“Preserve America”: A Grounded Study of History, Heritage, and Tourism in a Small Town

Abstract

In 1960, the town of Weston, Missouri, began preparing for exponential population growth over the next thirty years. When the town’s population did not balloon by the start of the 1980s, business and municipal leaders in Weston were forced to redirect their focus toward revitalizing and addressing the present day’s decay. In very little time the efforts to revitalize and bring the citizens the services and amenities they needed and required took a backseat to the larger goal of becoming a site of attraction for tourists. The solution favored by Weston, and many other real and fictional small towns, was to delve into and market their local history. Weston was not the first town in the United States to try and succeed at heritage tourism; heritage tourism has been a saving grace for small towns and even bigger cities for well over one hundred years. Where we also witness success in heritage tourism is on television. Fictional small towns have illustrated dire need in the wake of decay, eventually turning to tourism. Much like Weston, these towns create historical museums, plan large festivals, and coordinate reenactments of significant historical moments. Fictional or not, small towns are expected to solve their blight on their own, by turning to local businesses, municipal taxes, and an ever-shrinking pot of federal funds. This shift from preservation for the sake of local and national memory fits into the larger framework of neoliberalism as it demonstrates preservation and the commodification of history as one of the only economic tools available to struggling small towns and ignores the larger economic processes at work that largely disadvantage rural small towns. This paper argues that Weston’s shift in focus from revitalization toward establishing an economy of heritage tourism is based on the neoliberalization of historic preservation and is presented as the only route to economic and population growth. Further, this reliance on heritage tourism as the primary solution for small towns facing economic struggles is so embedded in the idea of “small town America” that as it is occurring in small towns across the country, it is also being simulated in popular television.