Martha Shea keeps watch over the sprawling summer home where impressionist T.C. Steele spent time a century ago painting landscapes of southeastern Indiana's scenic Whitewater River valley.
The 19-room home in Brookville, Ind., which Shea owns and operates as The Hermitage Bed & Breakfast, would seem like an ideal tourist stop given its history, 112-foot-long veranda and nearby Metamora's canal district.
But the antique-packed two-story house was often overlooked until several nearby locales with ties to Steele's life got together to devise a common strategy for drawing sightseers.
Tapping into a marketing concept called regional branding, they created the "T.C. Steele Trail," a trip along miles of back roads with stops at some of Steele's favorite spots for setting up his easel.
Since 1998, several groups of travel writers have taken the Steele tour, many of them staying overnight at The Hermitage, and Steele fans have taken notice.
"We're getting tourists who come here just because T.C. Steele lived in this house. That's what brings them here," says Shea, who serves guests home-cooked meals in one of the home's two artist studios.
While they once saw each other as rivals competing for the same tourist pool, rural communities such as Brookville are increasingly working together to create a unified theme to attract even more visitors.
The idea is simple: If there's more than one spot for tourists to see in a given area, they'll probably hang around longer, have a better time and visit more restaurants, antique shops or service stations.
Several regions of the state have employed that concept for years, including western Indiana's Parke County, which touts itself as the "Covered Bridge Capital of the World" because of the 32 such spans. A section of northern Indiana, including Nappanee and Shipshewana, markets itself as Amish country.
On the Web:
Indiana Tourism Division: www.state.in.us/tourism
Purdue Rural TRIP project: www.ces.purdue.edu/RuralTRIP
The Hermitage Bed & Breakfast: bbonline.com/in/hermitage
Despite those success stories, many rural communities limit their tourism potential by thinking too small, says Liping A. Cai, an assistant professor of hospitality and tourism management at Purdue University.
Tourism promotion efforts often end abruptly at county lines, leaving untapped other sights just around the bend, he says.
"The traveler really doesn't care about the boundaries between the communities," Cai says. "If they have an image about a place, they will plan on staying longer and spending more."
To help with the "branding" effort, Cai and his colleagues at Purdue's Rural Tourism Resources & Information Program are amassing a database of potential attractions of some of Indiana's rural areas.
They plan to survey travelers, whom Cai says often perceive an area in an entirely different light than local tourism boosters. "Beauty is really in the eye of the beholder," he said.
Melanie Maxwell, who markets 17 southern counties for the Indiana Tourism Division, said one of its success stories is the state's winery industry.
Not only did the state's 21 wineries band together to form a promotion group called the Indiana Wine Grape Council, they also dreamed up festivals to both celebrate their product and market it to wine-lovers.
Still, Cai and others agree the key to tourism success isn't just brochures and signs pointing the way to the next attraction: It's plain old friendliness, with a touch of calculation.