The Creating of Connelly’s Tavern and the Making of Mississippi’s Cultural Tourism Industry During the Great Depression

Abstract

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