NEW AVENUES

Friends of Arrow Rock staff are considering several new avenues of pursuit for future tours and interpretative programs. Most notably, the Friends are considering options for building the touring programs, new and traditional, around the intense heat of summer. Because spring and fall are more amenable to visitors taking a walking tour or viewing first-person reenactors, the Friends have been focusing the scope of future efforts around specific time frames and themes. At the same time, they plan to apply lessons they have learned from Millenial Visions to the modified living history tours.

Kathy Borgman, in her final report, explains such efforts: "I ... feel the program [would] be most successful if we focus on a specific time reenactment tours are offered. For example, since it is difficult to conduct reenactment tours in the heat of summer, we might advertise that on the first two weekends in June reenactment tours will be offered. This would allow us to utilize volunteer staff for a specific time period rather than trying to sustain the activity for a long period of time. It will also give us reason to send press releases and promote our tours...At the same time we need to take a new look at our 'regular tours' offered in the heat of summer and make some changes offering more variety and doing them in a comfortable manner considering summer weather."

In this way, the Friends of Arrow Rock can continue to use the living history models, publicity techniques, and volunteer staff that they had cultivated over the grant period. At the same time, they have allowed themselves the flexibility to improve on what they have already accomplished; as of November 2001, Friends staff have been considering using motorized vehicles or theme tours to supplement and/or narrow the focus (and time frame) of future reenactment tours. In addition, they feel their school program could benefit from these models if they were to focus their efforts on these groups.

Equal in importance to these logistical efforts to sustain and modify the living history models are the conceptual revisions that the Friends of Arrow Rock have undertaken in order to follow up on their success. Because the project of creating and presenting a new living history tour was, as Kathy Borgman stated, "a highly intense, labor-intensive ... venture," it spurred the Friends staff to evaluate the sustainability of their efforts. Realizing the difficulty of "being able to turn around and do [a similar project] again another time, another year" helped staff to see the living history project not as a cure-all for their institution, but as an avenue toward other programs or models that the staff could pursue. Living history, then, has become for the Friends of Arrow Rock but one component of a broader approach to enlivening their tours. It has become a model around which the Friends can create other reenactment tours as well as a springboard for involving broader reenactment techniques and groups, such as Civil War reenactors.

It is important to emphasize, however, that the Friends, as President Sue Stubbs asserted, "didn't drop the idea" of creating further living history tours similar in model to the project they undertook. Volunteers are beginning to take the initiative to learn the parts of first person narratives, and the institution is moving forward with its ideas. The next task for the Friends staff is, then, to decide the means by which the institution could develop and produce tours continually. Education Director Pam Parsons explained: "What we have to develop is being able to do [the living history tours] in repertoire, so that you could offer three or four of them over the summer, or rotate them..." For the Friends of Arrow Rock, this may mean restructuring what was done during the grant period by expanding the time frame during which the tours were created, tailoring the script so that the living history could be presented by one person instead of three, separating the intern project from the writing of the scripts, or re-focusing the tours around certain weekends or weekend events.

No matter the approach, the model has given the Friends of Arrow Rock the flexibility and knowledge necessary to expanding its programs. Kathy Borgman sums up: "Now that we have a working model, we can continue to create first person tours for additional buildings and time periods. As we add to our narratives, we can offer weekends when one or two first-person tours are given. I hope ultimately we can host a fund-raising event where visitors meet numerous Arrow Rock "people of the past" portrayed by first-person interpreters in our restored buildings."