July 12, 2015 - Sunday our "hump" day in Carthage!

That's right!  Today was the biggest day for Sunday tours on the 2015 schedule of the Historic Carthage Jail.  We have worked hard and prepared well for today and we had 1302 visitors go on tours in a 5 hour period.  That was incredible, and a miracle that we were able to do that in such a short amount of time.  And I think that we were successful in providing the best tours possible under the circumstances.  We only had to turn away about 50 people and we were only about 30 minutes past closing when we completed the last group through the jail.  I wish I had the time today just to take pictures of the crowds, but there was no chance.  In fact, I did not even think about pictures until right now!

We had 6 bus loads of youth from the Houston, Texas, Stake, just to begin our day.  We scheduled 320 for tours and they had 55 youth every 30 minutes for three hours.  I would meet the group outside and share some stories with them and then move them into the movie room as it became available.  Then we would fill in the group with families coming for tours and we seemed to get the flow down pretty well.  

Of course there were a few folks that may have been disappointed with the large crowds and the abbreviated tours, but I am convinced we did the best we could under the circumstances.  Each movie we showed had an average of about 90 people, and the movie was shown about every 25 minutes.  The largest group in the movie was almost 100!

As we look forward to the balance of the tourist season and our scheduled visits to Carthage this summer, we will have daily averages of 400 to 600 guests compared to over 1,000.  That is very manageable after our experiences this week.  In fact, this week we had nearly 10,000 visitors come between last Sunday and yesterday.  This is quite remarkable to me.  

I could not single out any individual experience today but I know that there were several families and several youth groups that came without scheduling a time that we were able to accommodate and they left very satisfied.  Our prayers for a miracle this week in handling these tours was greatly answered!