Wimmer's trolleys put city on display

BY EMILY BATTLE

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.

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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.

Read more stories about Fredericksburg
Date published: 6/3/2009

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