Historic Tourism is All About Romance, Folks  – To Bring Visitors, You Have to Tell a Story

By Pauline Masson –

As tourist attractions go, Pacific is a landmark haven – with spots to highlight on a travel brochure  – white silica bluffs, a rail fan pavilion in the heart of Old Town, bluff top visitor sites at Blackburn Park and Jensen’s Point, and – for better or worse – its latent adoption of the Red Cedar Inn.

I’ve been writing about the Red Cedar for for thirty years. I came across this piece that I wrote in my I Have to tell you . . . column in the Washington Missourian. I want to share it now, because it was fun and it reflects something that doesn’t happen all that often, a dream come true. It’s a bit long, but I liked it. Now, remember this was January, 2009.

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Pacific needs a tourist attraction. 

Now that we have a bed tax to provide funds to attract visitors and we have a tourism committee to determine the best way to get our message to people who might visit, we need an edifice to capture the emerging qualities of the community.

I came to this conclusion last week after reading in a London newspaper that the Heritage Lottery Foundation had awarded 31 million pounds sterling (About $15.5 million U.S. dollars) to conserve two old wooden ships that, between them, attract an estimated seven million people to London every year.

The way I figure it that’s about $2 per tourist. It’s a number a person could get his or her mind around.

So why does it work? Why would people travel from Hong Kong or Omaha or the south of France for that matter to see these old boats. It appears to me that it’s all about spell binding – the kind of story telling that captures the excitement of another time. So here’s the story.  

In Portsmouth, the conservationists are preparing to spend their share, 21 million pounds, to build a museum around the Mary Rose, the 16^th Century Henry VIII flagship, which also happened to be the country’s first real warship and the first ship in all of history that could fire a broadside, which didn’t work out all that well for the Mary Rose.

She sank accidentally in 1545 when she was attempting to fire all the cannons on one of her sides as 200 soldiers in full body armor surged near the rail ready to board an enemy ship. She leaned too far into the waves with all her gun ports open, took on water and sank.

She lay at the bottom of the Solent for 437 years. When she was raised to the surface in 1982 such a huge crowd lined the wharf to see the old hull brought in to Portsmouth harbor that locals knew they had a tourist attraction.

When she was in service the Mary Rose was a big lumbering caravel that stood tall in the water and was loaded down with more than a hundred guns. 

In full sail, she would have been pretty enough with her twenty or so big canvas sails strung along three masts.

And so in imagination it is the glamour and adventure of the past that brings the hordes to stand in the museum and stare at the old wooden hull that is being bathed in a continual spray of cold water and some kind of chemical. In 2011 the sprays will be turned off and allowed to dry then the hull will be baked hard as glass. Who wouldn’t want to see her?

But my heart is really down in Greenwich, where the conservation group is going to spend 10 million pounds to restore the Cutty Sark.

You might remember the Cutty Sark was one of those China tea clipper ships that were long and low and so beautiful when they were under sail they took your breath away. They did mine anyway.

The age of all the tea clippers in all the world didn’t last much longer than the life of the Mary Rose. 

For about two decades in the 1850s and 1860s they raced across two oceans to bring each new crop of tea leaves to the thirsty British – a blink of the eye the life of sailing ships.

They had four masts and could carry 35 sails at full rigging. They were called clippers because of the way they clipped through the water, cutting the trip from Canton to London from upwards of 200 days to as short as 97 days.

The first ship into port could sell its cargo as premium prices, which prompted a series of ocean races that some had ten or twelve clippers sailing within eyesight of each other.

The introduction of the steam ship cut short this glorious age of sailing ships.

In all only 24 clippers were built by American or British companies. The Cutty Sark was one of the last. After the steam ships took over commercial shipping, the life of beautiful sailing ships was left to the whims of private owners.

I sailed for a week at Newport Rhode Island in 1990, choosing the week that the Plymouth to Newport single hand race would end there – where a few of the old twelve-meter boats, long and low like the tea clippers, relived the romance of sailing ships.

In Greenwich they were half way through a 25 million pound conservation project when a fire almost consumed the Cutty Sark. But they didn’t give up, they began rebuilding the burned parts and built a shelter over her.

When I was in Greenwich the Cutty Sark sat on a set of cradles along a boardwalk that led into a small market area.  You could buy fish and chips served in a piece of folded newspaper. You could also buy expensive natural wool sweaters – those that the sailors wear that retain body heat in the toughest weather because the animal lanolin has not been removed.

I didn’t buy one. I stood and stared at the Cutty Sark and ate my fish and chips (fried potatoes) from my little makeshift newspaper wrapper.

This is all romance folks, living on dreams of an exciting past, where all it takes to entice people to share your little bit of history is a bit of story telling.

So here we are in Pacific, looking for a tourist attraction, while we sit on historic Route 66 with a bit of the past languishing at the eastern border of the town.

The Red Cedar Inn lived longer than either the clipper ships or the Mary Rose. What she shared with them is that she was a symbol of her era, the time when privately owned automobiles could travel from Chicago to Los Angeles on one road.

Many of the travelers stopped at the distinctive cedar log building for a hot lunch or a cold drink. When Good Morning America filmed the entire length of Route 66 for a TV documentary the crew members said on national television that their favorite stop on Rt. 66 was the Red Cedar Inn in Pacific, Missouri. 

Closer to home, famous baseball players and local television news people hung out there.

There are enough stories about the Red Cedar to fill a tourism brochure and then some.

Route 66 was romance and adventure American style. Now that we have interstate highways, automobiles of subtle comfort and air travel, you’d think we’d just abandon the old Mother Road and her series of motels, roadside stands and occasional really good restaurants like the Red Cedar Inn. 

But people keep making the drive. And there stands the Red Cedar, just inside the city limits, sturdy as a wooden ship that lived through the glory days of Route 66 and the current renaissance.

This is not my first (and probably won’t be my last) attempt to interest city father and tourism officials in considering building a tourism marketing campaign around the Red Cedar.

At the Cutty Sark, they have a gift shop where you can buy a hundred brands of tea, China tea cups emblazoned with blue clipper ships in full sail, tea cozies, crumpets, scones, pins and medallions, coasters and stationery embossed with the Cutty Sark. There are hundreds of way to remind you of your trip to the historic ship and they bring in hundreds of thousands pounds (dollars) each year to help preserve and market the site.

It occurs to me that all it takes to create a tourist attraction – if you happen to have an edifice of real substance – is imagination and a few marketing dollars.

I have to tell you . . . if we don’t combine resources to market the Red Cedar Inn, we’re missing the boat.

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We finally did it. And we’re almost ready to live the dream. Let’s celebrate.