ANN ARBOR—Just as the future of travel by rail in America seems in jeopardy, we can travel back in time to summer vacations planned around excursions via railroads and steamboats.

Without having to negotiate fares through a travel agent or Internet deals, visitors to the University of Michigan’s exhibition “Summer Paradise” can let their minds travel to Block Island, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Cape Cod, Niagara, Mackinac Island and the Canadian Rockies. “Summer Paradise: The Role of the Railroads and Steamboats in Creating the Modern American Vacation” can be viewed at U-M’s Clements Library through Sept. 27 weekdays from 1-4:45 p.m. The commercial success of railroads and steamboats to move natural resources with great efficiency on major rivers and complex coastal waters, opened those areas to the marketing of recreational travel and at the same time opened a new source of revenue for these transportation modes. The first American travelers did so to escape large cities for the sake of their health thereby avoiding yellow fever, tuberculosis and unsanitary conditions that peaked during the hot summers.

“Those who could afford the time and expense of the stagecoach trip to Virginia Springs, Saratoga or Newport would find others of the same class,” says the exhibit’s curator Clayton Lewis, curator of the Library’s Graphics Division. “Together they built a summer society of affluent ease that would become legendary.” By the end of the Civil War, it became reasonable for a less affluent level of American society to take a week or two out of the city. The quick construction of spectacular resort hotels along rail lines and the new larger market for tourism led to a boom in the development of additional vacation destinations. Through travel albums and journals, a library visitor can explore these 19th century vacation destinations — a welcome contrast to the dense smoke of 19th century cities. As tourism became more popular, its accompanying industry provided colorful and glitzy travel guides and literature designed to entice the curious public. So did state governments who were promoting tourism within their boundaries.

“The automobile and air transportation systems that would ultimately kill the rail and steamboat networks were originally seen as an adjunct to the services offered by trains and boats,” Lewis says. And promotional literature for the nation’s new highways was developed along the same themes as promotions for the railroad and steamboat lines. When the Interstate Highway System was introduced in the 1950s, the competition from automobile travel proved to be overwhelming. “Hotels and boats of wood construction were not made to last into an era of steel and concrete,” Lewis says.

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