Real Places Telling Real Stories

Finding uniqueness in your community: Texas Historical Commission workshop helps participants create heritage experiences for visitors at Bosque Museum

CLIFTON – From mid-October to the beginning of December 2024, a collaboration between the Bosque Museum, Clifton Main Street, the Smithsonian and the Texas Historical Commission offers a unique event. A traveling Smithsonian exhibit at the museum called “Crossroads: Change in Rural America” highlights local heritage is expected to bring heritage tourism to the county.

Clifton is one of the seven sites selected for the exhibit – San Augustin, St Elisario, Bandera, Brenham, Buffalo Gap and Rockport are the other six. Besides the Smithsonian exhibit, a local exhibit will be created.

Under the motto “Real Places Telling Real Stories,” THC’s Special Projects Coordinator, Heritage Tourism and Texas Treasure Business Award and Community Heritage Development Division’s Mallory Laurel and her team are visiting the seven cities which will receive the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main exhibit.

In a hands-on visitor experience workshop March 7 at the Bosque Museum, the THC offered assistance in creating local heritage experiences that are interactive, authentic, and memorable for the increased amount of heritage tourism visitors. The workshop prepares organizations and businesses how sharing history during exhibit can benefit them.

Because Bosque County is claimed by two Texas Trail regions, the Brazos Trail and the Texas Lakes Trail THC representatives of those trails were present, as well as 30 representatives from area museums, Chambers of Commerce from Bryan, Corsicana, Fort Worth, Glen Rose, Johnson County, Mexia, Navarro, Nocona, Salado, Valley Mills, Waco and Weatherford

“We were so impressed with your energy and enthusiasm and we can’t wait to see what projects emerge in your region as a result,” Laurel said in a follow-up email. Laurel loved seeing so many communities from the two trails represented, as it also gave the opportunity to network with other towns and cities. “As you get older, you realize how time is fleeting and time spent with people we love is more valuable.”

As preparation for the opening activity, participants brought an object that represented time for them, whether it was time lost or time gained; wasted time; precious time; time off; time in terms of hours, or years, or millennia; time passing quickly or time moving slowly. To induce more creativity, watches, clocks, timers, phones or calendars were excluded from the assignment. Objects ranged from a scanner, to a restoration project photo album, faded, vintage photographs, and petrified wood.

The exercise was meant to convey how the same subject has different interpretations for different individuals. Finding interpretive potential for visitors was a main goal of the workshop, and to bring mindfulness to historic information – how to tell the story in different ways to increase interest for different audiences.

“How can we get from extensive to intensive travel, From devouring miles to lingering, From ticking off items in the travel guide to stopping and thinking, From rush to leisure, From aggressive and destructive to creative communication, From camera-wearing idiots to people with the third eye? I believe these are the important and burning issues. For we are all looking for meaning and humanity.”

Author of The Holidaymakers: Understanding the Impact of Leisure and Travel J. Krippendorf said about the mindful traveler: "Components of a mindful heritage experience are: historical value, information beyond the facts, show versus tell, reflection, connection to locals and immersion."

Laurel informed the participants that the younger generations put more personal meaning into travel and tourism – 43 percent of Millennials – born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s – travel to "find themselves" and 55 percent of Gen Z – born in the late 1990s and early 2000 – travel for "knowledge and experience." And due to the modern-day hyper-mobility and heightened leisure time, there is less expectation for a vacation to feature exotic or extraordinary experiences.

“Their favorite aspects of travel are connecting with the local culture of a destination, experiencing the place with the people they are traveling with, and creating new memories,” a citation out of “Watch Out, World, Here Comes the Gen Z Traveler” states. “Gen Z travelers are all about the intangible when it comes to what they value from travel – rather than accumulating more “stuff”, they crave creating experiences and memories with the people they care about.”

And it is up to the arbiters of heritage and history’s task to connect people to a story that is not theirs. Adding the “shiver of contact,” is the goal – getting the visitor to stop and think, and feel the impact of the object or story.

Additionally, interactive exhibits allow for more personal connection, making the experience more memorable. As creating a space for the visitor to engage with and contemplate a moment from the past.

In the case of the Bosque Museum, an exhibit of one of the Norwegian travel chests could include an assignment for the visitor, urging them to think about what they would bring to a new home that would fit in one chest.

Another exercise, the workshop participants engaged in finding the four components of a mindful heritage experience to well-known Texas historical sites like Casa Navarro, Gen. Eisenhower’s birthplace and the Charles Goodnight Ranch by finding an alternative story to tell and offer an emotional set piece – an artefact that creates that shiver of contact.

In general the workshop triggered the participants to find new ways to tell the same story – offering the what, but also the why and how. For example, a photo of Ellis Island represents immigration to the United States, but also new beginnings, freedom, ancestors, what was left behind, sacrifice, rejection, a place of work for the clerks.

Laurel stressed it was important to distinguish between the history, the unchanging facts and heritage, what we want to pass on, which evolves over the generations.

The next step was to identify there are two types of heritage tourism, the intangible – cultural heritage like traditions, culinary, living expressions – and the ancestral – the search of one’s roots.

In Bosque County, examples of cultural heritage are the Our Savior Lutheran’s annual Smorgasbord, the Zion United Church’s German smoked sausage and sauerkraut event or Cranfills Gap Independent School District’s Lutefisk dinner with Norwegian folk dances, the use of the expression “Uff Da,” ranch rodeos celebrating the ranch and cowboy heritage.

The last part of the workshop was how to incorporate the different elements to enhancing the visiting experience of the heritage tourists expected to view the Smithsonian “Crossroads: Change in Rural America” exhibit. Involving the community is an important part of this.

“If heritage is a reflection of place, then heritage experiences should reflect what is important to locals and provide opportunities for them to share it with visitors,” Laurel’s slide show offers.

Bosque Museum Executive Director Erin Shields hopes different entities – like Our Saviors Lutheran Church, St. Olaf’s Kirke, Legacy Park, the Bosque Arts Center, will focus on the heritage tourism it will create.

Additionally, by showcasing more local history and in unexpected places, there is a stronger sense of place, both in the past and the present, which ties into the immersion component of the mindful heritage experience. The workshop discussed different types of interpretive media to achieve this. Budgets and funding come into play when planning high-tech options like interactive digital stations, soundscapes and VR immersion. But print media and signage work too.