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Book Review
| Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age, 1860–1900. By David L. Richards. Durham and Hanover, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press and University Press of New England, 2005. x + 313 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $45.00.
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| Maine's Poland Spring resort is perhaps best known to readers as the original source for the bottled water that still bears its name. But as David Richards's compelling book demonstrates, the resort was also a paragon of Gilded Age American culture—a place where the class-based values, anxieties, and aspirations held by many during the last decades of the nineteenth century found expression in a specific tourist economy. Poland Spring offers a detailed account of the resort and its owners, the Rickers, who transformed the family homestead into a five-thousand-acre complex with grand hotels, pleasure grounds, a working farm, and a spring house where guests could drink the resort's renowned water. Richards draws on insights from business, social, and environmental histories to tell his story. But his primary goal is to craft a cultural history of the Gilded Age by linking the story of Poland Spring to larger cultural tensions between modernity and antimodernity prevalent in American society at the time. Poland Spring, Richards argues, was simultaneously an escape from the worst of late-nineteenth-century urban life as well as a modern "summer city" unto itself. It was a place where nostalgic, antimodern sentiment blended with sophisticated urbanity and a faith in material achievement. |
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Richards explores this "dialectic between modernity and antimodernity" through nine chapters grouped into three sections, each of which begins with its own short introduction. The first section, "The People of Progress," explores the progressive attitudes shared by the resort's proprietors and its urban patrons. The second, "The Masquerade of Antimodernity," argues that antimodernism frequently masked the modernist intentions guiding the resort's construction and the expectations of its visitors. The book's final section, "The Search for a Middle Landscape," describes how vestiges of an antimodern countryside overlapped at the resort with those of modern urban life, yielding a middle landscape of "vivid contrasts." |
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Environmental historians will likely find Richards's final section of particular interest, for it is here that he grounds his arguments most effectively in discussions about nature and the transformation of material space. (Those discussions, however, would have benefited from maps and diagrams of the resort.) In particular, researchers interested in intersections between tourism, environment, and Gilded Age ideals will find value in his discussions of farm-tourism relations and changing patterns of outdoor recreation. |
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Poland Spring is well-written, detailed, and impressively researched; Richards clearly has command of a tremendous body of knowledge about the resort. But because the book focuses so exclusively on Poland Spring, it must repeatedly convince readers that the particulars it describes matter to the book's larger arguments. Richards is clearly aware of this challenge, and he works hard to connect local events to national trends. His short introductions to each section, for instance, provide valuable and effective frames at key points along the way. Yet there are places in the book where Richards's extended examples do not always feel as if they are advancing his arguments as effectively or efficiently as they might, and there are places where readers might want to see more explicit connections drawn between this resort and others, whether regionally or nationally. Nonetheless, Poland Spring's degree of intimacy and specificity remains a strength of the book as well—one that will undoubtedly benefit researchers with interests in nineteenth-century tourism and the Gilded Age. |
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Blake Harrison is a historical and cultural geographer whose work has explored landscape, identity, and tourism in New England. He has taught at Montana State University, Yale University, and Quinnipiac University. His current project is a book-length study on migrant farm labor in New England. |
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