Miss Laura’s Visitor Center to host special presentations

FORT SMITH — Miss Laura’s Visitor Center will be giving special presentations throughout this month on what life was like for women during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The repurposed bordello will still serve as the Visitor Center and social club museum outside the presentation times. These events do not require attendees to RSVP or purchase tickets, and there are no age restrictions.

Miss Laura’s Visitor Center served as a brothel house, also known as a bordello, from 1896 to 1948. In 1992, after a full restoration and registration on the National Register of Historic Places, the house became the official Fort Smith Visitor Center and Social Club Museum. Volunteers provide free house tours and informal education about Miss Laura’s history with prostitution during their regular hours.

“It’s up to parents at this point to determine what they want their kids to learn,” said Angel Tracy, Miss Laura’s office manager. “Nothing about these presentations is ever lewd or not age-appropriate, but do you want your child to know what a prostitute is right now?”

Volunteers with Miss Laura’s will give 30-minute presentations, each covering a 15-20 year period between 1890-1965. These will include the fashion, beauty standards, women’s rights and laws surrounding prostitution at the time. Each week will feature a different era, with the same presentation given Wednesday and Saturday of each week.

“We’re going to deep dive into what those years might have looked like as well as weird and quirky laws that might have only affected women,” Tracy said.

She also said the museum has worked to make its tours reflect the actual history and women who worked as prostitutes in Fort Smith’s red light district. This includes the living conditions of the women and what could have driven them to the profession.

On Friday — International Women’s Day — special guest speaker Micki Voelkel from the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith will give a lecture titled “Women’s History and Their Accomplishments.” Voelkel described her event as “setting the context of what’s going on in Arkansas and the country” during the 1900s.

“This particular presentation is more about what the issues were at the time that women gained the right to vote in Arkansas,” Voelkel said. Women gained the right to vote in Arkansas in 1918, 11 years after prostitution became legal and six years before it was made illegal once more, in 1924.

The first event Miss Laura’s will be holding is a talk at 2 p.m. today by Cody Faber with the Fort Smith National Historic Site. While these events do not require tickets or an RSVP, Tracy said the Visitor Center is more than triple over capacity for Faber’s opening presentation, according to Facebook engagement. She suggested interested visitors attend any of the other free events throughout the month.

“This talk is an overall, overarching history of Fort Smith through the histories of six different women that were here,” Faber said. He also said he would be discussing the influence of women on the infrastructure, economy and social structure of the Fort Smith community.

Faber will not touch on prostitution in his presentation. However, Miss Laura’s free tours and presentations this month will touch on how the money from fines and registrations of bordello houses contributed to the Fort Smith economy and infrastructure.

On March 29, Good Friday, there will be a presentation titled “Good Friday at the Brothel” by Shanna Jones. Tracy said she plans to hold similar events at Miss Laura’s for other national holidays and celebratory months. These potential presentations include Labor Day, Black History Month and Memorial Day. Such presentations would focus on how women working as prostitutes were affected by different wars and how the life of a Black woman working as a prostitute differed from that of a white woman in the same profession.