Standing on the edge of a 300-foot limestone bluff in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest, Machaela Sweeney could thank the perfect words she typed into ChatGPT for bringing her to the unexpected spot.

“I literally looked up lush, magical, fairytale areas,” she recalled, looking over the edge of the forest’s Inspiration Point Trail.

A 30-year-old social worker from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Sweeney was looking for a destination to recover from burnout. The AI app recommended two destinations: North Carolina or southern Illinois.

The first recommendation didn’t surprise her. Sweeney said that many people in Kentucky go to the Great Smoky Mountains when they want to get away. But she had never heard anyone talk about the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois before.

“So this almost feels like a hidden gem,” Sweeney said. “If somebody was going to the Smokies all the time and they were tired of it, I would say, ‘Try mixing it up.’”

The forest stretches across the eastern and western parts of southern Illinois, from Inspiration Point Trail overlooking the Mississippi River Valley here in the west to the popular Garden of the Gods wilderness area in Herod to the east.

Sweeney is among the growing number of visitors discovering southern Illinois as a travel destination amid a recent effort to entice more people to visit for the summer season.

Carol Hoffman, executive director of the Southernmost Illinois Tourism Bureau, said the primary draws to southern Illinois are the outdoor recreation activities in Shawnee National Forest, including hiking, cycling, rock climbing and ziplining, as well as another Illinois surprise linked to the unusual terrain: vineyards and five wine trails.

The bureau has appealed to riders of the Chicago Transit Authority with a recent signage campaign that invited potential travelers to “go where the bus won’t take you” and to “come see our skyscrapers.”

In addition to plastering photos of lush greenery and rocky bluffs across Chicago buses and train stops, the bureau has paid to have promotional mailers, exhibits, shows and content creator posts that promote tourism to Illinois’ southern region.

Southern tourism bureaus have been tapping into a trend of high visitor spending in Illinois in recent years, exceeding pre-pandemic numbers for the first time in 2023, according to the most recent available data from a 2024 report prepared for the Illinois Office of Tourism.

More than $80 billion in economic impact

In 2023, tourists spent over $47 billion across Illinois, creating nearly 450,000 new jobs and generating over $6.5 billion in state and local taxes, according to the 2024 Tourism Office report. The report estimated that tourism in that year generated over $80 billion in total economic impact for the state.

Travel tourism influencer Jessica Baine, 35, has worked on tourism promotions with the Southernmost Illinois Tourism Bureau and Jackson County’s Southern Illinois Tourism bureau for more than two years.

Baine, a Carterville nurse practitioner raised in southern Illinois, said she regularly receives messages from viewers online who were surprised by the content she shared, telling her, “I had no idea that southern Illinois looked like that.”

Hoffman’s group aims to connect with people within “an easy day’s drive,” typically those within a three- to six-hour driving distance from the forest, such as those living in central and southern Illinois and in the St. Louis metro area.

The advertising campaign is just one in a series of projects seeking to boost tourism in the area in recent years. The industry has seen a more than twofold increase in funding since 2023, with the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, or DCEO, giving out over $9 million in grants to boost tourism in the southern part of the state.

That money was distributed to cities and tourism bureaus across the southern half of the state for the last fiscal year, from Alton and Mattoon down to Metropolis, the officially designated home of Superman, where fans can take photos with a 15-foot statue of the comic book hero.

Past Illinois tourism campaigns have paid major returns. In the 2023 fiscal year, every dollar invested in promoting tourism generated $75 in direct visitor spending, according to the 2023 – 2024 Economic Impact of Tourism report by the DCEO Office of Tourism.

Grant funds are matched by local hotels and motels hoping to bring travelers in, according to Hoffman.

In some cases, lodging is the attraction itself. According to Lyle and Tammy Woodrum, the married innkeepers of the Davie School Inn in Anna, Illinois, a fifth of their guests come just for the experience of staying in a former schoolhouse.

Originally built in 1853 as a school, the Davie School Inn was repurposed as a bed and breakfast, but still looks in many ways like a school, with various rooms featuring desks, globes and chalkboards covered with messages from past guests.

Susan Hill traveled from her home in Memphis to stay at the Davie School Inn last month. She said she’s done it a handful of times since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was looking for somewhere to stay where she could sit outside.

According to Hill, the novelty of staying in an old school was a draw. “It’s like, heck yeah, come on,” she said. “It’s just really quaint. I feel safe there.”

The Woodrums said most of their guests have come for the area’s local attractions, primarily the Shawnee Hills Wine trail and outdoor activities in the Shawnee National Forest but also for family and college reunions.

‘Wine just likes us’

Shawnee Hills Wine Trail is the largest of the state’s five trails, comprising 12 wineries and 13 locations. It originated in the summer of 1995, when owners of the first three wineries in southern Illinois — Alto Vineyards, Pomona Winery and Owl Creek Vineyard — worked with the Southernmost Illinois Tourism Bureau and the Carbondale Convention and Tourism Bureau to start the first wine trail in Illinois.

Maggie Pugh, assistant manager at Feather Hills Vineyard on Highway 51, said the campaign to attract tourists to the region has had a real effect on the winery. Recently, the company ran out of three of its bestselling — and most bottled — wines, which, to her, is an indicator of increased visitor flow.

“I think we are getting busier. I think the advertising has worked,” she said. “I also know that the Wine Trail is doing quite a lot to try and bring more people down, because part of the problem is, this area isn’t taken seriously for wine — although it should be.”

Illinois is the second-flattest state on the nation’s mainland, seemingly perfect only for corn. But Pugh described the Shawnee Hills region — home to many of Illinois’ highest elevations — as a “little golden nugget” in which “wine (is) just likes us, grapes enjoy our soil.”

Since 2015, wineries on the trail have won over 30 medals in national and international wine competitions. Although the vineyards are geographically close together, scattered across an area of 40 miles, the trail boasts a wide range of wines, Pugh said.

“The coolest part about southern Illinois is that even a winery that’s only 20 minutes away from this location right here, our wine is going to taste vastly different, even if we made it the exact same way,” she said. “Our grapes don’t taste the same because of the elevation, and you get those slight hints that might make or break a wine for you.”

‘Illinois’ most hippie town’

Award-winning wines and breathtaking vistas aren’t the only unexpected finds in southern Illinois.

Makanda, a short drive from the Southern Illinois University campus in Carbondale, features a boardwalk of shops by local artists. Artists sell jewelry, gemstones, sage for burning, paintings, intricate metalwork and more. The tiny village of fewer than 550 people, a short drive from SIU, proudly calls itself “Illinois’s most hippie” town.

Nina Kovar is one of those artists. In her Visions Art Gallery, dream catchers are hung along the front window, inviting shoppers to come browse clothing, jewelry and handmade ceramics.

Kovar said she sees graduates coming back for homecoming again and again, as well as others who are discovering the town for the first time after hearing about its hippie reputation.

“There’s a certain timeless element to it,” Kovar said of Makanda. “The creativity that we have, that a lot of us are artists and artisans and crafters, that it’s kind of nestled in nature; it’s beautiful.”

Kovar said she has seen a significant increase in tourism to Makanda since the COVID-19 pandemic, with people not flying as much, but also wanting to get out of the house and into the outdoors.

Makanda also made it onto the map, Kovar said, because of the total solar eclipse that took place on April 8, 2024. A few shops down from Kovar, artist Dave Dardis painted a line through his shop to represent the path of totality at the time.

Dardis is better known as the Rainmaker, a name he shares with his bronze art studio. A backdoor in Dardis’ shop opens out to his secret garden, a poorly kept secret in Makanda.

The garden features lush greenery and natural elements interwoven with bronze sculptures. Sweeney, a self-described whimsical person, said her visit to Dardis’ not-so-secret garden was the best part of her southern Illinois experience.

“That’s like walking into a literal fairy tale,” Sweeney said. “He’s like a hermit slash hippie slash, I don’t know, man with wisdom,” Sweeney added of Dardis. “He almost reminds me of a sage, like, you know those giant trees that talk?”

Having grown up in the area, tourism influencer Baine is well aware of the traditional engines for local economies — whether that’s coal mining or agriculture. But she sees a path for tourism to become an even bigger factor in time.

“There’s coal mines and there’s all these very blue-collar jobs, but tourism brings even more money to our region. Tourists are spending money at restaurants, at the wineries, and they can reinvest in our communities,” Baine said.

“When you live and breathe southern Illinois, and your kid goes to school here,” she said, “you want these businesses to thrive.”

Sonya Dymova and Maggie Dougherty are students in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and fellows in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Uniquely Belleville

Last call for Stag on tap? Amid rumors, Belleville still pours its ‘local legend’

Get unlimited digital access

#ReadLocal