Overview
I’m not the biggest Civil War buff. Growing up in Loudoun County and now living in the Shenandoah Valley, I feel like this particular era overshadows all other local history. But I recently learned about a new mobile app from The National Park Service called Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park (NHP), so my family and I went on a self-guided auto tour of the local battlefield, which was the perfect way to get out of the house while still avoiding all people at all costs because social distancing.
This app is a 17-mile driving tour with nine stops that follow the events that took place before, during, and after the Battle of Cedar Creek in October 1864. In a nutshell, Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan was in charge of the Union Army in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864 and was tasked with shutting out the Confederate Army from their supply chains, thereby defeating them. Part of Sheridan’s tactic was essentially to burn everything, which has arguably made his legend in the Valley pretty infamous.
On the other side of the story is Gen. Jubal A. Early, who was in charge of the Confederate Army in the Shenandoah Valley, which was not at all in control of the situation by 1864; Sheridan definitely had more victories under his belt. On October 19, 1864, Early decided to do an early morning sneak attack on the Union soldiers camped out along Cedar Creek, which was incredibly effective until Sheridan counterattacked later that day, ultimately defeating Early’s army. It was an intense day for everyone involved!
Engage through place-based techniques
I think that this particular part of the app is really well done. It’s nothing fancy, but I found it effective. In the lower toolbar in the app is a Map icon that, if your phone’s location services is turned on, allows you to see where you are in relation to the tour’s designated stops. In the screenshot, you can see our little red dot nearing the first stop of our tour. Each of the nine tour stops is clickable on the map and opens a basic dialogue box with the stop’s name, that, too, is clickable and opens the stop’s information page, which I’ll talk about in just a minute. I particularly like the location services that the app uses because it allowed me and my family to see our route, which ends up being a big loop through Middletown via a mix of back and main roads.
If you happen to have trouble with the app’s Map feature – e.g., it doesn’t work on your mobile device or you don’t get service – there are also physical cues that make it nearly impossible to get lost. As you near your stop, there are brown roadside signs (similar to those historic site signs you see that let you know that you’re coming up on a historic home, site, battlefield, etc) that are clearly labeled “Auto Tour” and then the applicable stop number.
As you proceed with the tour, I questioned where we were going as we made a couple of turns down back dirt roads. How on earth are they going to communicate with us where we need to stop? Just like they (the NPS) have brown historic site markers, they have the same style roadside sign with arrows letting you know where to turn to get to the next stop on your auto tour. Again, nothing fancy, but their tactic goes to show that you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel to create an effective end product.
Give the people what they want
It’s one thing to read history and another to actually see it. The Shenandoah Valley really is a beautiful place, even to this day, so to drive on these back gravel roads, wind along Cedar Creek, look at Signal Knob from Belle Grove, and so forth, it’s powerful.
What I think that the NPS has done particularly well with this app is blend traditional with modern. Each site has your traditional, ever-popular interpretive panels with a historical synopsis of what happened as it relates to the overall narrative being told, so some visitors/users may want to just experience the auto tour without the mobile app, which is perfectly fine. With the app, though, you literally have your own NPS ranger giving a tour to you right on your mobile device. Starting at the visitor’s center, mobile app users watch an introductory video by Park Ranger Eric Campbell, who then accompanies them through the Cedar Creek Battlefield tour via a mixture of videos and sound recordings; not all sites have a video, but they’re all narrated by Eric in some digital way or another.
By using this digital interpretive element, the app is giving mobile device users what (I think) they want as well as how they want it – brief but informative sound bytes (i.e., not information overload), self-guided tours (i.e., no pressure), convenient (i.e., everything’s on your mobile device, and you don’t even have to get out of your car, if you don’t want to!).
So at each tour stop, you have a park ranger narrating you through the historical narrative, an interpretive panel for additional reading, and also a transcript of everything that Eric is saying in the app, so even if your mobile device’s reception is spotty or you’re having technical difficulties, you’re able to skim the narrative to understand the site’s importance in the greater narrative.
Final thoughts
I suspect that there’s one shared drawback of mobile apps: not everyone has a mobile device. What I like about this particular app is that it doesn’t really leave anyone behind – it enhances a traditional auto tour with traditional resources (historic marker signs, interpretive panels, etc.). Even if there’s a non-mobile device using visitor, they’re still able to experience the Cedar Creek Battlefield; they just won’t have Park Ranger Eric in their car with them as they travel through Middletown and relive October 19, 1864.
