Long a favored destination for travelers due to its scenic coastline and rural landscapes, New England's tourist industry evolved in parallel with transportation technologies. Rail lines opened summering opportunities in the interior of the region in the nineteenth century, and the expansion of roadways and the automobile after the First World War drove the industry further, leading to a proliferation of summer camps, inns, and tourist sites, even in remote locales, serving shorter-term vacationers from the working class through the moneyed elite.
This small collection of travel brochures gathered by Faith Brainard and her husband Homer W. Brainard in the 1920s and 1930s, documents camps, inns, hotels, and touristic sites throughout New England. Most of the brochures advertise accommodations or attractions in a natural setting, including room rentals at farms, hiking in the White Mountains, and the rivers and mountains of Vermont. The target audience for many of the brochures was women traveling alone, featuring the promise of clean accommodations and wholesome activities.
Long a favored destination for travelers due to its scenic coastline and rural landscapes, New England's tourist industry evolved in parallel with transportation technologies. Rail lines opened summering opportunities in the interior of the region in the nineteenth century, and the expansion of roadways and the automobile after the First World War drove the industry further, leading to a proliferation of summer camps, inns, and tourist sites even in remote locales, serving shorter-term vacationers from the working class through the moneyed elite.
Scope of collection
This small collection of travel brochures gathered by Faith Brainard and her husband Homer W. Brainard in the 1920s and 1930s, documents camps, inns, hotels, and touristic sites throughout New England. Most of the brochures advertise accommodations or attractions in a natural setting, including room rentals at farms, hiking in the White Mountains, and the rivers and mountains of Vermont. The target audience for many of the brochures was women traveling alone, featuring the promise of clean accommodations and wholesome activities. Tourist sites in a few states outside of New England are also included: New York State, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Ontario.
Designed to attract business, the brochures reflect the New England tourist scene and the expectations of motorists and travelers in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the inns or camps represented were very small establishments set up to serve the new motorist-tourist, and several appear to have been private homes taking in visitors. A handful of brochures provide insight into the recreational preferences and perspective on natural world, and some include attractive, if idealized illustrations.
Among the more interesting brochures are several from Vermont issued by the state tourist board, reflecting the rise in importance of tourism to the state economy, and a series of brochures from the Adirondack Loj of the Lake Placid Club, printed in "simple" English (with a simplified spelling system). Among these is a remarkably direct relic of the growth of segregation in tourist facilities:
From its founding the invariable rule [of the Lake Placid Club] is to admit no Hebrews. While it seems unfair to bar desirable members of a race because there is so great social prejudice against the undesirables, to make any exception in behalf of refined and agreeable Hebrews involvs consideration of individual cases which would be impracticable, so the vote has always been unanimous that no exceptions should be made.
Exept as servants negros ar not admitted.
The collector of the pamphlets, the Brainards, lived in Hartford, Conn. A mathematics teacher, Homer W. Brainard was listed in the federal census for 1940, when he was 75, as a genealogist in private research.
