A Brief History of Leaf-Peeping

In 2014, columnist Jim Mullen and his wife, Sue, drove home from the grocery store with a full slate of chores ahead of them—cleaning gutters, installing storm windows, and so forth. But this was the Catskills. In the middle of October.

“We have been stuck behind Mr. and Mrs. Leaf Peeper for 45 minutes,” Mullen wrote. 

He proceeded to grumble about tourists clogging the road every autumn, thwarting locals who had better things to do than stare at “dead leaves.” “If you look at them close-up, they’re dirty, spotted, misshapen, full of bugs,” Mullen wrote.

And then, in a Grinchian twist, as Mr. and Mrs. Leaf Peeper veered off toward an overlook, the Mullens glimpsed the brilliant red and gold vista beyond it. Awestruck, they followed the tourists to the overlook and discovered that they weren’t tourists at all but folks from a neighboring town. “They didn’t know why, but they’d decided to take the day off and drive around,” Mullen recounted. “We decided to take the rest of the day off, too.”

Mullen’s anecdote is a testament to the irresistibility of the Northeast’s most celebrated seasonal wonder, one which laid the foundation for a whole tourism industry and can still stun a curmudgeon or two. Here’s a brief tour through our history of looking at autumn leaves—long before it got labeled “leaf-peeping.”

Cruising Through the Color Show

Our collective fascination with feeling like we’ve just stepped into a watercolor painting is such that you can probably find a guide to fall foliage spots no matter where you live. In Japan, leaf-peeping is known as momiji-gari, often translated as “hunting red leaves.” In Finland, ruska describes the colorful leaves themselves. 

While the United States boasts breathtaking displays everywhere from Texas to Minnesota, it’s hard to deny that the Northeast is queen of the season—a position the region has held for at least a century and a half. Lifelong Massachusetts resident Henry David Thoreau once called October “the month of painted leaves.” He planned a whole book comprising paintings of autumn leaves paired with descriptions of their corresponding plants, and though he passed away in 1862 before completing it, his notes were published later that year as Autumnal Tints. Standing among drooping yellow elms he likened to standing “within a ripe pumpkin-rind”; red maples he described as “burning bushes.”

Emily Dickinson, another 19th-century Massachusetts poet, also distinguished the maple in the last stanza of her poem “Autumn”:

“The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.”

In October 1863, a New York correspondent for New Orleans’s Times-Picayune wrote that “When American poets first began to talk about the ‘gorgeousness’ of October” in the Northeast, “they were heartily laughed at abroad and at the South, and their enthusiasm was looked upon as extravagant.” But “that was years ago,” the writer said, and travelers had since realized that the area’s annual “color show” truly was spectacular.

As the century progressed, that color show became a selling point for autumnal excursions. An 1877 advertisement for Guigon House, a resort in the Catskills, highlighted “magnificent mountains, beautiful fall foliage and fine partridge shooting.” A September 1884 briefing in Connecticut’s Hartford Courant mentioned the popularity of taking the 8:40 a.m. train from Hartford to the Hudson River, having lunch, and coming right home. “The scenery on the Western road with the fall foliage is grand,” it said.

Though the bulk of this activity was centered in the Northeast, the West and Midwest weren’t oblivious to their own botanical marvels. The Cincinnati Enquirer encouraged people on one October Sunday in 1887 to visit the city’s zoo, “now radiant in all the glory of fall foliage,” and in September 1906, Washington’s Spokane Chronicle included a notice about a $2 round-trip steamer ride down the Saint Joe River, with its “superb fall tinted foliage and perfect river reflections.”

It wasn’t all that different from how many of us currently leaf-peep: by taking the scenic route, be it by train, boat, or automobile. Within a few short decades, what began as but one feature of a fall outing would become the main event—transforming a trend into a full-fledged tourism machine.

Invasion of the Leaf-Peepers

In late September 1934, the New England Council conducted a three-day airplane survey of the region to create a fall foliage guide for visitors. The Council organized New England’s first fall foliage festival in New Hampshire in early October. The following year, Vermont’s Burlington Daily News reported that fall foliage had made New England a “mecca to tourists,” and resorts would stay open throughout autumn to accommodate them. The general thinking seemed to be that tourists would come no matter what, so the region better build up its offerings to handle (and profit from) the influx.

Various towns started hosting their own fall foliage festivals—e.g. Elkins, West Virginia, and Uniontown, Pennsylvania—and the chamber of commerce in North Adams, Massachusetts, went so far as to institute an entire fall foliage week in 1941. Even gas rationing during World War II couldn’t keep people from flocking to rural roads come autumn: The North Adams Transcript reported in 1942 that “foliage sight-seers” had been hoarding gas to use on their yearly trip to the Berkshires.

In the 1960s, these foliage sight-seers finally got a snappier moniker: leaf-peepers. It first showed up in print in a September 1965 issue of Vermont’s Bennington Banner, which mentioned that “prospects for weekend ‘leaf peepers’ seem extremely good.” That term was predated by leaf-peeker, which first appeared in 1963. “‘Leaf-Peeker’ Proves To Be Kissin’ Cousin,” the Banner proclaimed. (A boardinghouse owner had discovered that she and one of her guests both had relatives in a small Ohio town, and one of her cousins had married one of his. The news made the paper’s front page.)

Though leaf-peeker has remained in scattered use over the last several decades, it’s been thoroughly eclipsed by leaf-peeper—a nickname that some people despise at least as much as moist. “The term is a scourge,” Devin Gordon wrote for GQ in 2017. “For one thing, it’s dirty and voyeuristic. For another, it’s infantilizing, like I’ve never seen red or yellow before.”

Thanks to this negative connotation, leaf-peeper lends itself to the kind of scorn so apparent in Mullen’s “Mr. and Mrs. Leaf Peeper.” And while the Northeast at large continues to embrace its identity as the leaf-peeper’s paradise—a boon to the economy worth billions—you can understand the irritation its permanent residents might feel at being overrun by leisurely vacationers acting like they’ve never seen red or yellow before. But as Jim and Sue Mullen were once reminded, it’s pretty hard not to act like that in the presence of all those painted leaves.

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