This article presents Tony Wise?s 20th-century Wisconsin tourist attraction,
Historyland, as a case study which unpacks the idea of civic landscape
manipulation as historiographic operation. Beginning in 1954, Wise?s
enterprise collected and displayed artifacts from the 19th-century logging
industry of northern Wisconsin and the town of Hayward. Historyland
featured an ?authentic? logging camp and an Indian Village with costumed
performers. The enterprise culminated in the 1960s with the physical
removal and relocation of Hayward?s historic buildings to the tourist site,
where they were rearranged and staged as ?Old Hayward?. Approaching
the subject from a theatre history and theory background, this article looks
at the ways Historyland produced heritage and nostalgia as touristic
commodities through performance, and examines the economic
repercussions of staging the history of a town by actively segregating the
old from the contemporary elements. |