1882-1938, facility endured fire, flood

In spring 1882, the city of Little Rock granted the Athletic Association of Little Rock a 19-year lease for $1 a year on a riverfront lot, 125 feet by 65 feet at the west side of Main Street -- where the Academy for Young Ladies in Little Rock had existed before the Civil War.

Over the decades, the club built two boathouses there, and so extensively renovated the second one that its fiery destruction in 1938 was reported as the loss of "the third Boathouse."

In the spring 2000 edition of the Pulaski County Historical Review, researcher Mary Fletcher Worthen recounts how the first Boathouse, financed in part by the issue of 80 $25 bonds, was a 40-by-80-foot structure with indoor plumbing. "Hugh Barclay, they say, stands under its shower bath and recites touching and eloquent passages from Romeo and Juliet," the Arkansas Gazette reported in June 1882.

That building staged the first regatta in the state and began traditions followed off and on for decades. It burned in November 1887 along with a nearby cotton warehouse so overloaded by a bumper crop that bales had been stacked along Main Street.

The second building, grander than the first, was expanded by the addition of a third story in 1905. Newspapers in 1920 noted it had suffered a small fire. In 1925, it was renovated again, adding a swimming pool and a changing room for women.

The building was inundated in the Great Flood of 1927, with three feet of water on the second story. Club members were able to paddle into and out of the building in canoes; but most of the club's boats were smashed up in the basement. Engineers concluded that even though the concrete pool cracked, its mass saved the whole building from washing into the swollen Arkansas.

After each disaster, the Boathouse was renovated and reopened, and after the 1938 fire, members immediately vowed to rebuild. But that never happened.

In a history feature the Gazette published July 23, 1972, railroad historian Clifton E. Hull reported that only half the damage was covered by insurance. The club had a 99-year lease on the land, renewable through 2007, but "then, one by one, the members began to withdraw from the club. The Great Depression was still being felt, and the fellows needed their money for necessities."

Officers decided to split the insurance among remaining members -- minus what they owed in unpaid dues. Most received checks for $138.08.

The club account at W.B. Worthen Co. Bankers was closed Feb. 21, 1941. "Four members, John F. Geister, Joe House, Jim Porter and David Terry, Sr., remained until 1945 when they let the lease with the city expire," Worthen writes.

All the club's property was lost in that pile of rubble, char and ash in 1938, except for some oars belonging to member Bob Alexander of Scott and a one-man racing wherry, which members had termed a gig. The gig escaped burning because, after the Flood of 1927, Worthen's brother Thomas Fletcher had hauled it and another, hopelessly flood-smashed gig to the family home in Scott for repairs.

Worthen writes, "It hung from the ceiling of the front porch until our parents moved to Little Rock in 1948, then it graced the ceiling of the Terry garage until Jack Trotter started his River Museum in January 1972." The River Museum closed, and in 1979, the gig came to rest in vaults of the Old State House Museum.

-- Celia Storey

ActiveStyle on 08/25/2014

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