Rethinking the Rural: Nostalgia and Progress in Vermont’s Tourist Industry

This paper explores conceptions of rural-tourist landscapes in late nineteenth century Vermont. Traditionally, scholarly and popular discourse about rural tourism have identified nostalgia and the tourist’s search for harmonious pastoral landscapes as dominant themes in tourist promotions, and as dominant motivations for tourist travel. This paper adds alternative perspectives to this discourse by unearthing connections between tourism, progressive ideologies, and industrial development in the small town of Wilmington, Vermont. The historical geography of tourism in Vermont reminds us that American travelers and tourist promoters never shared a singular rural ideal based solely on nostalgia for an allegedly simpler agricultural past. As important as this nostalgia was, tourism in rural Vermont was also linked to a more progressive climate of landscape change, economic growth, and industrial land use. This pattern, I argue, led to the creation of a different kind of rural “middle landscape”—one located not merely between the poles of wilderness and the city, as it is traditionally conceived, but between a nostalgic view often associated with agriculture, and a less obvious, but equally important, progressive view often associated with industrial development. Although both were important, neither enjoyed a precise definition, reminding us of the contested, rather than balanced, nature of Vermont’s middle landscape.