With historic celebrations in Jamestown last year, the state-run museum there saw the number of guests walking through its doors barely increase.
Just more than 2,300 more people paid to visit the Jamestown Settlement and American Revolution Museum at Yorktown and the state-run agency that operates the museums saw higher revenues last year than in 2018, according to data released by the organization at the end of January.
Jamestown Settlement saw 360,379 paid guests walk through its doors and into the past in 2019 — a 0.19% increase compared to 2018 and a 11.50% decrease compared to 2017 visitation.
“Some of the other (historic sites) around here and elsewhere in the state don’t report their visitation,” Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation spokesman Bob Jeffrey said. “But the sense I got from people was that last year was a tough year.”
“Finishing slightly above (2018) was actually a pretty good achievement.”
That sentiment takes an entirely different meaning as tourism in the first quarter of 2020 came to a sudden stop with the coronavirus pandemic. The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation remain closed.
Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation executive director Christy Coleman said she expects it to take between 18 and 24 months before the museum system operates like it did before the pandemic.
“We really don’t know how long it will take for visitation to bounce back,” Coleman said.
The numbers
In total, 536,496 people paid to visit the Jamestown Settlement and American Revolution Museum at Yorktown living-history museums in 2019, a 0.5% increase from the year before. Admissions revenues were higher — $5,890,586 in 2019, up 4.2% from the year before, according to a news release from the foundation.
Nearby at Jamestown Island, Historic Jamestowne spokeswoman Kelly Beckley said the organization saw steady visitation with about 200,000 guests in 2019. Historic Jamestowne is a separate, nonprofit organization entity from Jamestown Settlement.
The American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, which opened in 2017, had 176,117 paid visitors — a 1.2% increase.
Susan Bak, the senior director of marketing and retail operations for the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, said the increase in visitation and revenues the foundation saw was due in large part to the programming surrounding the 2019 commemoration event that recognized the 400th anniversary of representative democracy in the United States and the arrival of women and enslaved people.
“We had some unique events, we had some special exhibitions and then we had special events,” Bak said. “We tried through the entire year of programming to weave in those themes to those events so that it would be meaningful and it would also build on the story that we were already telling and sharing at our museums.”
The foundation promoted two special exhibitions throughout the year, “TENACITY: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia” and “Forgotten Soldier: African Americans in the Revolutionary War” and two custom theatrical presentations “Mother Tongue” and “Season of the Witch” that were specifically written to use in the museum in 2019. Other annual programming such as the Military Through the Ages weekend event was tweaked to feature women, a theme of the commemoration.
“Historic sites continue to attract people year after year because we are all constantly evolving and adding to the narrative,” Beckley said. Area attractions and organizations worked hard in 2019 to share “the history of the first Africans, first women and first representative government…”
Because of the 400th anniversary event, the General Assembly also provided an additional $100,000 in funding to the foundation to invest in marketing its attractions. Online bookings for tickets went up by 32.8% and produced $539,946 in ticket revenue, its best year to date.
“The general trend in travel and travel planning is that more people are accessing information and purchasing via their mobile phone,” Bak said. “We benefit from that trend so we’re seeing that but we were feeding it and then we got the results from that.”
Each year the foundation commits half of its state funding to America’s Historic Triangle that helps support the area’s attractions as a whole. In 2019, it saw a 7.3% increase in the sales of cooperative tickets that includes an America’s Historic Triangle ticket which offers seven days of unlimited admission to Jamestown Settlement, Historic Jamestowne, Colonial Williamsburg, Yorktown Battlefield and the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown.
Tickets that included other tourism partners such as Colonial Williamsburg, Historic Jamestowne, Yorktown Battlefield and Busch Gardens and Water Country USA also went up for the foundation.
“There’s a much greater economic benefit to the area for them not just to choose one site or two sites but to choose a ticket that allows them to stay longer in the area which benefits not only our museum sites and the national parks sites and Colonial Williamsburg but it also benefits our hotel partners and our restaurant partners,” Bak said. “It just is a benefit to the economy of the Williamsburg area.”
Ticket sales to individuals made up 64% of the total paid visitation at Jamestown Settlement and the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown last year. About 70% of individual visitors came from out of state, according to its news release. Group visitation to the museums that include school field trips, made up 36% of its whole visitation. The foundation gave out 71,323 tickets for both museums in promotional admissions and to residents of Williamsburg, James City and York counties, William & Mary students, children younger than 6 and group escorts that all receive complimentary admission.
“We are continuing our approach to offering solid programming that themes with our museum products that we offer 363 days a year,” Bak said. “It’s extremely important to us that the programming that we offer supports the themes — and makes sense to connect the contemporary connection, something you can do and see today — but that connects to our museum experience and our mission of presenting 17th and 18th-century history in Virginia.”
Steve Roberts Jr, 757-604-1329, srobertsjr@vagazette.com, @SPRobertsJr on Twitter.
