The RM of Emerson-Franklin is making a concerted effort to promote tourism in the region with the unveiling of a new online portal.
Accessed through the municipality’s website, the tourism portal offers a glimpse of the areas’s cultural landmarks, historic buildings, interpretative trails, and natural wonders as well as a variety of year-round events where Emerson-Franklin’s stories and landscapes come alive.
Reeve Dave Carlson said it has been part of their strategic planning process and has been in the works for some time.
“We wanted to really highlight tourism for our area as part of the quality of life aspect of things,” said Carlson, who is part of a dedicated tourism committee that includes several other representatives from the community. “We really wanted to highlight some of the places in our area that we would like to see people come and visit.”
The tourism portal covers a lot of ground and notes such highlights as the Senkiw cable suspension bridge built in 1946, Roseau River canoeing, kayaking, and tubing, the Franklin Museum in Dominion City, Roseau Crossing Heritage Park in Dominion City, historic log buildings and a suspension bridge in Emerson and the Manitoba Tall Grass Prairie Reserve.
The region is part of the Crow Wing trail, and it annually hosts a variety of festival and events such as the Emerson Canada Day bash and Dominion City Summer Fest.
“And there’s just a lot of outdoor things to do,” he added, noting there are two challenging golf courses in Emerson and Dominion City.
“We’re a very historical area. We had settlers here quite early,” said Carlson. “Fort Dufferin is a real highlight because it’s where the Boundary Commission was based out of for a couple of years back when they were mapping the border back in the early 1870s.
“We have the Senkiw swinging bridge in the eastern part of our municipality which has become a real tourist draw, and we’re really proud of it. That bridge was built in the 1940s, and we’ve kept it up.”
It was a fair bit of work to pull all of this information together in a user-friendly way.
“What we did initially was kind of take an inventory of all of our assets through our planner,” Carlson said. “We took an inventory of everything that we had and put them into their different segments.
“We figured we should have a story map so that people can find these places of interest or the services or restaurants or campgrounds,” he added. “We thought it could be a real help to those in the communities who have these businesses and attractions.”
“We just want to make sure that people know we’re open for business and that we have all of these amenities in our area,” said Carlson, suggesting there is much more to the region than what people may realize.
“We have a lot going on,” he said. “We have a beautiful river that runs through the entirety of our municipality, and we’ve got a lot of great people doing great things, so we just wanted to highlight that, and we just want people to support it.”
The municipality is now also part of the Central Manitoba tourism agency, and Carlson thinks that will provide a further boost.
“I think the timing was really good because now we’re introducing our area to a whole new audience,” he suggested.
“We’re very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, and the website will be ever evolving,” Carlson added. “We’ll be adding more things as they come up. We hope we have a lot of people come out to visit … it can be a real economic driver for our region.”
