"GUIDED TOUR, LIVING HISTORY STYLE"

"Guided Tour, Living History Style," was the Friends of Arrow Rock's idea to attract more visitors through public programming. Their goal was to create a new living history "exhibit" of "people telling the stories of Arrow Rock's history." Through the recruitment of interns, volunteers, and new temporary staff members, the Friends sought the means to script and present these stories. This process would involve guides and historic interpreters as well as students recruited from nearby Missouri Valley College. In addition, the Friends proposed to build in a forum for community critique as they developed and piloted their program. The Friends of Arrow Rock, from the start, knew that they wanted the living history exhibit to focus mainly on the story of John and Nannie Sites, (link to character overview) local nineteenth century gunsmiths. Centering the story around this couple would also allow the Friends of Arrow Rock to explore the historical context, namely the post-Civil War era, in which the Sites lived.

JOHN AND NANNIE SITES:
This text is taken from a "Gunstocks and Bustles" flyer which explained the characters of John and Nannie Sites:

John P. Sites: After a gunsmithing apprenticeship with his father and his 1841 marriage to Nancy Jane Toole, John Sites opened the first of three gunshops in Arrow Rock in 1844, the year of the Big Flood of the Missouri River (the worst recorded in history until 1993). He was from a long line of Virginia gunsmiths and could make the entire gun, lock, stock, and barrel, convert flintlocks to percussion guns, and repair just about anything. His other interests included buying and selling property, his farm and its peach trees, his newly found religion, and the prosperity of the town he loved, Arrow Rock.

Nancy Jane (Nannie) Toole Sites: Born in Kentucky in 1825, Nannie married John Sites at the age of sixteen in 1841. Known affectionately as Aunt Nannie, she and her husband raised a great nephew, Ernest Randolph, after the 1855 death of their only child, Charles, at age ten. In 1880, Ernest (age 16) was serving as an apprentice to John and living in the Sites' home.