Slavery Romanticized: Spectacle Lynching and Heritage Tourism

It is hard to imagine any marketing expert today using the “romantic period” of slavery to promote “Heritage Tourism.”  However, in 1930s North Florida, that is exactly what Pearce Lewis, proprietor of the Lewis Turpentine Still and Plantation located in Brooksville, Florida, did in a promotional brochure. 

In an effort to acquire a piece of the almighty Florida tourism dollar, adults were charged 35 cents and children 10 cents in order to explore the plantation and experience “real plantation life...meeting and talking to authentic pre-Civil War slaves,” who apparently are unable (read: likely warned not to) ruminate on numbers or facts surrounding the turpentine business.  Those who lived and worked on the plantation are described as “carefree” and “happy.”

Lewis Turpentine Still and Plantation, Tourism Brochure

In sharp contrast with its colorful and ebullient tourism industry is Florida’s reputation for lynching, 61 reported lynching’s of African-Americans between 1921 and 1946.  One of Florida’s most infamous public lynching’s occurred in Marianna, Florida in 1934, roughly the same time tourists would be flocking to witness the sheer joy of slavery at the Lewis Plantation about 300 miles south.  After torturing and mutilating farm laborer Claude Neal, “Heritage Tourism” would reach a new level of brutality when Neal was left hanging overnight followed by photos of his hanging body being sold alongside an exhibition of his fingers and toes.

The Story of Florida's Last Spectacle Lynching: Claude Neal

When one considers the opposite experiences depicted of African-Americans in the 1930s south, happy-go-lucky turpentine workers at the Lewis Plantation, versus a victim of “spectacle lynching,” itself a form of theater in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, was there even an alternative in the post-Reconstruction South, specifically on the Lewis Plantation, of not playing to your audience.