Antiques.

 
If he [Tom Sawyer] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the 
writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that work consists 
of whatever a body is obliged to do and that Play consits of whatever a 
body is not boliged to do. 
Mark Twain, The Adventures of tom Sawyer, 1876 

When, in 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a prosperous Maryland physician, embarked on a four-month trip "intended only for health and recreation," it was an unusual thing to do. Only later in the century did the first members of the colonial gentry venture to leave home for vacations. A small number of South Carolina planters, for example, escaped the summer heat by sailing up the coast to Newport, Rhode Island, where they were joined by rich merchants from Philadelphia, and even some residents of Jamaica. Others sought the allegedly salubrious mineral waters in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, and Berkeley Warm Springs in Virginia (now Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). While this might have been a way of aping the British, many amenities were lacking. When an ailing George Washington came to Berkeley Warm Springs in 1761, he found no lodgings and wrote: "Had we not succeeded in getting a tent and marquee at Winchester, we should have been in a most miserable situation here."

In the nineteenth century summer outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever ...