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Things were booming 12 years ago when Pam Steinbeck opened her shop, Mosaic Gardens, in downtown St. Francisville.

That’s not the case now. The hoards of tourists who used to sustain Steinbeck’s shop and others in the quaint West Feliciana Parish community don’t come anymore—at least not in the numbers they used to.

“It’s very, very slow in St. Francisville,” she says.

So slow, in fact, that Steinbeck is pulling up stakes and moving the shop to her Baton Rouge location, Wild Orchid, on Government Street. She’s not alone. Dale Gault, who once owned three antique shops in St. Francisville, moved out to the intersection of U.S. 61 and La. 10 outside the central part of town to catch more traffic.

Gault, who says his business picked up immediately after moving to the highway, thinks the major culprit is Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans tourism. A large number of the tourists who used to come antiquing and sightseeing through St. Francisville stopped there as one destination between New Orleans and Natchez.

“We were just getting so much tourism coming down that road from Natchez, Woodville and on down to New Orleans,” he says. “We still get some people coming through but not like it was.”

Gault says he’s the “only game left in town” as far as antique stores, which were once numerous in St. Francisville. A number of small businesses have come and gone within the last six months or a year, he says.

“There’s not enough money being spent there,” Gault says.

If St. Francisville is the canary in the coal mine, other historic sites in South Louisiana are reporting tourism levels just beginning to nudge back up following the crippling affect of the 2005 hurricane season.

Despite the increasing emptiness of downtown, Rachel Hall, who co-owns the gift shop at Rosedown Plantation in St. Francisville and also runs a tour business, says Rosedown tourism was “going great guns” before Katrina and Rita, which knocked it down to nearly zero.

It’s not back to where it was pre-Katrina, but the numbers are picking up, especially with the Delta Queen and American steamboats finally making stops again, she says. Hall says as New Orleans’ fortunes improve, so will those of Rosedown.

“New Orleans is the gateway to the state,” she says. “We’re pulling for New Orleans.”

So are tourism officials in Natchez, Miss. Walter Tipton, the city’s director of tourism, says tourist traffic to the area’s antebellum homes was practically nonexistent in 2005 and “barely recognizable” in 2006. Tourists finally started to rematerialize this year, though motor coach and steamboat business—two major tourism sources—are still down substantially.

Still, Tipton is optimistic things will get better.

“Certainly when New Orleans is back in full swing that business will come back,” he says.

Laura Webb, who’s been with BREC-owned Magnolia Mound Plantation in Baton Rouge since 1985, says tourist visits there have never been steady or predictable in all the time she’s worked there.

“It’s like a roller coaster: up one year and down the next,” she says.

Nevertheless, the hurricanes did have a significant impact on visits to the plantation, Webb says, with things just starting to pick up this summer. Magnolia Mound is also on the steamboats’ itinerary and gets lots of kids for day camp programs, especially in March and April. It’s also a popular place for weddings but gets few bus tours. Webb says the site probably would get more visitors if it were advertised more.

Paul Arrigo, head of the Baton Rouge Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, guesses that historic sites in Baton Rouge get more visitors than in places like West Feliciana because people come to the Capital City for other reasons—conventions for instance.

“Here’s my gut feeling: The individual tourist, with New Orleans still not being up where it ought to be, has gone down,” Arrigo says. “And the group travel—that being the bus tours—has gone down around the country. The whole group tour is not what it was 10 years ago.”

Cindy Hidalgo, general manager of Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, says the blow to New Orleans tourism was keenly felt at Nottoway. Numbers of visitors are on the rise but haven’t reached pre-Katrina levels.

Typical of privately owned plantation homes, Nottoway doesn’t release exact tourism tallies. One indicator, however, is the plantation’s number of employees, which dropped from roughly 100 to around 55 after Katrina.

Nottoway likely would have suffered even more loss of business if all it offered were tours. As it is, the site also features a restaurant and bed and breakfast, and plays host to weddings and other special functions.

Hidalgo, who’s managed Nottoway for more than two decades, says Sept. 11 produced the same drop-off in attendance. Now, post-hurricane, each month brings tourist counts a little closer to normal. Nottoway is using the lower tourist volume to get some things accomplished.

“We’re taking the opportunity to do a lot of maintenance and landscaping work,” she says. “We’re in process of putting together the final touches on renovations and repairs. We’re starting this week. While business is slow you’re not inconveniencing a lot of people.”

Mark Northington, director of research for the state department of tourism, says he’s heard reports of a waning interest in historical tourism around the country, but he doesn’t have specific numbers about Louisiana to offer a clear picture of what’s going on in the state.

However, one of his department’s tasks over the next year is to put together a master plan for tourism development, Northington says. He’s also been in contact with LSU about getting an intern to interview public and private historic sites to get a handle on visitation trends. Nothing is set in stone yet.

“It’s something we have to determine,” he says. “We’re looking into it. Let’s put it that way.”

James House, manager of Oakley House at the Audubon State Historic Site for the past 10 years, says tourist visits finally rose to pre-hurricane levels late last year. But even those numbers aren’t what they once were. House says visits were falling off even before the hurricanes—which knocked things down to rock bottom and spurred some soul-searching.

“The demographics are changing,” he says. “We’re all trying to hurry and adjust to new reality that people don’t come for the same reasons they came to parks for 20 years ago. It forces us to re-evalute what were doing.”

Two new priorities are cultural and eco-tourism—booming niches within the U.S. tourism market.

“That was really never pursued much in the past,” House says. “Now we’re doing it.”