Emporia State is hosting a bus tour focused on educating students about the history and development of local businesses on Saturday. The tour will be from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and will loop around Emporia, making multiple stops.  

“We start from the (Emporia) Main Street Office, 727 Commercial, then we kind of go around, so we will basic introduce how small the business started and some other entrepreneurship ideas,” said Joyce Zhou, chair of business administration department. “We will (also) visit Granada Coffee and Sweet Granada. The owner will talk about how they started their business and their entrepreneur story.” 

The tour features local historian Roger Heineken as the tour guide and he will introduce the three phases of Emporia business development.  

“I plan to talk about the different phases of Emporia’s business, in the beginning it was starting the town and building infrastructure to attract people to come to Emporia, and make it their home,” said Heineken, “In the second phase, it was a booster period, there was an economic depression in 1893, and leaders of our communities wanted to find a way to build business.” 

To fund the tour, Zhou applied for and received a $350 grant from the Katherine K. White Faculty Incentive Grant program. Emporia Main Street also provides gift certificates to students who attend. 

“We thought that the setup of this business trip kind of benefited all parties (and) involved all students to give us an opportunity to showcase some differences of our local businesses to students who might not had a chance to come down and visit the downtown area,” said Jessica Buchholz, the community development coordinator of Emporia Main Street. “It’s also an opportunity for students to learn a little bit about Emporia business history.”  

If the feedback from the tour is positive and students enjoy it, then they plan to hold another tour in the future, according to Zhou and Bucholz.