The staging of history: theatrical,temporal and economic borders of Historyland

Abstract

This article presents Tony Wise’s 20th-century Wisconsin tourist attraction, Historyland, as a case study which unpacks the idea of civic landscape manipulation as historiographic operation. Beginning in 1954, Wise’s enterprise collected and displayed artifacts from the 19th-century logging industry of northern Wisconsin and the town of Hayward. Historyland featured an ‘authentic’ logging camp and an Indian Village with costumed performers. The enterprise culminated in the 1960s with the physical removal and relocation of Hayward’s historic buildings to the tourist site, where they were rearranged and staged as ‘Old Hayward’. Approaching the subject from a theatre history and theory background, this article looks at the ways Historyland produced heritage and nostalgia as touristic commodities through performance, and examines the economic repercussions of staging the history of a town by actively segregating the old from the contemporary elements.