Dublin uses audio tour and mobile app to spotlight rich history

DUBLIN, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – Visit Dublin is putting a modern twist on capturing the city’s place in history. The road to discovering Dublin’s historic past now has a few stops along the way.

“Each of these audio boxes captures and combines local stories with history, so it really has a kind of modern edge to it. It really captures the story and what makes Dublin unique,” said Director of Tourism Rebecca McWilliam.

Visit Dublin’s new smart phone app and additions to their audio tour will guide you in the right direction. It’s about a 5 mile walk which includes 71 sites–and 16 of those sites are a part of the audio tour.

“So we kind of knew what stories we wanted to focus on reached out to locals like Jeff Davis who owns the old post office and got his story in the box,” McWilliam added.

Davis’s post office is just one of the sites on the tour.

So here’s how the audio tour works–you walk up to the green box at each historic site, click one of the four buttons and there you have it–instant access to Dublin’s rich history.

“Cultural and heritage tourism is one of the fastest growing segments of tourism in the state, so we really wanted to capture that and bring it to life through the art of story telling,” said McWilliam.

Using the app you can take pictures and post them to your social media, navigate the streets and hear stories told for each of the sites.

“You can filter by specific history, if you wanted to focus on African-American history, if you wanted to find a place to shop, if you wanted to find solely architecture.”

It’s all possible with the new app. McWilliam says more importantly, the tour will give residents an in depth view of the city’s past and visitor’s one more reason to stop by.

“The amazing thing about tourism is it also has that community development aspect, we can share the history of Dublin with people from around the world as well as educate our citizens on their heritage,” she said.

Paving the way for a road more traveled than just talked about in the archives.

McWilliam says even though the walk is a little over 5 miles it’s well worth it and the good news is you don’t have to do it all in one sitting.

The four audio tour sites are located at the newly installed MLK Monument Park, the Dublin Theater, the old post office on Madison Street and The Old City Cemetery.

McWilliam says all four of the audio tour installations will be up and ready to be walked by the end of the week.