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Butch Wimmer started Trolley Tours of Fredericksburg in 1994. At first, he wrote the script and gave all the tours.
Butch Wimmer was a big supporter of the New Life in Christ Youth Group. He's posing here with some of its members. |
Fifteen years ago this month, Edgar C. "Butch" Wimmer started driving visitors to downtown Fredericksburg around in a 1978 Dodge motor home converted to look like a trolley.
Taking them by historic sites like the Rising Sun Tavern and Sunken Road, he'd give them a 75-minute tour he'd written himself.
So began Trolley Tours of Fredericksburg, a business that Wimmer's wife, Nancy, and his six employees are determined to continue to run just as he set it up. Wimmer died Sunday of cancer. He was 74.
Nobody is quite sure how Wimmer first came upon the idea to make a business out of tours of the city.
Mark Davis, who has been a driver with Trolley Tours since 1995, and Nancy Wimmer both say Butch had been talking about the idea since the 1960s or '70s.
At one time, he approached Carl D. Silver about it.
"Carl Silver told him, 'Butch, you have a lot of good ideas, you just don't have any money,'" Nancy Wimmer said.
The tours weren't Wimmer's first taste of business ownership in the city.
He owned an apparel store downtown called "The Clothes Horse." Later on, he owned a car wash next to Carl's Ice Cream, where Keystone Coffee and Auto Spa is today.
Up through the early 1990s, Wimmer worked in real estate.
Nancy Wimmer said around 1993 Butch was sidelined by a back injury and couldn't work for several months.
That was when he finally decided to make a go of his trolley tour concept.
A business acquaintance in South Carolina--Herman McDaniel--helped with the funds to buy the first trolley, and Wimmer read up on the city's history and wrote the script for the tour.
Wimmer's tour was something completely new in downtown Fredericksburg, a community that doesn't always welcome new things with open arms.
At first, some of the historic attractions he was featuring in his tour complained that he was doing too good a job, and that his business would keep them from coming to their attractions on foot.
But over the years, Wimmer's trolleys have become a part of the landscape of downtown Fredericksburg.
"It is something that is very well-integrated now, and it has its regular devotees, that when they have out-of-town guests, that's what they want to do," said Karen Hedelt, the city's acting director of economic development and tourism.
The people Wimmer hired over the years say working for him wasn't like being in a typical boss-employee relationship.
"He would introduce me to people and they'd say, 'Does he work for you?' and he'd say, 'No he doesn't work for me, he works with me,'" Davis said.
Wimmer also made a point to use his business to talk about his Christianity. He was a devoted member of Crossroads Baptist Church in Spotsylvania County.
"He would say, 'It's not my company, it's God's company and I'm just running it for him,'" Nancy Wimmer said.
Every year, Trolley Tours takes church groups on caroling outings at no charge. The only conditions are that they must sing true Christian Christmas carols, and they must spread their cheer by visiting a homeless shelter, shut-ins or senior home.
That tradition will continue, Nancy Wimmer said.
So will the rest of the Trolley Tours business.
While the daily tours have dropped off a little in recent years as the economy has suffered, Trolley Tours' David Hurt said the charter business for weddings, family reunions and other group events has picked up.
Hurt said Wimmer had been approached by officials in Charlottesville and Richmond about starting tours there, but after visiting the cities, determined that their historic sites were so spread out that it would be hard to conduct a tour as rich as the one in Fredericksburg without spending too much time driving.
At some point in the future, Davis said the business plans to get an air-conditioned trolley that will help shield visitors from the city's brutal summer heat and humidity.
When it comes, that car will be given the same name that Wimmer's 4-year-old grandson inexplicably gave his grandfather.
"Archie."
Emily Battle: 540/374-5413
Email: ebattle@freelancestar.com
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More than nine years ago, David Hurt took some out-of-town guests on a Trolley Tours of Fredericksburg tour to show them around. By the time he got off the trolley, he had started a conversation with tour driver Mark Davis that would lead him to the job he now has as a driver and business manager for the business Butch Wimmer started in 1994. Anybody who gives tours for pay in downtown Fredericksburg must be licensed by the city, a process that includes passing a 16-page test on city history, administered by the tourism department. "I studied Russian at Mary Washington College, and that was a piece of cake compared to becoming licensed downtown," said Katherine Quann, who has driven for Trolley Tours for five years. When Wimmer started his business, he crafted the tour script himself. He also gave all the tours for the first year, and as he added workers, he phased out of the driver's seat and into the business side. But Davis said Wimmer's tour was a treat. He had a gift for storytelling, and his passion for the city's history came through in his delivery. "The first time I took a tour with him, I was in tears on Sunken Road," Davis said. Hurt said he made a transcript out of a recording of Wimmer's original tour. That is what Trolley Tours drivers use to train when they first come on, although they all add their own touches to the tour based on their area of expertise or their own method of storytelling. But Davis said some of Wimmer's original words live on. "I've put a lot of it into my own words, but there's definitely a lot of it that's still Butch's," he said. |
