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Signatures of Commerce in Small-Town Hotel GuestRegisters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

David A. Fyfe  and
Deryck W. Holdsworth
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Abstract

Guest registers for six commercial hotels are analyzed to reveal everyday,nonmigratory travel patterns associated with small towns and villages in theupper Susquehanna valleys of New York and Pennsylvania at the turn of thetwentieth century. The residences of guests are mapped using geographicinformation system (GIS) software and reveal two broad patterns of connectivity,a translocal cluster of visitors from places within the immediate vicinity and aset of visitors from more distant places up the urban system. Census anddirectory data identify many repeat visitors, such as hucksters and peddlersextending the reach of rural stores and merchants traveling circuits as agentsof metropolitan manufacturing centers. In addition to commercial travelers, thepresence of traveling entertainments, such as vaudeville acts and circuses, inhotel guest registers reveals shifts in American popular culture andentertainments on small-town Main Streets. These registers offer a fixed windowonto a mobile world, and the signatures hint at the types of connections betweenthese settlements and the outside world.

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Social Science History , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 17 - 45
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Copyright © Social Science History Association 2009 

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