Mississippi Quarterly

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, Americans became fascinated with places associated with their country’s past. Spanish missions and fortresses in California and Florida; historic architecture and urban districts in colonial era cities; and Revolutionary War and Civil War battlefields—all became places where Americans not only learned about their history but also reaffirmed their cultural identity. Moreover, they looked at history as entertainment. Cultural geographer John Jakle noted that by the 1930s, “History tended to be packaged as contrived attractions” (286). From Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Michigan to John D. Rockefeller’s Colonial Williamsburg, heritage¹, not history, was commodified, packaged, and sold to American middle-class families, which were more mobile than before, traveling on improved roads in affordable automobiles.

Heritage theorist David Lowenthal distinguishes history and heritage, saying, “History explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time; heritage clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes” (xv). Public historian James Lindgren reminds us that a significant amount of this heritage was fabricated through “personalism”—a feminine-based historic preservation, which was based on a social group’s application of values and beliefs on a historic monument (42). Ann Pamela Cunningham’s Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the [End Page 169] Garden Club of Virginia, and the Daughters of the American Revolution were groups that applied their family-based cultural values— Christianity, family, and patriotism—on historic monuments associated with American nationalism and colonialism. During the 1930s, these sites became more than historic shrines; they became cultural tourism attractions.

In 1932, the women of the Natchez Garden Club created the cultural tourism industry in Mississippi. Based on their personalism, they initially celebrated the Spanish colonial past, but unlike the plans for Greenfield Village and Colonial Williamsburg, which showcased groupings of buildings, the approach these middle-class women took showcased built patrimony as individual vignettes, utilizing the automobile to present heritage to tourists. The event they created, the Natchez Spring Pilgrimage of Antebellum Homes, was an immediate success; it preserved the historic town and presented the heritage that the women wanted tourists to enjoy. In 1935, Natchez Garden Club member Roane Fleming Byrnes convinced her club colleagues to purchase and restore a forlorn building and make it Mississippi’s first historic building attraction, Connelly’s Tavern. Located on Gilreath Hill, it was rebuilt and marketed as the late eighteenth-century tavern that terminated the fabled Natchez Trace, the place where Andrew Ellicott defiantly raised the first American flag in Mississippi in 1797 and where Aaron Burr and Harman Blennerhasset planned the treasonous plot to separate the American West from the US in 1807.

However, the old wood-framed building was never “Connelly’s Tavern.” In 1974, nearly forty years after it was first opened, archival researchers disclosed that it was a very old residence but not a colonial tavern. “Certainly, it is a shock to find this error, and it’s hard to stop thinking of our headquarters as ‘Connelly’s Tavern,’” replied Margaret Moss, at the time the immediate past president of the Natchez Garden Club (Culver). Now known as “the House on Ellicott Hill,” the building is undergoing its latest restoration and the Natchez Garden Club will present it as a historic residence of the “Old Southwest” (Doyle). Although it continues to be depicted as a colonial Natchez shrine, the House on Ellicott Hill better exemplifies how historic preservation and cultural tourism were developed in the Deep South during the Great Depression. My aim here is to examine how the first cultural tourism [End Page 170] landmark in Mississippi was developed and how it became the embodiment of the struggle over the heritage that the women of the Natchez Garden Club wanted to portray to the world. I will conclude by considering the impact that the first preservation and tourism building venture had on heritage perception and commodification in Natchez and Mississippi during the twentieth century.