| This dissertation explores the historical geography of tourism in rural Vermont, focusing on the ways in which residents and visitors imagined, represented, and transformed their environment according to the dictates of a growing leisure economy. Throughout this story, I pursue two interrelated goals. The first is to challenge popular and academic discourses on rural tourism commonly built around the image of a singular, agreed-upon “rural ideal.” Such discourses typically focus on the tourist's sentimental idealization of rural landscapes as sites for social tradition, harmony, and stability. Rather than reiterate these traditional perspectives, I reinterpret Vermont's rural-tourist landscapes in a more complex and critical light. My first aim, then, is to show that there was never one, singular rural ideal associated with tourism in Vermont, but rather that there were many. My second goal is to trace landscape's role in the ongoing production of social ideologies, in this case as they related to land use and rural-tourist space. I frame this discussion of landscape and ideology according to a broader discussion of work and leisure in rural Vermont. As the following chapters suggest, tourism in Vermont complicated the relationship between rural work and rural leisure in myriad ways, continually reconstituting the meanings and activities associated with each according to different spatial and temporal contexts. As Vermont's tourist economy grew in scale and influence, this ongoing interaction between work and leisure became central to the construction of rural form and rural identity statewide. To structure this discussion, I turn to theories of landscape advanced by cultural and historical geographers over the past two decades. What my work offers, then, are two main opportunities: first, to reposition rural places more firmly within contemporary geographic discussions of landscape; and second, to trace the history of enduring struggles for control over rural land use and rural identity in American tourist communities. |
