So, Eclipse Boomtowns, How’d It Go?
In making preparations for Monday’s total solar eclipse, tourism managers in St. Joseph, Missouri, didn’t know what to expect beyond the cosmic obvious. Would they be overwhelmed with out-of-towners? Even just a couple days before the event, they didn’t know. The estimates they’d heard indicated that as few as 50,000 people or as many as 500,000 might show up—quite a range for a town whose roads typically accommodate a population of about 75,000.
St. Joseph may have been unusual in the gulf between its high and low estimates, but it was not alone in its uncertainty. The eclipse’s path of totality—a 70-mile-wide strip of land where the moon completely blotted out the sun—curved from Oregon to South Carolina, prompting city officials and tourism directors of cities as different as Nashville (population 684,410) and Glendo, Wyoming, (population 203) to wonder what to plan for and how much of an infusion of
