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June 2, 2008

History in the making | Maine groups embrace heritage tourism to bring visitors — and their wallets — to town

By Kerry Elson
In Gail Worden's eyes, southern Piscataquis County hasn't had its fair share of tourists. Worden is a resident of Sangerville, a town of 1,270 just outside Dover-Foxcroft, and she runs a local nonprofit health club called Friends of Community Fitness. Worden says visitors typically drive right through the old mill towns of Milo, Monson and Dover-Foxcroft on their way to Katahdin or Moosehead Lake.

Worden wants those visitors to stop and stay awhile. The area could use an economic boost, she says. Decades ago, the area was thriving: Rich landowners bought land and set up mills, and workers followed, establishing towns like Sebec and Monson. Over the last several years, some of those mills have closed, and many residents have left to find jobs elsewhere. "It's a time for the whole economic climate to change and be a little more versatile," she says.

The area is still relatively undeveloped, with few restaurants or hotels to accommodate visitors. But Worden says its rural character is an asset. She and a group of volunteers are planning to market that asset to tourists, hoping increased traffic will spur development in the region's struggling downtowns.

Worden's first project is a self-guided driving tour of the area, which she's dubbed "The Villages of Piscataquis County." The $35,000 project includes interpretive signs at as many as 30 sites in 15 towns, as well as a website, brochures and an audio tour on CD that visitors could listen to during the 134-mile trip. Worden and a group of volunteers from the Piscataquis County Economic Development Council, a nonprofit in Dover-Foxcroft, have installed six signs since late 2006 with grants from the Maine Humanities Council and the PCEDC. They plan to complete the project by summer 2009.

"These days the area is much smaller than it used to be," she says. "We're remembering the heyday and trying to resurrect it."

Worden's group is one of several in Maine experimenting with heritage tourism ˆ— a broad category that includes historical society museums, scenic byways and tours of landmarks that played an important role in a region's economy. Heritage tourism has grown in the last several years as communities have become more concerned about historic preservation, according to Amy Webb, director of the heritage tourism program at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, based in Washington, D.C.

"For a long time, tourism was about getting as many heads and beds as you could," she says. "At a certain point, people realized that more tourism can degrade the location."

If done right, historic sites and heritage tours can be a cash cow, too. According to a 2004 study from the Travel Industry Association of America, visitors to historic sites stay longer and spend more than those who travel to, for example, resorts, casinos and amusement parks.

Several Maine nonprofits and municipalities want to tap those moneyed visitors. Maine Freedom Trails Inc., a nonprofit in Portland, last July completed the Portland Freedom Trail, a walking tour of Portland sites linked to the Underground Railroad. Last November, the Maine Acadian Heritage Council completed its own audio driving tour of the St. John Valley. And in April, the towns of Portland and Saco received nearly $100,000 combined from Preserve America, a federal historic preservation program.

And yet, as more towns print brochures and record audio tours, the competition for visitors increases, making it more difficult to stand out. "There has been an explosion in new museums and new heritage trails and new scenic byways," says Webb. "The traveler has many more places to go." Many groups are relying on volunteer hours and limited grant funding to set up their programs, and then have little left over for marketing. Groups can spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on projects that end up gathering dust.

Selling the story

Marketing is the key to a successful heritage tourism project, according to Abbe Levin, a consultant in Boothbay who's worked with the Maine Office of Tourism on historic landmark tours and downtown development efforts. "This is all about making these places come alive," she says.

Some projects, however, have failed to meet high expectations. When the $6.6 million Downeast Heritage Museum opened in Calais in 2004, for example, it hoped to draw 90,000 visitors a year. In 2005, just 1,700 visited the museum. (For more on the museum, see "Destination unknown," Aug. 21, 2006). By last February, the museum's board of directors wasn't sure the debt-burdened museum would open this year, according to the Associated Press. (Calls and an e-mail to the museum were not returned by press time.)

Other scenic byways and historic sites in Maine have been modestly successful. In 2006, Levin helped produce a self-guided driving tour of Route 201, a federally-designated scenic byway, for a Maine nonprofit called the Kennebec Chaudiere International Heritage Corridor Corp. The 230-mile trip runs from Bath to Jackman and onto Quebec City, following the Kennebec River in Maine and the Chaudiere River in Canada.

The nonprofit received $50,000 from the state legislature in 2003 to hire Levin and market the tour. In 2006, the group printed 60,000 free guidebooks and 5,000 audio guides on CDs, which it sold for $10.50 each at state visitors' centers and chambers of commerce. The group is printing more books this year, with $8,000 reserved from the initial grant, according to Carolann Ouellette, a member of the nonprofit's board of directors and now deputy director of the Maine Office of Tourism.

Promoting Route 201 as a heritage site may have helped at least one business. Russell Walters runs Northern Outdoors, a rafting company and resort on Route 201 in The Forks. He says summer walk-in traffic has increased 20%-30% over the last three or four years, to 40-50 people per day. Most of those visitors, he says, were "just driving around and exploring" Route 201, which received federal scenic byway designation in 2000, making it eligible for improvement grants. "We are definitely seeing an increase in visitation from people seeing scenic byways," says Russell.

Though the first run of the guidebooks have all been sold, some of the CDs haven't. One of the main CD sellers, the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce in Waterville, has sold 160 CDs since late 2006, according to Jill VanGorden, the chamber's administrative assistant. To see a return on the investment, Ouellette says, the group needs to promote the tour more heavily. "We really in essence failed to pull together a good marketing effort," she says, adding that one plan is to promote the tour during Quebec's 400th anniversary celebration in July.

Striking a balance

While the nonprofits behind heritage tourism projects want visitors, they don't want to turn historic sites into theme parks.

It's a hard balance to strike, says Rachel Talbot Ross, who's in charge of the Portland Freedom Trail. "We don't want to turn this into a kind of Disneyland experience," she says.

Ross, director of the city of Portland's Office of Equal Opportunity and Multicultural Affairs, also is the president of the local NAACP chapter. While local historian Wells Staley-Mays has given informal tours of the sites since 1999, Ross says she wanted to further highlight Portland's somewhat hidden contribution to the abolitionist movement. She installed the trail's 13 interpretive bronze-and-granite signs last July, and plans to install another three this July to mark the trail's one-year anniversary.

Though Ross started the $260,000 project with altruistic goals, she now realizes attracting tour groups can also benefit the local economy. Ross hopes to capitalize on increased interest nationally in African-American heritage trails ˆ— Webb, at the National Historic Trust, says sites and heritage trails focused on ethnic groups are uniquely popular now. "Traditionally, [historic] sites celebrated the wealthy, white male," she says, but at sites like the Portland Freedom Trail, "you're learning about people who may have been more like you."

Ross and a group of volunteers have distributed brochures at area restaurants, the Maine Historical Society, and the city's cruise ship port, and they've spoken at conventions focused on African-American genealogy. That work tripled the number of walkers on the 1.4 mile tour, from around 650 when Staley-Mays began giving informal trail tours to more than 2,000 people last year, including groups from the New England chapter of the Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society and Maine Tour Connection. And while the tour is free, the groups spend while they're here. "We do let them off on Exchange Street to let them shop 'til they drop," says Staley-Mays.

Ross says she's begun working with Abbe Levin, the Boothbay consultant, to improve the trail's marketing strategy. Like others seeking to boost visitor numbers through heritage tourism efforts, Ross has discovered that historic sites are only as interesting as the stories behind them. "Putting markers in the ground is the easiest thing to do," she says. "The hardest thing is to develop the narrative of the trail so it can engage people, so it's not like a mandatory history lesson."

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