About That “Wall Street Journal” Article Showing Declining Interest in Civil War

Many of you know John Hennessy. He is a historian for the National Park Service who has worked at Manassas and Fredericksburg. He just posted an examination of the statistics that underlay the widely circulated Wall Street Journal article on declining interest in Civil War Battlefields. Here is what he said on facebook:

On the WSJ Piece about Visitation to NPS Battlefield Sites

Since the WSJ published its piece on declining interest in the Civil War last weekend, it’s been making the rounds. I have a few things to say.

Of course the nature and extent of interest in history and the Civil War has changed. There’s no denying that. It’s been changing, upward, downward, and in swirls, since my first day at Manassas in June 1981.

The WSJ chose 1970 as their baseline for comparison. I’m not sure why, or even from whence their statistics come. I do know this: however it was that the NPS counted visitors in 1970 is different than it is today. The NPS had no systematic way of counting visitors prior to the mid-1980s, and even today, various parks count visitors in different ways.

And even those methods, with their (to me) mysterious algorithms, change fairly frequently. By way of example, at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania NMP, in 2010, the statistics gurus changed the algorithm for counting “recreation visits” to the park, and our numbers rose from 460,000 to more than 900,000. I can assure you that our visitation did not nearly double–just our way of counting it did. I don’t know if the old figure or the new figure is more accurate (I suspect the latter), but it all points out the danger of using government statistics.

The WSJ article claims that visitation at Gettysburg is today 14% of what it was in 1970. I suspect most of that change is in fact a reflection of how visitors have been counted. But I think the gist of the WSJ article is to suggest a more recent dive in interest.

So let’s look at that–some real numbers, going back to 1995–a time when interest in the Civil War was high in the wake of Glory, Ken Burns, and the Gettysburg movie. The surest and most consistent way to count visitors for comparative purposes is to count those who come in the doors of various visitor facilities. If you come into the space, we count you. It’s almost a religion in most NPS areas. No algorithms involved. Just a person with a clicker. Not perfect, but consistent and timeless.

Here are the numbers for various parks, counting visitors into their visitor centers and other contact stations (at FRSP we count visitors at two visitor centers and three historic structures).

Park 1995 2018 Trend

Gettysburg 1,147,305 1,130,595 FLAT
Antietam , 158,330 227,808 UP
FRSP 136,258 165,828 UP
Appomattox 106,140 66,413 DOWN
Chick-Chatt 162,344 92,299 DOWN

I don’t have numbers from 1995 for Manassas, but I can assure you that the 131,831 coming into their buildings last year was a great deal more than the numbers that arrived in the 1990s. [I am waiting on numbers from Vicksburg and Shiloh).

The visitation at all these parks has eroded in the last few years, but the drop is well within the normal fluctuations we have seen since the NPS started publishing park-level stats in 1992. And the 25-year trend is, generally, about flat, with a bump upward in the late 90s.

This is not to say that visitation isn’t changing and won’t change more. It is. And we who work at these sites feel it. But I thought it might be helpful to put some hard data out there so you can draw your own conclusions.

One personal observation: While the level of interest in the war will continue to evolve, and perhaps downward, there is no question in my mind that we have far more people USING the parks today than we have ever had. I suspect that’s true at Gettysburg too.