Miss Laura's, The Bordello on the Row

At the corner of First Street and the levee, there once stood a row of establishments that served the appetites of a river town and a frontier court. The area was known as the Row, and it operated for decades with the practical tolerance that boom-era American towns extended to the commerce of vice, provided it stayed in its designated geography and did not trouble the respectable blocks further up the hill. Miss Laura's Social Club opened in the late eighteen nineties on First Street and became, over the following decades, one of the better-known establishments of its kind in the region.

Laura Ziegler, whose name the house took, ran it as a business with some care for outward respectability. The building itself was designed with a certain Victorian ambition: brick, two stories, an ornate facade that signaled a level of investment unusual for a house whose primary product was not intended to be architecture. The establishment operated until approximately nineteen eleven, when a combination of reform pressure and municipal enforcement finally closed the Row.

The building survived demolition by a combination of neglect and eventual recognition. In nineteen seventy-three it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, among the earliest former bordellos in the United States to receive that designation. It has since been restored and serves today as the Fort Smith Convention and Visitors Bureau, a function that the building's original clientele would probably find amusing.

The history of the Row is a reminder that the edge-of-civilization mythology of Fort Smith was not purely about law and outlaws. There was also a town here, with all the commerce, appetite, and complicated moral negotiation that towns have always involved.