Toward a Consumer Culture: "Adirondack Murray" and the Wilderness Vacation

Abstract

peutic or consumer culture in the late nineteenth century has been well documented. 1 The material underpinnings for this process seem relatively clear. The industrialization of America created greater material abundance and the opportunity for more leisure. The availability of products and leisure, however, was not an automatic sanction for their enjoyment by the American people nor did it indicate how they should be used. Indeed, the value placed on work and salvation in a Protestant culture could and did limit the exercise of such enjoyment and influence its content. Nonetheless, among those groups in the cities who had access to the new opportunities, there was considerable pressure as the nineteenth century wore on for the traditional custodians of culture to address this issue of consumption in the broadest sense. Affluent congregations needed guidance in how to use their time and money and ministers could provide it. Among the most influential of these leaders was William Henry Harrison lecturer, adventurer and minister of the Park Street Congregational Church of Boston. Murray was known to contemporaries both as the Beecher of Boston and as the Frank Forester of his day. Despite the fact that he served for four years as minister of one of America's most prestigious churches and published numerous volumes of sermons, his contemporaries were more likely to think of him as Murray, the advocate of wilderness camp-life. Indeed, the publication of Adventures in the Wilderness or Camp-life in the Adirondacks in 1869, according to Wendell Phillips, kindled a thousand campfires and taught a thousand pens how to write of nature.2 The coincident publication of Adventures in the Wilderness and the flood of summer tourists to the Adirondack region has led historians to argue a causal connection between these two events. In fact, although Murray's book must have speeded the process, it was inevitable that a wilderness area so close to major urban centers should attract visitors once adequate transportation and tourist accommodations were pro