Here are listed links to pieces about both the Lincoln and the non-Lincoln tourism businesses in Springfield, including tourism-related sites and issues. Conventioneers, arguably, are tourists, but pieces about the capital city's convention center are listed on the main Springfield topic page. 

 

Springfield has hosted travelers from a world curious about Abraham Lincoln since his assassination in 1865. With the advent of the automobile and mass tourism, visitors came to the capital in numbers sufficient to constitute a market. To a city suffering from the loss of its smokestack industries, the tourism industry promised to be a godsend.

 

So it has proved—to people making their livings as tourism promoters. For decades they argued to gullible officials that people who come to see the great man's house and the tomb can be enticed to stay longer and spend more by giving them more. Make history tourism entertaining rather than just informative, they said in effect, and, if necessary, make it entertaining and not informative. More sites (and not only Lincoln sites), more facts, more fun.

 

Springfield thus has come to remind me of the dinner host who, after you’ve eaten, insists you stay and look at their vacation slides. The result has been the visitor centers that tell tourists what they are about to see, interpretive exhibits, audio-visual extravaganzas—and visitor numbers that, adjusted for population growth, get smaller and smaller by the year.

 

The tourism industry was a frequent topic of mine mainly because it offered irresistible targets for mockery. But I’d no idea until I prepared this archives just how many time I’d written about it. The explanation is that I care about history and entertain a vain hope that it can be made intelligible and relevant to a wider audience. And it's an easy target.