One of the joys of midwinter is planning for the summer season, and knowing we are already halfway there.

In Bath, event committees have been meeting to prepare for events like our weekly outdoor Gazebo Concerts, Third Friday ArtWalks, Bath Heritage Days festival and other activities designed to encourage residents and visitors to spend some of their summer enjoying the City of Ships.

Summer is, of course, our high season for tourism, although our diverse state offers a variety of attractions throughout the year. In January, the Maine Office of Tourism rolled out plans to coordinate marketing to present a unified message about our state.

“Originality” is a key theme of the 2013 marketing campaign, using images and words that evoke the “quintessential qualities of the Maine attitude — the quirky, unusual, one-of-a-kind, offbeat, original things found only in Maine.”

The Maine Office of Tourism will use Maine people and places to represent these qualities, and should have no difficulty in coming up with some interesting characters.

I found myself thinking about Bath, and imagining how, as a historic city that values its heritage, we might express our unique qualities and attract visitors by drawing on some of the stories of people from our past.

Our neighbors in Brunswick have done this with good success by promoting — with a little help from the popular 1993 film — past resident and Gettysburg hero Joshua Chamberlain. The Chamberlain house and museum in Brunswick are popular destinations for Civil War buffs.

Other illustrious part-time residents were Bowdoin alums Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, celebrated annually in February during Brunswick’s Longfellow Days, and Admiral Robert Peary, whose North Pole expeditions are represented at Bowdoin’s Peary- MacMillan Arctic Museum.

Taken together, these historic figures give Brunswick added luster and help make it a destination for heritage tourism.

Bath, in contrast, was for many years seen as the scrappy neighbor, building ships rather than scholars.

I like to think that the upside of this was a larger opportunity to lift yourself up by your bootstraps if you were hard working and talented enough. Many Bath residents built successful careers coming up through the ranks in the shipyards.

The downtown and city overall also have a certain self-made, can-do legacy, having gone through periods of economic decline as the era of the tall ships waned, and again after the shipbuilding surge of World War II — only to find their feet and come back fighting.

To personify this scrappy spirit, Bath might draw on the story of Charles W. Morse, an energetic innovator who leveraged a start in his father’s towing-andshipping business to build a fortune providing ice harvested from the Kennebec River to New Yorkers. Morse become a wealthy Wall Street tycoon.

Unfortunately, Bath’s so-called “Ice King” has a mixed history, as he was accused of cornering the market and trying to use his monopoly to drive up prices, and of manipulating stocks and helping to cause the financial panic of 1907.

He eventually was jailed for financial violations; it’s said he wrangled an early pardon from President Taft by feigning illness.

But he did also gift Morse High School to the city of Bath, and named it for his mother.

To balance his story, we have Bath’s other famous “King”— Governor William King, who became the first governor of Maine after serving in the Massachusetts Senate, where he successfully petitioned for Maine’s independence.

Perhaps Bath’s two Kings can help us understand the quintessential qualities of Bath that make it so attractive to residents and visitors.

Bath is all about balance between contrasting forces, and this is what gives the city its unique character.

Bath wouldn’t be Bath without the sight of the iconic No. 11 crane at Bath Iron Works forming a backdrop to the graceful buildings of the historic downtown district.

I anticipate the two greatest draws for visitors this summer are likely to be the very popular tours of BIW, where construction of the futuristic Zumwalt class of destroyers has begun; and the addition of six masts to the sculpture representing the tall ship Wyoming at the Maine Maritime Museum.

We draw on our history to help inform our understanding of who we are today, and to keep us on track to maintain and improve our quality of life as we move toward the future.

Balance. Heritage. Character. Good words to live by.

JENNIFER GEIGER is executive director of Main Street Bath.