TIMELINE
1877 Col. Samuel George Hamblen, a white surveyor and lawyer from Maine who had led the 10th U.S. Colored Troops Heavy Artillery regiment during the Civil War, began working on a design to build walls and an arch over Hot Springs Creek. Later he became the second superintendent of the Hot Springs Reservation (now Hot Springs National Park).
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1880 Hot Springs Creek was a stinking ditch carrying sewage and waste from the valley town and eroding the road beside it.
1882 Work began on the tunnel using Hamblen's design for a 3,500-foot sandstone archway aqueduct with a Y-shaped footprint.
1884 "Hamblen's Arch" was completed at a cost of $136,745.
1886 A large sewer main and pipes discharging thermal waters from the bathhouses were set inside the tunnel.
1892, 1950, 1960, 1978, 1986 the National Park Service funded maintenance projects inside the tunnel.
1910, 1923, 1960, 1990 the topology of Hot Springs created significant flash floods, which caused damage in the city, but no serious long-term damage was done to the tunnel walls and arch.
1963 McRae Construction of Hot Springs removed debris, cleared boulders and repaired the tunnel's walls and ceiling.
1980 A landslide occurred along the west side of the 200 block of Exchange Street, one block from the tunnel. Engineers determined that the slide was caused, in part, by the quarry men who had removed stone for the tunnel arch from the toe of West Mountain 100 years earlier.
1996 The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers studied ways to reduce the threat of flooding in Hot Springs and proposed solutions that included boring another tunnel under West Mountain toward the Ouachita River. This was never acted upon.
2001 Hot Springs made $795,000 worth of improvements and extensions to the tunnel.
2008 Heavy rain and runoff caused Hot Springs Creek to overflow the tunnel in April, briefly flooding part of downtown.
2011 Hot Springs obtained $459,570 in grants from various sources to repair and improve the tunnel.
2012 Hot Springs High School students in the EAST (Environmental and Spatial Technology) Lab program used a high resolution laser scanner to create a 3-D model of part of the tunnel.
2016 The tunnel remains a Y-shaped structure 2 miles long and oriented north to south. Water enters on the eastern arm near 335 Park Ave. and on the western arm in back of a parking lot at 201 Whittington Ave. (across from the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts). Water exits the tunnel behind Habitat for Humanity's ReStore at 350 Malvern Ave.
-- Jerry Butler
ActiveStyle on 01/16/2017