It's early morning on the Fourth of July, and I'm walking the streets of downtown Fort Smith.
My son inherited my love of traveling Arkansas, so we're taking weekend trips across the state this summer while he's home from graduate school in Atlanta. The Fourth of July weekend seemed perfect for spending two nights in Fort Smith, the subject of my cover story in today's Perspective section.
One day was spent exploring the nearby Arkansas wine country. Another day was spent visiting Fort Smith's historic attractions.
As a lifelong student of Arkansas and American history, I've always found Fort Smith to be an attractive destination. I can stay at a downtown hotel, walk to good restaurants (we dined at 21 West End, Rolando's and Bricktown Brewery on this trip) and also walk to the Fort Smith National Historic Site and Fort Smith Museum of History.
Garrison Avenue, the widest city street in the state, is suited for those morning walks, as are the trails along the Arkansas River as you leave Fort Smith National Historic Site. You can find plenty to do without ever moving your car.
I often hear Fort Smith residents complain that even though they live in one of the three largest cities in the state (behind Little Rock and Fayetteville in the 2020 census with a population of 89,142), they're overlooked as the state media focuses on northwest Arkansas and the Little Rock metropolitan area.
I tout the virtues of Fort Smith across the state, but remind my friends here that things occur that seem inexplicable to those in other parts of Arkansas.
I'll list a couple. People outside the city found it hard to believe back in March 2019 when Fort Smith voters rejected a nine-month 1 percent sales tax to complete the U.S. Marshals Museum. This is going to be a fantastic attraction for the entire state, one that promises to change Fort Smith's image for the better. Yet voters wouldn't go along with a mere nine months of a temporary tax.
So what's Fort Smith left with? It has a beautiful building on the banks of the Arkansas River that's largely empty. It has a fundraising campaign--still needing another $5 million--that has gone on for years. And it has folks in other parts of the state saying, "What's wrong with those people?"
The latest inexplicable action was the failure of Fort Smith business and civic leaders to speak out more forcefully in their attempt to stop a small group of aging Benedictine sisters from tearing down the 1925 St. Scholastica Monastery. The sisters destroyed the building despite interest from potential developers. The 1925 structure, which had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2006, was among the state's iconic buildings.
Once more, I heard Arkansans asking, "What's wrong with those people?"
The Benedictine sisters have had a presence in the state since the 1800s. Through the decades, they staffed three girls' high schools for boarding and day students, operated elementary schools, ran four hospitals in rural areas, cared for children in a Pine Bluff orphanage from 1932-38 and operated an orphanage and school in North Little Rock from 1907-97.
St. Scholastica traces its beginning back to the late 1800s when railroad officials received U.S. government land grants to attract settlers to land along the route from Little Rock to Fort Smith.
According to the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas: "To attract German immigrants, the railroad company enticed the Benedictine sisters of the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception in Ferdinand, Ind., to send sisters to Arkansas, offering 100 acres of land and $2,500 for the sisters to build a church and school in rural Logan County. Four sisters arrived from Ferdinand in the fall of 1878.
"Since their log cabin wasn't yet constructed, they remained at Subiaco, then known as Creole, where two of them taught in an elementary school while the other two did housework for the Benedictine monks who had arrived the previous spring to establish their own monastery. When the sisters' cabin was completed in January 1879, the two who weren't teaching moved to Shoal Creek, about 10 miles east of Subiaco and 60 miles east of Fort Smith, where they also opened an elementary school."
These were the founding members of St. Scholastica. The community moved to the new facility in Fort Smith in 1925.
Despite their decades of accomplishments, Arkansas Benedictine sisters will now be remembered for destroying a classic structure, apparently because they simply don't want neighbors. From a historic preservation standpoint, it's the biggest tragedy in Arkansas in years and another black eye for Fort Smith.
While no one can bring St. Scholastica back, the Marshals Museum eventually will open. The project at times has seemed cursed. Patrick Weeks, its previous president and chief executive officer, was arrested Dec. 21 and charged with two felony counts of aggravated assault with a firearm after two utility workers reported he pointed a gun at them.
The museum's architectural jewel of a building, which covers 53,000 square feet, was completed in January 2020.
It was January 2007 when the U.S. Marshals Service director announced that Fort Smith would be the home of the museum. The announcement, met with excitement across the state, ended a highly competitive site-selection process that took several years. Federal marshals have served the country since 1789, and retired marshals have long wanted a facility to honor the agency's legacy.
A ceremonial groundbreaking was held in September 2015. Museum officials said at that time that they hoped to have the facility open by late 2017. Almost five years have passed since the expected opening date.
When it finally does open, the Marshals Museum will give history lovers a reason to spend all day downtown as they visit it along with the National Park Service site and the Fort Smith Museum of History, the best of the state's locally operated museums
In the 1950s, the city of Fort Smith began to reclaim property that had housed two military posts, a federal courthouse and two jails. In 1961, the site was turned over to the federal government. Lady Bird Johnson, the nation's first lady, was on hand three years later for the dedication. The commissary of the second fort is still standing and open to the public. The entire NPS site was listed as a National Historic Landmark in December 1960.
In 2020, Congress approved the Great American Outdoors Act, which provides a huge new pool of money to the NPS. Hopefully that will allow the federal government to make needed improvements at Fort Smith such as repairing audiovisual elements that no longer work and replacing the Trail of Tears overlook near where the Poteau and Arkansas rivers meet. The overlook and its interpretive signage washed away in the flood of 2019 and were never replaced.
Next door to the Fort Smith National Historic Site, the Museum of History continues to attract visitors. Previously known as the Old Commissary Museum and the Old Fort Museum, it has gone by its current name since 1999.
The museum's beginnings can be traced back to 1910 when a group of local women learned the city was planning to tear down the Old Commissary, which dated back to 1838. The building was leased from the city for a museum.
When the NPS took over the site, the museum moved to a temporary location on Garrison Avenue. In 1979, the Atkinson-Williams Building was acquired for the museum. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in December 1979.
In conjunction with the opening of the Marshals Museum, business and civic leaders must do two other things downtown: Focus on filling empty ground-level spaces along Garrison Avenue with additional restaurants and retailers, and address the problems caused by the large number of homeless people downtown. On my downtown walks, the homeless problem in downtown Fort Smith seemed even worse than that in downtown Little Rock.
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.