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Gettysburg and Lancaster County: Traveling down different roads

The Amish Stuff Etc. store on Route 30 in Lancaster County did a booming business with many out-of-town visitors on a recent Saturday. While much of what you'll find in the store is imported - including quilts and Amish figurines - Zook's hex signs were made locally. (Daily Record/Sunday News - Bil Bowden)

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If you ask Susie Riehl why she opened her Lancaster County farm to tour buses and curious tourists, she'll tell you she simply wasn't thinking.

"We don't even have any peace and quiet now back here," she said. Riehl's Quilts & Crafts, her family's business, occupies a building just steps from their farmhouse and barn.

Riehl is Amish. Her family grows corn and alfalfa and milks 30 cows. She's a housewife, mother and grandmother. But she's also a businesswoman. That last title seems to be why she has dealt with the relentless stream of visitors for 14 years.

Most of what she sells is handmade, sewn by 170 local families looking for supplemental income. "It's

Amish buggies can be found throughout Lancaster County, but they're especially common near Strasburg, in the heart of Amish Country. Tourists who don't venture from Route 30 may not find the most authentic Amish experiences. (Daily Record/Sunday News - Bil Bowden)

helping so many families - I guess that's what keeps us going," she said.

Riehl's struggle is just one example of the pressures tourism brings to the world's most significant historic destinations.

Lancaster County's Amish country, as well as the Hallowed Ground Corridor from Gettysburg to Virginia, were listed in the December issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine among the 109 most important historic places on Earth.

But both ranked fourth worst when it comes to promoting sustainable tourism and destination stewardship - how authentically they preserve their past, manage tourism and withstand the pressures of development.

Ed McMahon, a senior resident fellow for sustainable development at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of "Better Models for Development in Pennsylvania," said both places need to work on preserving what makes them unique, or they risk losing tourism:

"The more any place comes to look just like every place else, the less reason there is to go there."

* * *

While each destination faces its own unique challenges, both struggle with over-commercialization, suburban sprawl, billboard pollution and a lack of coordinated regional planning.

Experts who ranked Lancaster County said the culture of the Amish is lost "amid the sprawl and schlock" of built-up tourist towns.

"Why can we not celebrate a historic area without making cheap junk shops, especially when the local handicrafts are of such excellent quality?" asked one member of the international panel.

Billboard pollution along the Route 15 corridor near Gettysburg takes away from the beauty of the surrounding landscape, said Jonathan Tourtellot, director and geotourism editor for National Geographic Traveler.

He said while downtown Gettysburg is improving, and the National Military Park is holding steady, the areas around both are besieged by development, traffic and other problems related to suburban sprawl.

Experts said the history of the corridor is eclipsed by the excess of development.

"McMansions have already proliferated like mushrooms along this corridor," a survey judge noted, "undermining the historical and ecological integrity and aesthetic appeal of the region."

Tourtellot said it's not too late for both destinations to turn things around, but added, "The deeper you're in, the harder it is to get out."

In Lancaster, the county planning commission has begun promoting heritage tourism and community reinvestment.

It adopted a growth-management plan that suggests directing future development to places such as the already commercial strip along Route 30. A Route 30 Gateway study is in the works to figure out how to make the county's "Main Street" more attractive, walkable and bikeable.

"Our product is our landscape, our culture and our architecture, so we have to be very conscious of that," said Scott Standish, the commission's director of heritage

Signs like this one are common along Route 30 east of Gettysburg. The downtown is seeing a resurgence in tourism from visitors who have already seen the battlefield and done the tourbus thing. (Daily Record/Sunday News - Bil Bowden)

He knows some items sold in the city's Central Market are made offshore and passed off as local. He also thinks the traveling public is more educated these days and won't be so easily fooled.

The county's heritage program helps tourists by using a tag to certify authentic products, tours, events and lodging. Standish likens it to a local Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

"So when you pick up that quilt at Central Market, you'll know it was handmade by Amish using traditional methods and there will be a story that comes with it to tell you all about that."

Standish said although the Amish and their lifestyle are what draw some tourists to the area, that story isn't always told in the most culturally sensitive way.

McMahon recalls one trip along Route 30 with his daughter. As they passed Dutch Wonderland, she turned to him and said, "Gee Daddy, I didn't know the Amish lived in castles."

"A lot of times people go (to Lancaster County) once and they never come back because they feel a sense of disappointment," McMahon said.

Chances are, those folks never found the back roads that would lead them to homemade root beer stands, country lanes, an old-time general store and a bake shop with to-die-for local specialties made daily.

"The best marketing a place can have is word of mouth - and when the reality of a place meets or exceeds the image you've been sold through marketing and promotion," McMahon said. That's why he applauds the county's heritage tourism and preservation efforts.

McMahon said the power of the Hallowed Ground Corridor is that it links several towns that played important roles in the nation's history.

The problem is that it crosses three states and numerous local entities, making coordination difficult.

As the Washington, D.C., suburbs creep north along Route 15, so does the corresponding traffic and commercial and residential development, which is changing the view from the road. "It used to be that stretch of 15 in Maryland was one of the prettiest roads in the state, but now you have one townhouse development after another down to Frederick."

McMahon said highway departments in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia need to work together to make the corridor look like an actual parkway - something akin to DC's Rock Creek Parkway or the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina. Shoulders planted with grass and faced in stone, medians planted with trees.

Experts who ranked the corridor among the world's worst preserved cited development pressures and billboard pollution. They said that although the stretch of Route 15 in Pennsylvania is much cleaner than, say, Route 30 through York County, more could be done to preserve the view from the road.

McMahon cites Hershey and Montgomery County, Md. - just outside D.C. - as places that used to be overrun with billboards, but are now much improved. "They haven't allowed it for years, so they've disappeared by attrition," he said.

"They're homogenization, commercialization and uglification," he said.

Carl Whitehill of the Gettysburg Convention and Visitors Bureau said his organization is marketing the region as a place for city folk to have experiences they can't get at home. Picking their own fruit, visiting farms and orchards and enjoying the rural countryside and small towns.

"Along with that comes education about these resources," he said. "We certainly want to bring a lot of people here, but we also want to keep this place as hallowed in the future as it is now."

The National Military Park has taken steps in the right direction, according to McMahon.

"It used to be, you'd look down from Cemetery Ridge and they'd say, 'The first line fell there, in the Burger King parking lot," he said. "But it has been systematically restored."

The park service has buried utility wires and bought land so it can raze motels and fast-food joints with the goal of restoring the battlefield to the way it looked in 1863. Whitehill said, "We hope our visitors realize this is something we should be protecting."

Traveler's Tourtellot said he thinks both places are trying to turn the tide, and that's the whole point of putting together lists such as the one in this month's issue: "The idea is to get issues of destination stewardship on the table for public discussion. What we want is for places to try to raise their scores."

771-2034; jvogelsong@ydr.com.

ABOUT THE RANKINGS

Experts from a variety of fields - including historic preservation, architecture, tourism management, travel writing and ecology - rated destinations on a list of 109 widely-known historic places. Panelists were instructed to rank and comment on only the places they were familiar with.

"What we're trying to do is get all points of view on a place," said Jonathan Tourtellot, director and geotourism editor for National Geographic Traveler. He hopes the ratings encourage the places to work harder at preserving their history.

To that end, the magazine partnered with the National Trust for Historic Preservation this year. "They have some programs that these places can take advantage of."

Lancaster County is one of five places from the survey that the National Trust chose to profile in a recent issue of Preservation magazine.

The Preservation story highlights the county's efforts to preserve farmland and a rising interest in local history, but worries that suburban sprawl, a lack of cohesive planning and a convention center expected to open this spring will make things worse.

"The township government pattern makes it very hard," Tourtellot said. "Some people have been trying to promote a more appropriate type of tourism there, but there's still a lot of damage that hasn't been undone."

THE CRITERIA

Experts were asked to consider the following six factors when evaluating destinations for the National Geographic Traveler survey:

Create a forum for representatives of local governmental entities along the corridor to collaborate and coordinate efforts

YORK COUNTY

Although none of York County's historic sites were rated in the National Geographic Traveler survey, experts say it struggles with some of the same challenges as neighboring destinations: billboard pollution, traffic congestion and a proliferation of strip malls and McMansions.

READ MORE

· STORY: Searching for authentic experiences in Gettysburg and Lancaster County

· BLOG: Jen Vogelsong's "Explorer's Backpack"

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