By Pam Creech
Contributing Writer
Historic walking tours typically involve a tour guide, a large group of people and a pre-determined meeting time. Now with the Civil War Wilmington walking tour app, participants can set the pace and duration of their tours.
The tour begins at the Bellamy Mansion, located at 503 Market St. The following 12 stops lead walkers to the Bellamy Mansion Slave Quarters, Confederate Headquarters for the Cape Fear District, Thalian Hall, Wilmington Railroad Museum, Paddy’s Hollow, Customs House, Water Street, Orange Street, Seaman’s Bethel, the deRossett House and the Sword Factory.
The last five sites — Fort Fisher, Forks Road Battle Site, Fort Anderson/ Brunswick Town, Oakdale Cemetery and Wilmington National Cemetery — require driving.
Each stop includes historic photographs and a 400-word brief about the site. Purchasers can choose to read the summaries on their smart phones or listen to the audio version.
Dan Camancho, one of the app’s developers, stresses its uniqueness.
“It brings the multi-media you couldn’t normally get on a tour,” Camancho said.
Camancho worked for
Amazon.com before obtaining a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2009.
“I have a lot of experience with how people use websites, and what they understand and don’t understand,” he said. “I wanted to combine my love of writing with my love of history and my interest in technology.”
Camancho spent six months working on the Civil War Wilmington tour. He said it was challenging to condense the rich history of each site into a short summary.
“You write it differently when you know it’s going to be read aloud,” he said.
One of Camancho’s favorite stops is the deRossett House.
“We wanted to focus on what women did during the war,” he said. Many women, who had no prior work experience outside of the home, distilled salt from ocean water or became landladies by renting out their homes.
Beverly Tetterton, who co-developed the app, is fascinated by the Bellamy Mansion Slave Quarters’ history.
“That’s a story you just can’t make up,” she said.
While Camancho handled the technical side of the app, Tetterton, a retired research librarian at the New Hanover County Public Library, compiled historical information and pictures for each site.
“A lot of the photographs came from the public library,” she said.
Tetterton also credits Chris Fonvielle Jr., Ph.D., associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, for much of the historical information used to create the tour.
Tetterton was challenged by condensing Wilmington’s rich Civil War history into a two-hour tour with 18 stops.
“We could’ve added more, but we had to stop at some point and we wanted to get it out before the 150th [anniversary],” she said, which begins Dec. 24, 2014, on the anniversary of the Union raid on Fort Fisher.
To purchase the tour, download the “wihi tours” app. Then, purchase Civil War Wilmington for $5.99. Two other tours of Wilmington — Old Wilmington I and Old Wilmington II — are also available for purchase.
