March 2007 Contested Soil Sounding a call to attract Baby Boomer dollars to where armies collided 150 years ago By Allison Gorman
Five years ago, a single road drained the economy of Chickamauga, Ga. A bypass designed to reroute commuter traffic bisecting Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park, the nation’s biggest and oldest preserved battlefield, also steered local dollars away from the small town adjacent to it. “We used to have a vibrant mom-and-pop retail center. Laundromats, auto parts, clothing stores—anything you needed to live, you could buy right here in Chickamauga,” says John Culpepper, city utilities manager. “That’s gone.”
Having surrendered its retail business to strip malls, Chickamauga has pinned its economic hopes on the battlefield itself and on “heritage tourism,” an industry whose growing popularity has been quantified by recent research. According to Beth Jones, director of the Southeast Tennessee Development District, the numbers are encouraging: Civil War tourists have more disposable income, visit longer and spend significantly more money than typical tourists—and they are baby boomers. “The sheer numbers make their economic impact more pronounced,” she says.
With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War just four years away, Culpepper hopes to pull in tourist dollars well beyond the estimated $36 million a year the battlefield and its 974,000 annual visitors now add to the area economy. He’s helping coordinate commemorative efforts between Northwest Georgia and Southeast Tennessee, once a contiguous war zone that included Chickamauga Battlefield as well as Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain, which straddles both states. “Forget that line; armies didn’t recognize that line,” Culpepper says.
Tennessee, in particular, stands to benefit from its status as the only state designated in its entirety as a Civil War National Heritage Area. As such, it receives $400,000 in annual federal funding, which last year was parlayed into $1.33 million through leveraged spending by nonprofits and private matching funds. Jones says her organization is soliciting guidance from the state heritage area in creating signage and brochures to support Civil War driving tours; enthusiasts could follow a campaign trail, visiting (and spending money in) historically significant sites along the way.
With the Chickamauga-Chattanooga trail stretching as far west as Tullahoma, Culpepper says, the war’s sesquicentennial could breathe new life into any number of vintage towns like his. “You go down to Atlanta, and there’s nothing left,” he says. “It’s got buildings sitting where trench lines were. But stand on the east brow of Lookout Mountain and you’ll see the same sights the union soldiers saw in September of 1863. Our history is our future.”
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