmhouses or abandoned farm acreage across the state.

By selling farms as summer homes, rural reformers and tourist promoters used landscape asa means not only for reviving the state’s economy, but for reproducing a culturally conditionedimage of typicality in rural Vermont. Reflecting Richard Schein’s assertion that landscapes are‘continually implicated in the ongoing reconstruction of a discourse, or set of discourses, aboutsocial life’, resettlement campaigns in Vermont became implicated in the construction and repro-duction of popular discourses about typical Vermonters.3 This paper explores that process by as-sessing tourism’s role in the resettlement of rural Vermont, and by analyzing touristrepresentations intended to reproduce a cultural ideal threatened by, but still embedded in thestate’s abandoned landscape.

The decades from 1880 to 1930 were a time of profound transition across the rural Americannorth. As Hal Barron has suggested, this period was marked by a broad social and economic re-negotiation of the rural, as rural residents struggled to come to terms with the rising dominance of

480 B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 478e495

an urban, industrial society in the United States.4 Tourism, I would argue, played a critical role inthis larger redefinition of rural America, both in terms of actual landscape form, and more impor-tantly for this paper, in terms of rural identity. Indeed, as a growing body of scholarship in geog-raphy and history has demonstrated, tourism has become a powerful context for constructing,representing, and negotiating both place and group identity.5 This has been particularly true inthe case of the rural, where tourist-directed representations of rural landscape and identitywere shaped according to the largely urban audiences at which they were aimed. Indeed, as urban-ization accelerated in the United States, rural-tourist practices and representationsdrather thana daily, lived experiencedbecame central contexts through which a growing percentage of Amer-icans now identified rural landscapes and rural people. As Michael Bunce has argued, for in-stance, the rising popularity of the ‘countryside ideal’ in Anglo-American culture is closelylinked to the urban resident’s search for a stable, timeless, and harmonious foil to their dailylives.6

Much of the discussion about rural-American tourism among historians and geographers has re-lied on an essentially anti-modern ‘rural ideal’ in American culture to explain the motivations, rep-resentations, and success of rural tourism. The rural landscape, such work has shown, has longinspired travel among sentimental visitors for whom icons such as Vermont’s farms, steeples, stonewalls, and covered bridges have taken on all the trappings of a cultural-landscape ideal.7 Ratherthan focus on the material landscape itself as an inspiration for tourist travel, I focus here on thecultural identity of the so-called typical Vermonters. My interest lies, in part, in the power ofthat identity to motivate tourist travel, for as John Urry reminds us, ‘Part of what is involved intourism is the purchase of a particular social experience, and this depends upon a specifiable com-position of the others with whom that experience is being shared in one way or another.’8

In the case of Vermont, the ‘social experience’ that many visitors bought into was conditioned bycelebrations of the so-called typical Vermonter. Key to those celebrations were the frequent linksmade between ‘stability’ and typical identity in Vermont. Between the 1880s and 1930s, journalistsand tourist promoters often represented rural Vermonters as a timeless people who had long re-sisted some of contemporary America’s most dramatic social and economic changes. Clinging toa life shaped by agricultural work, the thrifty, industrious, and honest Vermonter embodied a pop-ular rural-based conception of national identity. Popular celebrations of rural people were not lim-ited in 19th and early 20th century American culture to Vermont alone; as Stephanie Foote hasrecently shown, for instance, late 19th century regional writers often crafted nostalgic representa-tions of rural residents across the United States, seeking to protect and preserve differences amongregional cultures in the face of urban-industrial change.9 Rural Vermonters became just such sym-bols for many writers and travelers, and their status in the popular press reached unprecedentedheights between the 1880s and 1930s. In the wake of late 19th century immigration to urban Amer-ica, for example, rural Vermont’s comparatively Anglo-descended population suggested to somethat the state’s residents were the nation’s only remaining ‘true’ Americans. From the 1927 perspec-tive of National Geographic, Vermont ‘is today one of the most truly American of our States. Itspeople have hardly changed in their essential elements in a century. Barely one in nine is for-eign-born, and the majority of these are Canadian, and therefore American’.10 Moreover, the na-tion’s slide into economic depression during the early 1930s served to fuel the Vermonter’spopularity as well. Depicted as self-sufficient survivors who weathered economic troubles with dig-nity, Vermonters were held up in the popular press as models for the rest of Americans to follow.11


As important as celebrations of cultural identity were to the success of rural tourism, we mustdo more than embrace a simple cause-and-effect relationship between the success of tourism andan idealized identity of typical Vermonters. Rather than being a model of timeless social stability,rural Vermont at this time was a volatile place marked by out-migration among rural residentsand in-migration among urban visitors. That volatility translated to the identity of typicality inthe state, making the notion of ‘typical Vermonters’ (and the larger rural ideal with which itwas associated) neither shared nor entirely stable. Instead, as this story suggests, the meaningsand definitions associated with typicality in rural Vermont were shaped, in part, by perhaps themost important symbols of volatility at the time: out-migration from rural Vermont and the sub-sequent sale of abandoned farms as summer homes.

Because of its contingency, the concept of typical identity in rural-tourist Vermont echoes theconcept of authenticity so often associated with tourism. Although tourist promoters often en-courage visitors to think of destinations as being ‘authentic’ representations of a specific timeor place, geographers such as Dydia DeLyser have been careful to remind us that the meaningof authenticity is rarely agreed upon, rarely fixed in time or place. According to DeLyser, authen-ticity is ‘not simply a condition inherent in an object, awaiting discovery, but a term that has dif-ferent meanings in different contexts, in different places, to different people, and even to the sameperson at different times’.12 Steven Hoelscher has also argued that one’s ability to define thatwhich is deemed authentic in a tourist destination is indicative of one’s cultural power. Althougha particular notion of authenticity may be dominant, the power of those who advance that dom-inance is never absolute or free from contestation by others with different notions of what con-stitutes authenticity.13 Similarly, popular characteristics associated with the authentic/typicalVermonter (such as those expressed for the Boston Herald questionnaire) were not entirely agreedupon. For this reason, we need to explore typicality in Vermont not merely as an essentialized,causal force operating behind rural tourism, but rather as an object of study in its own rightdacultural construct that was as much a product of the state’s resettlement campaigns as it was a pro-posed solution to abandonment.

The narrative that follows begins by looking first at the relationship between the late 19th andthe early 20th century farm abandonment and Vermont’s crisis of identity. Persistent out-migra-tion from the state, we will see, raised concerns about the integrity of the typical Vermonter’s cel-ebrated identity, and prompted some reformers to search for creative ways to bolster that identity.Second, I turn more specifically to the embrace of tourist-based resettlement campaigns as meansfor reproducing favored views about social and economic life in rural Vermont. For optimistictourist promoters, Vermont’s abandoned landscape remained coded or infused with the identityof the typical Vermonterda fact which made that landscape attractive to potential buyers whowere then expected to revive and reproduce that identity in the space of the summer home. Inthis sense, many tourist officials hoped that a transfer of property from farming to leisure wouldrepair the perceived damage done to Vermont’s identity by out-migration. Third, I look at mount-ing questions and concerns raised primarily during the 1920s and the 1930s about tourism’s role inthe production of typical identity in rural Vermont. After decades of in-migration by summerhome owners, some in Vermont began to wonder about the effects that a leisure economy washaving on the state’s popular image. As residents debated the particulars of Vermont’s resettle-ment campaigns, the state’s abandoned landscape became a key context for the broader negotia-tion and construction of typical identity in rural Vermont.


Farm abandonment and Vermont’s crisis of identity

Despite the rural Vermonter’s popularity among some segments of American culture, reform-ers, journalists, and residents at the turn of the century were often quick to point out an importantcontradiction at work relative to the state’s popular identity. Between the late 19th and the early20th centuries, Vermont experienced an ongoing crisis of identitydone that unfolded according tothe historical-geographic context of out-migration from the state. Following the American CivilWar, populations in many rural New England towns decreased dramatically as farm and villageresidents sought new opportunities in regional cities and on western American land. Between 1880and 1890 alone, populations fell in 81% of Vermont’s towns, thanks in part to the state’s noto-riously rugged, rocky farmland and to larger economic shifts occurring in the state’s agriculturaleconomy. That out-migration persisted for decades to come as Vermonters consistently faced theloss of younger generations to the lure of places beyond the state’s borders.14

According to rural reformers and to cynics in the popular press, New England’s ‘abandoned-farm problem’ lay at the root of what many now referred to as a ‘degenerate’ or ‘decadent’ ruralpopulation. ‘The decadence of the rural districts’, one journalist wrote of northern New England,‘the flow of population towards the great centers, and the consequent decline of rural industriesand values, are disastrous features of our latest civilization’.15 This impression felt particularlyacute in Vermont, where out-migration appeared to have siphoned off the best and the brightest,leaving behind what another called a mob of ‘shiftless, lazy, drinking, ragged paupers.a class thatdisgraces our nationality’.16 Although as Hal Barron has noted, Vermont’s late 19th century econ-omy was actually more stable than ‘degenerate’, the state’s lack of clear growth lay in sharp con-trast to other, expanding regions of the country, and the reputation of its ‘ragged paupers’continually challenged residents’ simultaneous claims to a quintessential American identity.17

For some observers at the time, in-migration by non-Anglo ethnic groups only added to Ver-mont’s crisis of identity. French Canadians, in particular, had been moving to Vermont in signif-icant numbers since the early 19th century, both to pursue farming and to work in the state’stextile and lumber mills.18 Although small by comparison to other parts of the nation, immigra-tion to Vermont continued into the 20th century, until by 1930, 30% of Vermont’s farm popula-tion consisted of first- or second-generation immigrants from Canada, Britain, Italy, Germany,Poland, Scandinavia, Russia, and Lithuania.19 Many Anglo Vermonters and many who idealizedthe state’s alleged ethnic purity resented the growing presence of non-Anglo immigrants in Ver-mont. According to the popular regional writer Clifton Johnson, the ‘Pollacks, Jews, French, Eye-talians, etc.’ who were moving to Vermont and who were purchasing abandoned farms lived ‘likepigs’, and were ‘often the worse for liquor’.20 Constructing what David Sibley has referred to asa ‘geography of exclusion’, many commentators denied immigrants the right to be includedamong the ranks of typical Vermonters.21 While some chose to ignore the presence of non-AngloVermonters altogether, others marginalized their contributions to Vermont society, downplayingtheir effects on its Anglo majority in an effort to secure the boundaries of typicality in Vermontagainst those who would challenge its alleged homogeneity.22

For other reformers and state officials, Vermont’s crisis of identity extended beyond immi-grants alone to include those Anglo residents who, for a variety of reasons, also fell outside theparameters of the state’s ideal rural identity. Indeed, once one peered behind the mask of the typ-ical Vermonter, reformers found a host of deeper social problemsdmany of which they traced


back to the catalyst of farm abandonment. From poverty to public-health, and from ignorance toextreme insularity, the identity of typical Vermonters was continually challenged by a fact manyfound hard to swallow. That is, the worst threats to the typical Vermonter came, quite often, fromthe state’s rural, Anglo residents.

If farm abandonment lay at the root of such challenges to typicality, some reformers respondedby trying to convince residents that theirs was a state worth remaining in. As early as the 1870s,officials from the Vermont State Board of Agriculture worked hard to encourage young people tostick with Vermont, often by inflating the state’s economic opportunities and by overstating thepotential of its farmland.23 Others appealed to rural pride by teaching Vermont children to seethemselves as the ‘best representative[s] of the true American’. As one school teacher remindedher peers in a 1922 article, it was important to instill in children a sense of the Vermonter ‘asa type’. ‘We have the right sort of groundwork to begin with, hereditary and otherwise’, she wrote,‘so, who knows, it may be for us to eventually develop into a race of super-men and super-women.It would seem that the typical Vermonter’s outstanding characteristics were conducive to some-thing of that sort.’24

The focus on heredity in this quote is telling. Beginning in the 1920s, some Vermont reformersturned to eugenics as a way not necessarily to convince residents to stay in Vermont, but as a wayto shore up and reproduce favored characteristics among those who remained in the state. Pro-grams in eugenicsdthe scientific study of human heredity and the manipulation of bloodli-nesdfound homes on college campuses nationwide during the 1920s, including the Universityof Vermont in Burlington, where zoology professor Henry F. Perkins established the Vermont Eu-genic Survey in 1925. Eugenics took on special significance for Vermont politicians and intellec-tuals, who, as the historian Nancy Gallagher has argued, viewed it with an eye for thepreservation of the social and ethnic characteristics so often associated with typical Vermonters.Towards that end, Perkins’s field researchers collected data on Vermont’s so-called ‘degenerate’ or‘notorious’ families, many of which included French Canadians and Abenaki Indians. Armedwith this information, Perkins made every effort to ‘rehabilitate’ such families, often through mar-riage restrictions or forced sterilization.25

By the late 1920s, Perkins’s Eugenics Survey had evolved into a broader program of rural re-form led by the new Vermont Commission on Country Life (VCCL). Comprised of 200 reformers,intellectuals, and planners, the VCCL’s 17 committees explored a wide range of rural issues in-cluding recreation, health, education, tourism, agriculture, forestry, government, religion, and,not least, the conservation of Vermont’s ‘traditions and ideals’. Among its members were well-known Vermonters such as the tourist promoter James P. Taylor, and the popular writers ZephineHumphrey and Dorothy Canfield Fisher. In 1931, the VCCL’s committees published their find-ings and policy recommendations in a remarkable 400-page book, Rural Vermont: A Programfor the Futureda book which remained an important guide to public policy in the state for yearsto come.26

Despite their ambition and high profile, reform efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuriesfailed either to convince many young Vermonters to remain in the state or to polish entirely a ruralidentity tarnished by farm abandonment. With the identity of typical Vermonters more an imag-ined set of characteristics than a physical reality, reformers continued to have a difficult time re-producing that identity on the ground. Nonetheless, many between the 1880s and 1930srecognized its persistent power to attract urban visitors to the state, and they continued in their


belief that rural Vermonters could indeed live up to their lofty reputation. To meet that goal,many looked beyond programs such as education or eugenics, turning instead to tourism andthe sale of abandoned farms as summer homes as means for revitalizing rural Vermont and forreproducing a degree of typicality in the state that was itself so-often used as a tourist draw.

The promises of summer home ownership

Reformers began trying to resettle Vermont’s abandoned lands with farmers, rather than tou-rists, as early as the 1870s and 1880s, at a time when out-migration was being increasingly identifiedas a serious problem in the state. In an ongoing effort to reproduce an agricultural economy in Ver-mont, promoters tried either to convince former residents who had left the state to return, or toattract farmers from other states who might be looking for an inexpensive alternative to settlingin the AmericanWest. As early as the 1880s, however, lukewarm responses fromAmerican farmerswere convincing officials from the Vermont State Board of Agriculture to adopt new programs, in-cluding an effort to attract Swedish immigrants to the state. Following the lead of a similar pro-gram in Maine, the board sent a recruiting agent to Sweden in 1889 and gathered informationon the availability of more than 1000 farms and over 500,000 acres statewide.27 To win supportamong Vermonters for the program, the plan’s architect, Alonzo B. Valentine, employed a hostof economic, social, and racial arguments. Swedes would bring welcome new markets for localgoods and services, he argued, and equally important to some, they would pose no significant chal-lenge to the state’s Anglo-American majority. Swedes are ‘our cousins with like instincts of free-dom, secular and religious’, Valentine wrote. ‘They are sober, peaceful and religious indisposition, industrious and thrifty.’ Swedes were an ‘agricultural people’ from a climate and lat-itude not unlike Vermont’s he added, and they loved their homes and communities with a devotion‘surpassing that shown by other nationalities’. What was more, Valentine portrayed Swedishbloodlines as being compatible with those of Anglo-Vermonters. Not only were they ‘physicallytall and stalwart’, he wrote, but they had ‘blue eyes, light hair and cheerful, honest faces’.28

Although roughly two dozen Swedish families did relocate to abandoned farms in Vermont,they ultimately proved to be perhaps a bit too much like their Vermont ‘cousins’. Most of the fam-ilies who moved to Vermont quickly abandoned their farms in search of wage labor or better landelsewhere. But despite the program’s failure, the value its architects placed on attracting the ‘rightkind’ of property owner to Vermont’s abandoned landscape foreshadowed future attitudes to-wards abandoned farms and typical Vermonters.

Unable to reproduce an agricultural economy on Vermont’s abandoned farms, many state of-ficials turned instead to tourism. Beginning in the middle decades of the 19th century, middle-classand well-to-do urban Americans began purchasing abandoned farms for summer homes, first insouthern New England, and later in the region’s northern tier of states. Sensing an important op-portunity, the Vermont Board of Agriculture (followed later by the Vermont Publicity Bureau)began producing extensive farm-promotional books in the 1890s, each of which grew increasinglyfocused on selling farms to urban visitors for use as summer homes. Vermont’s abandoned farmswere scenic, charming, relaxing, and accessible, the board emphasized in their promotions. Theyeven offered potential economic rewards, buyers were told, to those who wished to become absen-tee, gentleman farmers.29


In the 1890s and early 1900s, journalists and state tourist officials spoke confidently about thepotential of abandoned-farm sales to reverse Vermont’s reputation for decline. On the one hand,optimists suggested that summer home ownership would reverse Vermont’s economic problemsby returning abandoned property to depressed tax roles and by creating new summer-season mar-kets for labor, produce, and handicrafts. What was more, it was predicted that visitors would in-vest in their adopted rural communities, bolstering town services and infrastructure in places hardhit by abandonment. On the other hand, summer people were also expected to revitalize Ver-mont’s social networks, boosting local pride and reinvigorating schools, churches, and libraries.Learned visitors, one observer remarked, ‘bring culture into the rural districts, along with quietideas of life. Contact of these visitors with one another is valuable, and an influence towards ap-preciation of beauty and goodness is exerted over those who live permanently in the region.’30

Across a spectrum of community-development programs, then, summer home ownership seemedpoised to overcome ‘degeneracy’ in rural Vermont, reversing the economic and cultural effects ofabandonment, and most importantly, revitalizing rural society in a way that would allow resi-dents’ latent identity as icons of American culture to come forth. The sale of summer homes,by this common assessment, would inspire a return among rural residents to the favorable qual-ities with which they were ideally associated. If the definition of typical Vermonters hinged oncharacteristics such as stability, integrity, and hard work, let the sale of summer homes, promotersargued, do the work of insuring their future.

To convince visitors to purchase abandoned farms, promoters turned beyond topics such asscenery and relaxation to embrace as well the very same identity they hoped to revive throughtourism. Vermonters may be a people struggling to survive, some argued, but vestiges of typicalitywere still apparent in the state, even in the abandoned landscape itself. What such arguments sug-gested was that the abandoned landscape offered a unique opportunity: Not only did it offer socialand economic potential to Vermont through its immediate availability for sale, but it remainedcoded with a sense of cultural ‘typicality’, making it attractive to summer home owners fromthe urban northeast. An abandoned farmhouse, some promoters suggested, offered visitors theopportunity to encounter, first hand, the impressive work of Vermont’s Yankee homebuilders,whose skill, craftsmanship, and determination was visible in their hand-hewed beams and straightrooflines. Graceful in its simplicity, one argued, the average Vermont farmhouse ‘showed stabilityand integrity and was in unimpeachable taste’.31 At times, the historical record shows, touriststook it upon themselves to remodel farmhouses in ways that remained true to the spirit of formerrural inhabitants. Merging past and present into a new leisure landscape, visitors refurbishedhomes with an eye for reviving and preserving that which made them feel typical. In doing so,they expressed a desire to bring forth in the landscape the same values of a traditionalized ruralculture that had attracted them to Vermont in the first place.32

The challenges of summer home ownership

There can be little doubt that turn-of-the-century summer home owners spruced up farms andvillages across New England, and in some cases strengthened schools, churches, and librariesthrough an investment of both time and money.33 But measuring the tangible benefits of summerhomes on the state’s rural landscape is no easy task. If we use measures like the salvage of


homes that might have otherwise fallen down, the improvement of certain village services, or anincrease in property tax revenues as indications of success, there can be no doubt that the sale offarms as summer homes had a beneficial effect on the state’s rural landscape. It is even moredifficult to measure the effect that resettlement campaigns had on the state’s cultural identity.What we can do, however, is try to assess the ways in which different historical groupsresponded to the relationship between tourism and the definitions being offered about typicalcultural identity in the state. What becomes clear from this approach is that not everyonesaw the sale of farms as summer homes as a source of unequivocal promiseda fact whichmade the identity of typicality in Vermont inherently contested. Some Vermonters, for instance,saw summer home ownership as a threat to the very place and group identities it was intended tobolster. Such concerns tended to revolve around two points of contention. On the one hand,some observers worried about the effects that a leisure-based economy could have on residents’traditional work-related identities, while on the other, some worried that the indiscriminate saleof farms to certain classes and ethnicities could potentially undermine their version of the typicalVermonter.

By the turn of the century, skepticism about summer home ownership was spreading fastthroughout Vermont as growing numbers of visitors purchased land, and as new insular ‘summercolonies’ of professionals and well-to-do urbanites sprang up in towns from Greensboro in thenorth to Dover in the south. With thousands of acres now converted to summer homes, manyresidents began expressing their concerns through discussions about changing patterns of workand leisure in the state. Although some rural Vermonters conceded that summer homes were valu-able uses for worn-out, upland farms where soil was poor and farming was hard, they did notnecessarily advocate the spread of summer homes onto productive farmland. For instance, asone resident argued, ‘Let’s get summer people on the hill farms, like Ripton, Goshen and placesnot adapted to farming. But do not let’s try [sic] and encourage them to live in good agriculturaltowns. There is a morale that you are like [sic] to break down when you get country gentlemenfarmers in among you. I would rather see Vermont progress along agricultural lines than becomethe playground for New England.’34 In the minds of some residents, then, the typical Vermonterwas one who, first and foremost, worked hard in a farm economy, not one who was tempted toidle away summer days in the leisurely contemplation of rural beauty. By introducing summer vis-itors to the state, he worried, Vermonters were at risk of becoming something less than their tra-ditional identity suggested.

Changing patterns of work and leisure occurring in turn-of-the-century Vermont were not en-tirely unique to the state, but were instead a product of tourism’s increasing national role in shap-ing rural identity. As suggested above, discussions about this process in Vermont centered ona belief that a rural identity shaped by leisure rather than work was not in the best interest of typ-ical Vermonters. For this reason, many residents began to question the relationship between tour-ism and abandoned lands, suggesting as they did that the identity of typical Vermonters was notmerely a latent force waiting to be revived by the resettlement of abandoned farms, but was in-stead a force weakened and challenged by the introduction of leisure-based social relations tothe state. Concerns such as these were perhaps best expressed in a 1923 Outlook article, ‘TheNew Crop’, by the Vermont author, Zephine Humphrey. For Humphrey, there was little to sug-gest that summer home owners and local residents had formed meaningful social relations capableof reviving the state’s best of qualities. She worried, for instance, about the tendency of residents


to transform their property in ways that bore little connection to the state’s long-standing socialtraditions:

The summer tourist takes little heed of the real nature of the social life in the midst of whichhe spends his vacations. Oh, he thinks he takes plenty of heed when he buys a house or buildshim a house! The more intelligent he is, the more carefully he conforms to old fashions.Heknows how to achieve the most thoroughly charming, harmonious effects. But they are notalways quite real, these effects; paradoxically, his harmonies do not always ring true.35

More telling still was the lifestyle that summer visitors pursued in rural Vermontda lifestyle ofleisure rather than work, a lifestyle, Humphrey suggested, of self-indulgence rather than modesty:

Moreover, when he has finished and furnished his house, what kind of life does the summerresident proceed to live in it? A plain, old-fashioned, laborious life, full of manual work,bounded by early hours, instinct with simple neighborliness? That is the kind of life the na-tive New Englanders, when left to themselves still lead, thus proving themselves true to thespirit of the old days, even though they have cast aside many of the old trappings. But thesummer resident stops after making his environment what seems to him suitable, and hisclothes and habits conform, not to the old days, but to the very new.36

Humphrey’s goal, first and foremost, was to get readers to think critically about relationshipsbetween visitors and residents, between work and leisure, between summer home ownership andthe state’s rural identity. If Vermont’s ‘new crop’ were to have a positive influence on the state andits popular identity, she argued, visitors would have to leave behind their city ways, ‘become sim-pler in life and in dress’, and ‘refuse to give elaborate entertainments or to wear sophisticatedclothes in their cottages’.37 Said another way, the new crop would have to make a more concertedeffort to conform to the identity of the typical Vermonters whose farms they now owned.

The fact that many had not, the fact that a landscape shaped according to leisure rather thanwork seemed so potentially detrimental to the state, raised additional questions about ‘right’ and‘wrong’ types of summer home owners. At roughly the same time that Humphreys expressed herconcerns about the new crop, other reformers, state officials, and rural residents were trying toconsolidate their control over identity and landscape by insuring that only certain types of visitorspurchased the state’s abandoned farms. In an echo of Vermont’s ethnically charged Swedish im-migration experiment during the 1890s, Vermonters in the 1920s and 1930s targeted potentialsummer home buyers based on ethnicity and class, thereby attempting to mitigate the alleged im-pacts that the wrong kinds of visitors might have on the state. In the process, the abandoned land-scape became a site not only for reproducing an idealized cultural identity; it became a site forreproducing broader prejudices in American society at the time as well.

Some of the best examples of the growing concern in Vermont about right and wrong visitorsare found in the Vermont Commission on Country Life’s final report, Rural Vermont: A Programfor the Future (1931). ‘Are summer visitors an economic asset?’ commission members asked point-edly in the book’s introduction. ‘If so, are they a social and moral asset as well? What is the effectof their presence on the quality of life of Vermonters? Is the answer to these questions the same forall classes of summer visitors? If not, which classes should be encouraged to come?’38 Members ofthe VCCL’s ‘Committee on Vermont Traditions and Ideals’ were particularly vocal on the subjectof visitor desirability. On the one hand, the committee made an important distinction in their


report between Vermont’s growing numbers of transient automobile tourists and its seasonallysedentary summer home owners. Not unlike tourist officials in other states, committee membersbelieved that summer home owners came from a wealthier, more educated, and more desirableclass than most automobile tourists. They took a greater interest in their adopted summer com-munities, they contributed to the local tax base, and they spruced up places that had once beeneyesores.39

On the other hand, members of the VCCL and others in Vermont’s Anglo majority went be-yond this dichotomy between auto tourists and summer home owners by making distinctions be-tween property owners themselvesddistinctions often based on ethnicity or religious identity. Asother rural scholars have noted, western cultures often code rural-landscape identity with refer-ence to ethnicity and raceda pattern that has been particularly true in New England, wherethe dominant rural population has tended to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.40 The ethniccoding of rural-tourist Vermont that occurred from the 1920s forward applied perhaps moststrongly to Jews. Although historically a distinct minority in the state, Jews have long been a pres-ence in Vermont society. Most settled in Vermont during the middle of the 19th century, becom-ing traveling merchants, opening shops, and creating small but reputable Jewish communities intowns like Poultney, Rutland, and Burlington.41 By the early decades of the 20th century, Jews(drawn primarily from regional cities) were turning to Vermont for vacations as well. AlthoughVermont never developed the same popularity among Jews as Bethlehem, New Hampshire orNew York’s Catskill Mountains, they came to Vermont nonetheless, both as individuals and ingroups, and they ultimately persisted in making the state a summer home for Jews as well asGentiles.42

Vacationing in Vermont was not always easy for Jews, many of whom were plagued by the dog-ged anti-Semitism that marked early 20th century American culture. In Vermont, prejudice wasinstitutionalized in the tourist trade, giving the state one of the worst reputations for tourist-re-lated anti-Semitism in the nation. In fact, no state-level, anti-discriminatory law existed for Ver-mont’s hotel owners until the late 1950s, at which time one survey found that 45% of the state’shotels still actively discriminated against Jews.43 During the early decades of the 20th century, ad-vertisements for cottage rentals sent both subtle and overt signals to prospective Jewish visitors.State-sponsored publications from the Vermont Bureau of Publicity, for instance, specified cot-tage owners’ preferences for a ‘Christian clientele’ or for ‘gentiles only’.44 Hoteliers in Vermontalso commonly asked for ‘references’ as a means for subtly weeding out Jews or other unwelcomeguests. References at the massive Lake Champlain Club near Burlington, for instance, were de-scribed by its owners as a necessary way to insure that the club remained ‘attractive and home-like’. ‘We must be sure’, the management warned, ‘that the applicant will fit into the scheme ofthings. So when you apply we shall ask for references.’45 Of course, fitting into the ‘scheme ofthings’ could have many different interpretationsdethnic and otherwisedbut to Jewish travelersin the 1920s and 1930s, statements such as this would have hardly been ambiguous.

By controlling access to rental and resort properties, many tourist promoters and rural resi-dents also hoped to exert some degree of control over the sale of Vermont’s abandoned landscape.After all, as state tourist officials often pointed out, a casual visit to Vermont was very often thefirst step towards purchasing property in the stateda fact which would have been a call to armsfor residents who were eager to make sure that property fell into the ‘right’ hands. And indeed,some Jews did make the step from casual visitors to property owners during the 1920s and


1930s. In Wilmington, for example, Jewish visitors purchased the town’s former Forest andStream Clubdonce a haven for Gentile businessmendand developed it as their own private sum-mer club. For at least one group of Vermonters in Greensboro, the threat of having such a com-munity in their town prompted coercive action. During the 1920s, for instance, a localdevelopment company in Greensboro wrote into all its property deeds: ‘No part of the herein con-veyed property shall be leased or sold to any member of the Hebrew race.’46

Such examples should highlight a belief among some Vermonters that Jews did not makea good match for the kind of typical identity that many hoped to reproduce in the state. In lightof such anti-Semitism, it is not hard to imagine that some Jews failed to find virtue in the idealizedimage of typical Vermonters so often used to promote the state. In a tongue-in-cheek article thatnonetheless carried serious undertones, one 1930s Jewish visitor recounted the skepticism of hisparents when he decided to purchase property in Vermont:

My father stood by, repeating to himself. ‘No telephone, no lights, no running water.’‘People have lived there before, Papa.’‘Sure! But not Jewish people!’‘What’s the difference?’ I demanded.My father looked at me. ‘My son’, he said sorrowfully, ‘if a young man of thirty-five don’tknow yet what is the difference between Jewish people and the goyim [Gentiles], then it’ssad.’47

Although the author of this article never came out in direct condemnation (or support) of hisrural neighbors, the concerns he recounted in this passage reflected a clear sense among some Jewsthat typical Vermonters were less welcoming, noble, or democratic than their ideal imagesuggested.

Aside from religion, some Vermonters targeted certain social classes for inclusion or exclusionfrom the state’s rural-tourist landscape. Members of the VCCL’s ‘Committee on Vermont Tradi-tions and Ideals’, for example, expressed popular class-based criteria for summer home ownerswhen they stated in Rural Vermont, ‘It is apparent that the state offers a pleasant environmentfor authors, artists, college teachers, and others in the same general classification.’ Targeting a pro-fessional, learned audience became a common and deliberate move among members of the com-mittee and among other members of Vermont’s promotional establishment. ‘It would be fortunatefor the state and its people’, the VCCL’s report added, ‘if more and more men and women of thisdesirable type sought Vermont for summer or permanent homes. They are far more valuable toVermont as summer residents or as habitual dwellers in the state than other classes that might bementioned.’48

The Vermont Bureau of Publicity expressed a similar, class-based view of summer home owner-ship in 1932, when they published Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s popular ‘open letter’ to summerhome buyersda booklet entitled simply Vermont Summer Homes. Fisher was born into a mid-western academic family with deep ancestral roots in Vermont. After earning a PhD in Frenchfrom Columbia University, she and her husband moved to the family’s old homestead in Arling-ton, Vermont. Fisher’s novels and articles earned her a national reputation, and her promotionalpieces made her a powerful voice in the creation of Vermont’s public image.49 Her interpretationsof Vermont culture were often colored by a reverence for the past, and in this way were not unlikethose produced by others who were writing about Vermont at the time. In one of her most


definitive statements on the character of Vermonters, for example, Fisher recounted with sincerepride her grandfather’s suggestion that Vermont be turned into a new national park ‘so the rest ofthe country could come in to see how their grandparents lived’.50 Although a strong reverence fortradition informed Fisher’s tourist promotions, it is important to note that this did not automat-ically make her (or others like her) prejudiced against any one group. In fact, Fisher was a well-known crusader against anti-Semitism. She lobbied to create a state-level ‘inter-racial advisorycommittee’ in Vermont, for instance, and she pressured the infamous Vermont Hotel Keepers’ As-sociation to condemn the anti-Semitic actions of its members.51 Fisher also dealt openly and crit-ically with anti-Semitism in rural Vermont in the pages of her 1939 novel, Seasoned Timber, andupon her death, she won praise from the International Academy of Human Rights.52

But when it came to the sale of summer homes, even Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s perspective wascolored by a larger effort in Vermont to get the ‘right’ kinds of people on the state’s abandonedlands. In the first lines of her open letter, Vermont Summer Homes, Fisher made it clear that shewas addressing ‘those men and women teaching in schools, colleges and universities; those whoare doctors, lawyers, musicians, writers, artistsdin a word those who earn their living by a pro-fessionally trained use of their brains’. In a non-exclusionary gesture that with hindsight falls em-barrassingly short of the mark, she also invited ‘those others not technically of that class but whoenjoy the kind of life usually created by professional people. If your tastes, your outlook on lifeare generally in common with the classes I have named, please consider yourself one of my audi-ence.’ Which raises the question, then: If one’s tastes were not of that class, should one consideroneself unwelcome by Fisher, by the Vermont Bureau of Publicity who published her work, andby nearly everyone else in the state of Vermont? By the tone of the letter is would seem so; afterall, Fisher emphasized, hers was merely ‘the pen which writes what is felt all over the State’.53

As suggested by Fisher’s work, the voice of the allegedly typical rural Vermonter was very oftennot that of working rural residents, but rather was that of intellectuals who spoke as self-ap-pointed representatives of Vermont opinion and as watchdogs of the state’s cultural heritage.Set as Fisher was on attracting ‘superior, interesting families of character, cultivation and goodbreeding’ to the state’s abandoned lands, promoters betrayed their own class consciousness andplaced themselves in an intermediary position between the leisured guests they sought to attractand the rural people they sought both to valorize and to protect.54

From the perspective of the professionals who produced many of Vermont’s promotions, otherprofessionals would have been a welcome addition to Vermont society, even if only for the sum-mer season. But the professional slant that marked many of these promotions raises an importantquestion: If professionals were speaking publicly on behalf of Vermont’s more typical rural resi-dents, then how did non-professional Vermonters feel about the tendency to target professionalpeople as summer home buyers? Clearly not all rural residents bought into the idea of professio-nals as spokespeople for Vermont culture, nor did they support the idea of using professional,summer home owners to ‘revive’ rural culture in Vermont. Although difficult to trace in the his-torical record, some Vermonters expressed concerns that summer home owners posed a directchallenge to the future of what they defined as a typical identity in the state. Writing for TheNew Republic in 1923, one author criticized summer visitors for introducing new social forumsoutside of locals’ traditional meeting placesdforums from which local residents felt marginalized.‘Long ago, the village consisted of the general store and the livery stable’, he wrote. ‘Today it con-sists of the general store and the garage, plus, from the day of the first dandelion until the day the


snow flies again, the tea-room up on the hill in the old Oliphant place. The tea-room might as wellbe in Albuquerque, for all the use we natives make of it.’55

Although many residents may not have been able to relate to the ‘tea-room’ culture of summervisitors, that does not mean that Fisher and others did not try to draw comparisons between sum-mer people and residentsdcomparisons that informed the stated relationship between tourismand typical identity in the state. Of course, some professionals (professors more specifically)were obvious targets for summer home promotions because their summer schedules accommodatedlong stays in the state. And as modest as their income might have been in many cases, professionalswere often better off financially than other travelers for whom purchasing property was not an op-tion. But professionals made sense to Fisher and other promoters for another reason as wellda rea-son that again suggests a desire to use the ‘right’ kinds of summer home buyers to reproduce andprotect a favored identity for typical Vermonters. As Fisher argued in Vermont Summer Homes, forinstance, professional visitors and rural Vermonters had more in common than some would expect:Both had strong ‘mental and moral qualities’, both valued family and friends, both were hardwork-ing, both were modest, and both were beyond the shallow worship of money. As she told prospec-tive buyers,

In many ways, Vermonters will seem like country cousins of yours, sprung from the samestock.We simply love the fact that your women folks do not feel it necessary always towear silk stockings, and that your men folks like to wear old clothes. You value leisurelyphilosophic talk and so do we. We like the way you bring up your children, and we liketo have our children associated with them. You like to be let alone a good deal, and welike to let people alone. In other words we like you. And when a Vermonter admits thathe likes somebody, it means a good deal.56

Considering this apparent compatibility, it seems odd that Vermonters and the professionalsummer visitors in their midst were not already closer than many of them were. Those who werefamiliar with concerns such as those expressed by Zephine Humphrey in ‘The New Crop’, mighthave wondered why summer colonists and residents did not, in fact, always hit it off. The answer,of course, is that visitors and residents were typically cut from different cloths, and that many res-idents saw the creation of a leisured, professionally based landscape as a direct threat to local con-trol and regional identity. In light of this, Fisher’s self-conscious pairing of visitors and residents,feels like an attempt to use the sale of landscape as a means for reforming the typical Vermonter notmerely in the image of their idealized past, but in the image of the ‘right’ kind of summer visitor.Seen in this way, the sale of summer homes was not meant only to raise taxes, to improve locallibraries, or to get some paint and new shingles on the state’s empty buildings. Instead, the transferof abandoned lands from farms to summer homes was also meant to refashion the identity of thetypical Vermonter along what some considered more socially acceptable lines.

As Fisher’s work suggests, then, promoters had not given up their belief that the sale of thestate’s abandoned landscape for summer homes could bring out the best in rural Vermonters.And in this sense, property-owning summer visitors and the leisure landscapes they created hadimportant work to do on behalf of Vermont’s cultural identity. That is, summer people werecharged with protecting the best of the typical Vermonter. As Fisher put it, ‘Aware as all cultivatedpeople are of the immense value of regional color in a standardized world, you will help us keepwhat we have, rather than making our young people ashamed of it, as do some of the ignorant


among the well-to-do.You will value what is worthwhile in our inheritance, and so will help usperceive what is best in our traditions, and help us hold to it.’ Better yet, she added, ‘All thiswith no effort on your part, just because you have sensitive good taste, sound judgment andwell-trained perceptions which you enjoy using.’57

Perhaps the best part about all this, at least for promoters who shared Fisher’s views, was thatthe identities of visitors themselves stood to benefit from the summer home experience. For Fish-er, summer home owners gained entry into a world of rural stability where typical behavior wasnot only ideal, it was linked to America’s time-honored past. ‘There is something else of value wefeel Vermont has to offer you and your children’, she suggested, ‘something which the modernworld seems determined nobody shall have. This is stability’. Amidst a world of mobility andchange, then, the Vermont summer home offered vacationing families a rooted sense of place:This may be your child’s ‘only chance to learn how much richness and depth is added to lifeby belonging somewhere’, Fisher told potential buyers. ‘Vermont towns and villages, you see,are above all static, [they] provide that experience of unchanging stability that is such a rest tonerves assaulted by the modern haste to change for change’s sake.’58 The most profound irony,of course, was not only that this stability was itself a mythdthat instability and abandonmentwere endemic in Vermontdbut that Fisher identified the transfer of property from farms to sum-mer homes as key to the future of that stability. If being a typical Vermonter meant being true totradition, it must have struck some as odd to suggest that tradition be maintained through the saleof abandoned farms to people from outside the state.

Conclusion

In this paper I have focused primarily on the relationship between tourism and rural identity inVermont, rather than on the material landscape changes associated with tourist development inthe state. But in doing so, I have also suggested that identity was central to the actual sale of farmsand thus to the subsequent transition within Vermont’s abandoned landscape from farming to lei-sure. Between the 1880s and 1930s, Vermont promoters successfully marketed abandoned farmproperty to thousands of visitors, transforming large parts of the state’s abandoned landscapeinto a new tourist-oriented landscape of leisure. Indeed, to this day, thousands of visitors fromother states spend part of the year in former farmhouses or vacation cottages built on formerfarm property. To promote this transformation of Vermont’s abandoned landscape, boosters of-ten popularized the state’s so-called typical cultural identity, and in doing so, they representedVermonters as attractive representatives of rural tradition and stability. The summer home, pro-moters suggested, could put visitors in touch with such character traits on a very personal level,bringing the best of rural culture into their otherwise urban lives.

This process of selling farms as summer homes, however, was never defined by a simple cause-and-effect relationship between the success of summer tourism and an easily defined, agreed-uponimage of typical Vermonters. By relying on visitors’ affinity for the typical Vermonter, promoterswere, in fact, deploying the same stylized notions of rural identity that many feared were most atrisk from farm abandonment. As out-migration weakened traditional social and economic pat-terns in the state, many reformers and tourist promoters looked to the abandoned landscape itselfto revive and reproduce a notion of typicality that they saw as being at risk. In this way, the


resettlement of Vermont’s abandoned landscape served as an important context for the negotia-tion of typical identity in Vermont. While some Vermonters embraced a work-related image of thetypical Vermonter, which they defined as being threatened by the introduction of tourism to thestate, others feared that the ‘wrong’ kinds of summer home buyers would undermine the ethnic orclass-based image of typicality they sought to cultivate in the state. Without a clear sense of thedefinition of typical identity, without a clear sense of its future or its relationship to tourism, noteveryone connected to this story could agree on how best to achieve its reproduction.

What the sale of abandoned farms to summer home owners should remind us, then, is that thelarger American ‘rural ideal’ so often associated with tourism was never singular, static, or entirelyagreed upon. Although tourists are often told that rural places and rural people represent timeless,typical characteristics such as social stability, integrity, and self-reliance, such characteristics are, infact, debated and negotiated through the transformation of rural space into a leisure-based touristlandscape. Rather than being essential, inherent aspects of rural life open to the visitor on demand,notions of what constitutes typical rural identity are subject to change based on differing historical-geographic contexts. Perhaps stories like this can point towards a more complex understanding oftourism’s relationship to idealized notions of the rural in American culture. And perhaps by craftingnew historical geographies of rural tourism, we can gain a better understanding of tourism’s impactson the place and cultural identities of contemporary rural America.

Notes

1. James P. Taylor, Collection, 1906e1949, Doc. T5, Folder 23, Vermont State Historical Society, Barre, Vermont.2. J.A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Exploration of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Cen-

tury, Chapel Hill, 2001, 205e309; On regional identity in New England, also see S. Nissenbaum, New England asregion and nation, in: E.L. Ayers, P.N. Limerick, S. Nissenbaum and P.S. Onuf (Eds), All Over the Map: RethinkingAmerican Regions, Baltimore, 1996, 38e61; J.S. Wood, The New England Village, Baltimore, 1997.

3. R.H. Schein, The place of landscape: a conceptual framework for interpreting an American scene, Annals of the

Association of American Geographers 87 (1997) 664.4. H.S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870e1930, Chapel Hill, 1997.5. D. Delyser, Ramona memories: fiction, tourist practices, and placing the past in southern California, Annals of the

Association of American Geographers 93 (2003) 886e908; S.P. Hanna and V.J. Del Casino, Jr. (Eds),Mapping Tour-ism, Minneapolis, 2003; M.S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880e1940, Washington,DC, 2001; C. Aitchison, N.E. Macleod and S.J. Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geog-

raphies, New York, 2000; D. Gilbert, London in all its glorydor how to enjoy London: guidebook representationsof imperial London, Journal of Historical Geography 25 (1999) 279e297; S.D. Hoelscher, Heritage on Stage: TheInvention of Ethnic Place in America’s Little Switzerland, Madison, 1998; S. Hoelscher, The photographic construc-

tion of tourist space in Victorian America, The Geographical Review 88 (1998) 548e570; D. Brown, Inventing NewEngland: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century, Washington, DC, 1995.

6. M. Bunce, The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape, New York, 1994; also see S. Daniels, Fieldsof Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Princeton, 1993; L. Marx, The

Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, New York, 1964; H.N. Smith, Virgin Land:The American West as Symbol and Myth, Cambridge, MA, 1950.

7. Examples include, Brown, Inventing New England M. Bunce, The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of

Landscape, New York, 1994; J.F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century, Am-herst, 1989; P. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Baltimore, 1990, 1969; reprint, witha foreword by J. Stilgoe.

8. J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London, 1990, 141.


9. S. Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Madison, 2001; also

see, D. Brown (Ed.), A Tourist’s New England: Travel Fiction, 1820e1920, Hanover, NH, 1999.10. H. Corey, The Green Mountain state, National Geographic 51 (1927) 333.11. W. Hard, Vermontda way of life, The Survey 68 (1 July 1932) 301e303; B. DeVoto, New England, there she

stands, Harper’s 164 (1932) 405e415.12. D. DeLyser, Authenticity on the ground: engaging the past in a California ghost town, Annals of the Association of

American Geographers 89 (1999) 612.13. Hoelscher, Heritage on Stage, 181e220.

14. On out-migration from New England, see M.M. Bell, Did New England go downhill? Geographical Review 79 (Oc-tober 1989) 450e466; H. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England,Cambridge, 1984; H.F. Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England: Its Social and Economic History,

1790e1930, New York, 1936.15. E. Hungerford, Our summer migration: a social study, Century 20 (1891) 573.16. J. Ralph, Our Tyrol and its types, Harper’s Monthly 106 (1903) 520.

17. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind.18. P. Woolfson, The rural Franco-American in Vermont, Vermont History 50 (1982) 151e162; R.D. Vicero, Frenche

Canadian settlement in Vermont prior to the Civil War, The Professional Geographer 23 (1971) 290e294.19. J.L. Hypes, Recent immigrant stocks in New England agriculture, in: J.K. Wright (Ed.), New England’s Prospect:

1933, New York, 1933, 189e205.20. C. Johnson, New England and its Neighbors, New York, 1924, 183.21. D. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West, New York, 1995; For more on anti-immi-

gration sentiments in Vermont, see J.M. Lund, Vermont nativism: William Paul Dillingham and US immigrationlegislation, Vermont History 63 (1995) 15e29.

22. As one writer noted for the Federal Writers’ Project’s guidebook on Vermont, ‘foreign elements in Vermont have

made no appreciable contribution to arts of manners and no changes in the ways of livingdor thinkingdof Ver-monters’. Federal Writers’ Project, Vermont: A Guide to the Green Mountain State, Boston, 1937, 52.

23. Examples include, P. Collier (Ed.), Second Biennial Report of the Vermont State Board of Agriculture, Manufactur-

ing and Mining, for the Years 1873e74, Montpelier, VT, 1874; G. Bailey and O. Martin, Homeseekers Guide to Ver-mont Farms, St. Albans, VT, 1911.

24. F.W. Rich, Vermont and Vermontersdtheir future, The Vermonter 27 (1922) 159e160.25. N. Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenic Project in the Green Mountain State, Hanover, NH, 1999;

K. Dann, From degeneration to regeneration: the eugenics survey of Vermont, 1925e1936, Vermont History 59(1991) 5e29.

26. For discussions of the commission’s mission, founding, and results, see The Vermont Commission on Country Life,

Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, Burlington, VT, 1931; H.F. Perkins, The comprehensive survey of ruralVermont, in: J.K. Wright (Ed.), New England’s Prospect: 1933, New York, 1933, 206e212.

27. On Vermont’s Swedish immigration project also see A.B. Valentine, Report of the Commissioner of Agricultural and

Manufacturing Interests of the State of Vermont, 1889e1890, Rutland, VT, 1890, 15e19; D.M. Harvey, The Swedesin Vermont, Vermont History 28 (1960) 39e58; J.K. Graffagnino, Vermont in the Victorian Age: Continuity andChange in the Green Mountain State, 1850e1900, Bennington, VT, 1985, 119e121.

28. A.B. Valentine, Swedish immigration, The Quill 1 (1890) 28.

29. The Vermont Board of Agriculture’s first publication was called simply, The Resources and Attractions of Vermont.With a List of Desirable Homes for Sale, Montpelier, VT, 1891. Within a few years this publication was more ex-plicitly titled in an effort to target potential summer home buyers. The 1896 version was titled, A List of Desirable

Farms and Summer Homes in Vermont, and was reprinted in the Sixteenth Vermont Agricultural Report by the StateBoard of Agriculture for the Year 1896, Burlington, VT, 1896; For more on the Board of Agriculture’s summerhome promotions, see A. Rebek, The selling of Vermont: from agriculture to tourism, 1860e1910, Vermont History

44 (1976) 14e27.30. E. Hungerford, Our summer migration: a social study, Century 20 (1891) 576; also see Rev J.H. Ward, The revival

of our country towns, New England Magazine 1 (1889) 242e248; E.A. Wright, The rural-degeneracy cry, New


England Magazine 36 (1907) 152e158; R. Hitchcock, The summer home: the organization of summer communities,

Outing Magazine 52 (1908) 498e501.31. A. Chamberlain, The ideal abandoned farm, New England Magazine 16 (1897) 474; also see P.W. Thayer, Selecting

a summer home in Vermont, The Vermonter 31 (1926) 161e164.32. For examples, see C.B. Snell, Our searchdour farmdour vacation, The Vermonter 22 (1917) 33e36; P.W. Thayer,

Evolving a dormant value, The Vermonter 38 (1933) 310e313.33. Summer visitors, for instance, often formed or led New England’s turn-of-the-century ‘village improvement soci-

eties’dorganizations which allowed them to shape landscape form in accordance with their own, idealized visions

of rural life. See J.A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Exploration of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to theMid-Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill, 2001, 240e244.

34. As quoted in J. Albers, Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape, Cambridge, MA, 1999, 253.

35. Z. Humphrey, The new crop, The Outlook 134 (11 July 1923) 381.36. Z. Humphrey, The new crop, The Outlook 134 (11 July 1923) 381.37. Z. Humphrey, The new crop, The Outlook 134 (11 July 1923) 381.

38. The Vermont Commission on Country Life, Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, Burlington, VT, 1931, 3.39. For more on suspicion of automobilists in Vermont and beyond, see W.J. Belasco, Americans on the Road: From

Autocamp to Motel, 1910e1945, Baltimore, 1979, 105e127; H. Goldman, A desirable class of people: the leadershipof the Green Mountain Club and social exclusivity, 1920e1936, Vermont History 65 (1997) 131e152.

40. For a discussion of ethnicity and rurality, see J. Agyman and R. Spooner, Ethnicity and the rural environment, in:P. Cloke and J. Little (Eds), Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation and Rurality, New York,1997, 197e217.

41. M. Samuelson, The Story of the Jewish Community of Burlington, Vermont, Burlington, VT, 1976.42. On race, ethnicity, and tourism in America, see C.S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United

States, New York, 1999, 206e236.43. N.C. Belth, Barriers: Patterns of Discrimination Against Jews, New York, 1958, 38; also see H. Goldman, A desir-

able class of people: the leadership of the Green Mountain Club and social exclusivity, 1920e1936, Vermont History65 (1997) 131e152.

44. Vermont Cottages, Camps and Furnished Houses for Rent, Montpelier, VT, 1938, 20, 31.45. Lake Champlain Club, Malletts Bay, Vt. (n.p. [1920]). There are no pages in this text, but this quote can be found on

the final page.46. As quoted in P. Watson, W. Smith, L. Hill, N. Hill, S. Fisher, P. Haslam, R. Metraux, D. Ling and G. Sangee, The

History of Greensboro: The First Two Hundred Years, Greensboro, VT, 1990, 44; also see Unenforceable covenantsare in many deeds, The New York Times (1 August 1986) A9.

47. S.T. Hecht, Vermont pioneer from flatbush, Commentary 19 (1955) 371.

48. The Vermont Commission on Country Life, Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, Burlington, VT, 1931, 380.49. I.H. Washington, Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Tourists Accommodated and her other promotions of Vermont, Ver-

mont History 65 (1997) 162e163.50. D.C. Fisher, Vermonters, in FederalWriters’ Project,Vermont: AGuide to the GreenMountain State, Boston, 1937, 3.51. D.C. Fisher to W. Wills, 8 June 1944; D.C. Fisher to W. Wills, 28 August 1944, Dorothy Canfield Fisher Collec-

tion, Box 22, Folder 19, University of Vermont Special Collections, Bailey Howe Library, Burlington, Vermont.52. D.C. Fisher, in: M.J. Madigan (Ed.), Seasoned Timber, Hanover, NH, 1939, 1996; D. Baumgardt, Dorothy Can-

field Fisher: friend of Jews in life and work, Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society 48 (1959) 245e255.

53. D. Canfield, Vermont Summer Homes, Montpelier, VT, 1932, The pages in this work are not numbered. Although

the author typically went by the full name of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, she went by Dorothy Canfield for thispublication.

54. Canfield, Vermont Summer Homes.

55. B. Bliven, Rock-ribbed, The New Republic 33 (21 February 1923) 346.56. Canfield, Vermont Summer Homes.57. Canfield, Vermont Summer Homes.

58. Canfield, Vermont Summer Homes.

Documents

Tourism, farm abandonment, and the ‘typical’ Vermonter, 1880–1930