This book explores the origins and development of the North Woods vacation landscape and experience, demonstrating how tourism altered land, people, and institutions across northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With roots dating back more than a century, it is a story of interest to historians, geographers, landscape architects, conservation professionals, policymakers, and the general public, particularly those who live, work, and vacation in the region. The market’s intrusion into the nineteenth century countryside established connections between urban and r ... More

This book explores the origins and development of the North Woods vacation landscape and experience, demonstrating how tourism altered land, people, and institutions across northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With roots dating back more than a century, it is a story of interest to historians, geographers, landscape architects, conservation professionals, policymakers, and the general public, particularly those who live, work, and vacation in the region. The market’s intrusion into the nineteenth century countryside established connections between urban and rural worlds that exploited natural resources, altered lives, and transformed the landscape. In the twentieth century this former hinterland developed as the North Woods, drawing on urban resources and offering a place where many escaped to enjoy rejuvenation outdoors in a reforested landscape. Improved transportation, promotion, declining lumber and mining industries, and recreational land use and conservation initiatives contributed to the emergence of a vacation destination. North Woods tourist advocates, like earlier lumbermen, viewed nature as something that yielded profit. But unlike the cut and run lumbermen, they relied on nature’s regenerative forces to provide a new cash crop, a forested and lake-dotted countryside offering outdoor recreation for the masses. While often dismissed as casual and unimportant, tourism tells us much about modern America. Vacations served as a transformative leisure experience, a site of work, an emblem of worker participation in consumer culture and as a factor in America’s changing workforce and landscape.