Ben Garbacz/Daily Mining Gazette Hancock City Hall's garage will be converted into the Hancock Heritage Room once it is cleared of storage and painted restored. The Hancock Historic Commission is planning to use the heritage room to showcase historic photographs and artifacts and serve as a space for community events.

HANCOCK — The Historic Hancock Commission held its first official meeting Monday. The purpose of the initial meeting was to establish its foundation and formulate initial plans to showcase the city’s history through signage and displays. The commission named Jonathon Nagel chair and Mandy Lounibos as the vice chair, officially resuming the commission after a multi-year absence.

“I think we have a great variety of expertise on this committee, not just my own,” Nagel said after the meeting. “I come at this from a background more in architecture and city planning, so I’m very concerned with those elements. We also have members on this who have worked more with the cultural sides of it, who have actually worked managing museums and having collections and stuff like that, where that is outside of my expertise.”

The commission added to the variety of expertise with another member — Chief of Interpretation at Quincy Mine Clayton Gomez. Together the commission will coordinate projects to exhibit Hancock’s history, such as the creation of the Hancock Heritage Room. The city hall garage will become the heritage room once storage is removed and minor restoration concludes. Once the garage is cleared, more concrete plans will be discussed on how to turn the heritage room into an area which displays copies of historical photographs and artifacts and potentially be a space for revolving exhibits, meetings and public events.

The commission talked extensively on the implementation of a walking tour throughout the city which would entail downloading an app or using a website on mobile devices to correlate with historic spaces. City Manager Mary Babcock said Finnish Foundation National is planning to do something similar with their Finnish Heritage Sites, and Gomez mentioned he went to the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Virginia where after paying an entrance fee audio files are uploaded to visitors’ phones and they are played as a unit while touring the museum. How the self guided tours will be determined in the future.

Nagel said he is excited about the potential walking tours, since they promote interaction with the city. “That’s the best way to explore it. When you’re in a car, you’re kind of separated from everything, but when you’re actually there walking you can picture all the stuff that occurred taking those same footsteps as those before you. You can look at these pictures and see what these buildings used to look like, how they’ve changed and how they’re the same and learn about the historical events that occurred there,” Nagel said.

The commission is still working on their sign projects from last meeting, where historic recognition signs will be placed at places significant to the city much like the Historic Houghton signs. The commission tabled purchasing items from New Power Tour until the commission’s budget is established. The terms of commission members were established with Frank Fiala and Elise Nelson’s terms running to 2026, Nagel and Louinbos to 2027 and Steve Walton and Babcock to 2028.