Tauck World Discovery is finalizing plans for its first U.S. tour linked to a major historic event ”“ the Civil War ”“ among multiple trips the Norwalk-based company is promoting linked to the documentaries of Ken Burns.
Other trips include a tour of the American Southwest linked to Burns”™ documentary series on U.S. national parks and a tour of New Orleans to explore the city”™s jazz heritage.
The idea to approach Burns was bandied about during a brainstorming session last year, according to Roger Saterstrom, Tauck”™s product manager for North America.
“We were seeing some renewed interest in the national parks,” Saterstrom said. “We had assumed that it was just part of the overall recovery in the economy, but someone said, ”˜You know, that Ken Burns documentary really got a lot of attention.”™”
With Burns and his collaborator Dayton Duncan expressing interest, it did not take Tauck long to connect the dots to other Burns documentaries ”“ including the iconic Civil War miniseries. The Burns collaboration marks the first time Tauck has pegged a U.S. tour itinerary to a specific historical event, according to Saterstrom.
“We”™ve always had sort of a generalist approach to discovering areas, not particularly focusing on a particular theme or story line,” Saterstrom said. “This is a departure for us.”
Still, Tauck is no stranger to the textbooks, having long touted historic draws on domestic and international trips alike, including one for Charlestown, S.C., and Savannah, Ga., that includes area plantations that capture the age of the antebellum South.
With its roots in Arthur Tauck Sr.”™s first tours during the Great Depression, Tauck today offers two tours of New England heavy on history including a Gilded Age tour of southern New England landmarks such as the cliff-side mansions of Newport, R.I. The second is a separate tour that starts with Revolutionary War landmarks in Boston and Massachusetts, continuing to northern New England sights such as Portland, Maine”™s Old Port district, the Vermont boyhood home of Calvin Coolidge and the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., that showcases the works of one of the premier illustrators of bygone America.
If a tour of rural America”™s experience in the Great Depression might not get many takers ”“ Burns reportedly is preparing a documentary dubbed “The Dust Bowl” ”“ Saterstrom did not say whether other Burns documentary subjects like baseball, Frank Lloyd Wright or the Prohibition era might find themselves the topic of a Tauck tour in a future year.
The stability of a domestic agenda could be a welcome relief for Tauck, which this year has had to grapple with changes to planned itineraries for a number of international trips, including tours to Japan and Egypt.
The Tauck Civil War tour includes the usual rounds of battlefields such as Gettysburg and Appomattox, as well as unusual opportunities such as a private viewing at the National Archives of some of the nation”™s founding documents and participants staging a reenactment of sorts by assuming the role of a Union or Confederate soldier.
Of course Tauck is not the only Connecticut tour operator taking advantage of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Through May, Connecticut has already held a number of events commemorating the anniversary, including a conference at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain coupled with a reenactment. The state”™s commemoration commission includes Kathy Maher, executive director of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport.
And a Winchester-based company called Civil War Tours is running multiple tours this year led by Ed Bearss, who was chief historian of the National Park Service for more than a decade. Civil War Tours past roster of guides has included James McPherson, author of “Battle Cry of Freedom.”
Saterstrom said Tauck attempts to craft its own tours so that participants are engaged and “not just watching things from behind the glass,” in his words.
“We certainly have a story board ”¦ about how we wanted to engage this story,” he said.
