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Tour Hailey by Phone
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Thursday, February 8, 2018
 

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Rob Lonning is a sucker for historic trivia.

He can’t pass by a cemetery or a turn-of-the-century building without wondering what tales lies therein.

His quest to the learn the history of his adopted home of Hailey led him to write the book “Hailey-Images of America,” which described the historic nuances of a boomtown founded amidst the lead and silver rush.

And now he’s come up with a Historic Hailey Walking Tour app.

A couple touches of the screen on your iPhone or Android and you can learn how the Inn at Ellsworth Estate was used as a Mormon Church from 1945 to 1961. Or how St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church is considered the mother parish of southeastern Idaho.

“We have walking tour brochures but they’re always in short supply. We get a couple hundred printed up and give them out. I thought: Wouldn’t it be cool to have an app for visitors coming to town?” said Lonning, former chair of Hailey’s Historic Preservation Commission.

At first, Lonning thought it would be a great project for a high school student.

“But it wasn’t happening so I figured if anyone was going to do it it’d better be me,” he added.

Lonning began researching app building programs on the Internet. But each cost a couple thousand dollars and required a thousand dollar maintenance fee. Finally, he stumbled across Google Tour Builder, which allowed him to do what he wanted free of charge.

Google Tour builder allowed him to flag locations on a Google Earth map and add photos and text, such as how the Hailey Hotel used to be the Rialto, a Basque boarding house, or how the Snug Bar down the street used to be a Hemingway haunt.

Google Tour Builder was originally created to give veterans a way to record all the places military service took them so they could preserve their stories and memories as a legacy for their families, Lonning said. But, eventually, the creators realized it could be a useful tool for anyone with a story to tell.

Lonning added a few items not in the walking brochure, such as the Fox Barn that anchors the bicycle pump park by Blaine County Recreation District’s Aquatic Center.

The barn was built in 1935 by Dr. Earl W. Fox, a physician, rancher and son of Hailey pioneer and merchant J.C. Fox, who arrived in Hailey in 1881, having walked the last mile from Bellevue when his horse gave out. His son John Fox had an egg farm where the aquatic center is now but died in a tractor accident at the Quigley Reservoir in the early 1970s.

Along with creating the app, Lonning made a few corrections to details he discovered differed from what was written in the printed brochures.

He found out, for instance, that S.J. Friedman, who built the mercantile that survived the 1889 fire that wiped out much of the downtown businesses, was named Simon—not Samuel, as was reported in the written brochure.

“I looked and looked and finally found his name in the ‘History of Alturas County.’ His second cousin, who was the mayor of Hailey, was also named Simon. Since his cousin was more famous, I ‘m guessing he just told people, ‘I’m S.J.,’ ” Lonning said.

People can easily access the walking tour by going to the City of Hailey’s website at https://www.haileycityhall.org/. Click on the Historic Hailey Walking Tour on the right side and download it for free to your Apple smart phone or Android by sending an email to yourself.

Click on a red pin to bring up a photo and history of a site.

Tourists who don’t have access to a computer can open a file in Google Earth and go from there.

The question now becomes how to let visitors know it’s available. Could Lonning put posters in the windows of historic properties?

“I’ve still got a little work to do on that end,” he said. “But I figure there are 8,000 people in Hailey and I figure some of them will want to know about the history of their town. Did you know, for instance, that Chapalita’s Grill was the original site of the Wood River Times and that the editor T.E. Picotte was horsewhipped a number of times for the personal attacks published in his paper? Did you know that the west end of what is now Luke’s Pharmacy once housed the Wood River News-Miner during a time when there were no fewer than four daily newspapers in Hailey?

“I’m sure some of our visitors will find this information interesting, as well.”

TO DOWNLOAD THE APP:

Install the app Google Earth on your smart phone. It’s free from the App Store for iPhones and from app purveyors for Android, as well.

Look for a large globe of the earth with three lines in the upper left. Press the three lines to get a drop-down menu. About a third of the way down, select “My Places.”

Go to the bottom of the “My Places” page to IMPORT KML FILE. Use that option to load the file: Tour.kmz.

When complete, you should see the option to “Fly Here” on the My Places page. When you click on that option, you will be transported to Hailey where there will be a series of pins that relate to the sites that have been uploaded.

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