Directing the city to the country

Abstract

In his 1879 guidebook to the Wisconsin Dells, Patrick Donan indicated photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett's centrality as a promoter of tourism for the region:

Lying as these marvelously picturesque and beautiful Dells scenes do, so near the great centers of travel, it is strange that they have not long since taken rank among the world's most fumed resorts for lovers of nature in her wildest moods; but the truth is that, ten years ago, they were utterly unknown, none but the untutored eyes of Winnebago Indians or wilder raftsmen and hunters having ever beheld them, and even yet they have never been fully explored. Public attention to them has been directed to them, in the last four or five years, chiefly through the efforts of three citizens of Kilbourn, who deserve to be canonized as the tallest patron saints in the calendar of the Wisconsin Dells. The first of this appreciative and public spirited trinity [is] H.H. Bennett, ... an enthusiastic artist ... (who] is rapidly becoming known as a master of his art.