New website and app to showcase the rich history of Waseca

John Hanson knows that Waseca has a rich history, and he decided to make that history more accessible to Waseca’s citizens and visitors.

Hanson, who is a social studies teacher at the Waseca High School, created a website and is in the process of creating an app with tours of Waseca to give people the opportunity to learn more about the community and Waseca’s history. Hanson presented the website at the June 18 City Council meeting.

Website

“My intent tonight is to give you an update and report on where we’re at with what began a year ago with the city council giving their endorsement and being the vehicle by which the HPC(Heritage Preservation Commission) would pursue a grant, and that grant was obviously a huge part of this process,” Hanson said at the meeting.

Hanson, along with his students, worked with the HPC and city staff on the project and the website became live just two hours before the meeting on Tuesday June 18. Hanson walked through the website with the council at the meeting.

Hanson had help from many entities on the project, including Waseca Tourism, the Waseca County Historical Society, and the local newspapers, who gave Hanson and his crew access to articles to use for their research and their website.

“I’m just really grateful for all those different pieces and parts and people working together,” said Hanson. “There were a number of obstacles and detours along the way to get us to where we are at.”

The website consists of a series of tours that has historical information of many places around Waseca. The HPC and the city of Waseca received a grant from the Minnesota Historical Society and also received funding from the Waseca Area Foundation for the project.

“Each one of these tours has an element to it that’s unique,” Hanson said.

App

While the website is up and running and is a valuable source of information, the tours are made to experience with the app, which will become live sometime in the next month and a half. The app is GPS driven and people will be able to download it for free.

The app will be made for people to use while they are visiting the sites the tours are based off of.

“If you are using the app, the intent would be to not have people with their face in their phones reading all of this, so what we went ahead and did was we secured pretty good voices in Waseca,” Hanson said.

One of the voices that can be heard on the tours is Jack Williams, the longtime theater director at the Waseca High School.

Hanson said that they did everything they could to try and connect the history and tours with something going on today. For the tours, they used a lot of resources including firsthand accounts of certain events and things and old newspaper articles.

“The students that created the drafts of these were incredible researchers but more they were aggregators,” Hanson said. “They went out and found everything they possibly could under the sun on these topics, and in the process then accumulated it and we together as a class sorted through it.”

Response and future

The app will also allow people to participate and give them an opportunity to share their memory of a certain subject and stop on the tours.

“We recognize we don’t have access to everything, and we would appreciate it if people wanted to tell their story so we could contact them,” Hanson said.

The website currently has tours on the history of Waseca, and will soon have tours about schools, parks, restaurants and shops. Hanson and his students will also be adding tours to the history section of the website and app, with about a dozen of them to be added in the fall.

“We’re not done yet, this is really fun,” said Hanson. “We’re going to spend a whole nother year continuing to build it along with these other tours that will draw people to this app and this site to be able to use it for all these purposes and it will benefit the community in a lot of different ways.”

The council thanked Hanson for his efforts in the project and are really excited for the app.

“It’s a testament to when people work together and come together and also include the youth, you can get things done and you spur such wonderful interest and ownership into it,” council member Stacey Schroeder said.

In September, Hanson and some of the students who are working on the project will be presenting the website and app at the annual Preserve Minnesota conference in Red Wing. “We’re really appreciative of John teaching the students to appreciate Waseca’s history,” said Waseca’s Economic Development Manager Tina Wilson, who wrote the grant that got approved for the project.

Hanson closed his presentation to the council by saying how the project is not easy as there are some elements to Waseca’s history that are tough, but ultimately they were stories that needed to be told.

“We had to work real hard and come up with the best way to tell these stories in a way that’s accurate but also respectful,” Hanson said.