On February 28, 2023, the Town of Apex launched a year-long campaign to celebrate its 150th anniversary of incorporation. The sesquicentennial celebration aims to unify, create common understanding, and challenge community members to go all in with Apex.
In 2021, the Town of Apex formed a core team of staff to collaborate and plan the 150th celebration. The team quickly realized that to achieve its 150th goals, they would need to create partnerships with community members from all over Apex. Many community champions were identified and asked to join the Apex 150th historic subcommittee, which was led by two Town of Apex staff members.
Today, Apex is a town in transition. It is undergoing significant urbanization and development, and Apex is at risk of losing many of the physical reminders of those founding communities. To tell the community stories accurately and respectfully, community champions supplied artifacts, memories, photos, and important locations. Those materials, coupled with creativity and skill from the Town’s Planning Department GIS team, led to the creation of the Interactive Community Map project. The original vision for the Interactive Community Map project was to create a self-guided walking tour of the historic communities that current community members could do in their own time. However, while gathering the information, the core team realized that many of the proposed tours encompassed areas that either were too large to be feasible or lacked accessible infrastructure to work as walking tours. With that problem in mind, staff worked to develop an online, accessible storytelling solution.
The Interactive Community Map Project was created using Esri Storymaps. Esri Storymaps were chosen because of the flexibility of the tool, the ease of customization for each Storymap (rather than a one-size fits all program), and the ability to design maps using the Apex 150th branding palette. Each tour was built using a combination of text, timelines, and a guided tour, depending on the information available for each community. Current community members can scroll through the historic stories of past communities while the digital map moves them spatially through Apex, linking parts of the stories to the actual locations where they took place.
By creating opportunities for today’s community members to learn more about Apex’s past, the Interactive Community Map Project meets all the sesquicentennial’s goals in a way that will outlast the celebration itself.
The Board of Directors of Capital Area Preservation, Inc. is pleased to present a 2023 Anthemion Award to the Town of Apex for the 150th Anniversary Interactive Community Map.