By Katie Randall, MSNHA historic-preservation consultant
What do you think of when you think of a historic walking tour: pamphlets and brochures with a map guiding you from site to site, with little snippets of history for each one?
This type of tour has been a hallmark of local heritage tourism for years. It is still an important product that can introduce tourists to the history of a new place or even to another facet of a history they already know. But with today’s technology and the prevalence of smart phones, it makes sense to start thinking outside the box–or in this case, outside the brochure–when it comes to historic walking tours.
This idea led us at the MSNHA to begin thinking about a new way to present this type of tour. We wanted something engaging & media-centric and hoped for something that would be used across multiple generations. The Heritage Area was already using an app called OnCell for the Roots of American Music driving tour, but we knew there was more we could do with the app. Other towns and museums around the country have used OnCell to enhance their visitors’ experience and add digital components to existing material. With that in mind, we decided to pilot something similar here, starting with the downtown commercial core of Florence as part of the city’s bicentennial celebration.
Wouldn’t it be cool, we thought, to show local residents and visitors alike what downtown Florence looked like at the turn of the 20th century? Or when Franklin D. Roosevelt visited town? How about the changes downtown during the automobile age of the 1950s and ’60s? We wanted to research the history of each building, the businesses housed in them and the architecture. What makes these places special? We envisioned window transparent film-coverings with a historic photograph, the name of the building and a coordinating QR code that would direct users to more online content such as maps, images, oral histories and more.
In early 2018, Heritage Area historic preservation consultant Brian Murphy and I began to promote the concept of the tour to downtown Florence businesses. We spoke to Downtown Florence Unlimited, met with the mayor and members of City Council, partnered with the city’s museums and spoke to civic groups such as the Kiwanis Club. We went door-to-door showing businesses a model entry on our cellphones and asked businesses to contribute only the production cost of the window films. The Heritage Area covered the rest, including the OnCell subscription.
We were pleased with the overwhelmingly positive response. Several businesses signed up early on. We spent months researching the buildings of participating businesses, gathered images and launched the first phase of the reimagined walking tour in late October 2018.
We are still adding sites to the list and look forward to adding the historic buildings on UNA’s campus next. We hope this program will grow beyond Florence and look forward to replicating similar downtown walking tours in other towns around the Heritage Area.
