Marker denotes national park’s role in war

Hot Springs National Park contains no Civil War monuments or statues, but there is a marker on Bathhouse Row that denotes its unique, brief role in the conflict, according to park Superintendent Josie Fernandez.

According to an Arkansas Historic Preservation Program presentation to Hot Springs National Park Rotary Club in 2015, Hot Springs served as the state Capitol for a short time after Gov. Henry Rector felt like the Capitol building in Little Rock was about to be captured.

Rector housed the state documents and papers in buildings he owned on the present-day site of Arlington Lawn from May to August 1862, the Garland County Historical Society said in 2015.

The marker is located along the hedge near the present-day Superior Bath House.

The most prominent Confederate memorial

downtown is located at the triangular intersection of Central, Market and Ouachita Avenue.

The Hot Springs Confederate Monument, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, was made by the McNeel Marble Co. of Marietta Ga., in the early 1930s.

It depicts a standing Confederate soldier wearing a hat, coat and pants typical of the Civil War era. His hands are clasped at the top of a rifle barrel that has the butt to the ground at his right foot, according to the National Register nomination form.

The marble statue, which was dedicated on June 2, 1934, was the result of a nearly 30-year effort by Hot Springs Chapter No. 80 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to put a Confederate memorial in Hot Springs, which at the time was the only major city in the state without one.

In 1907, Mrs. J. Davidson Smith moved to Hot Springs from Alabama, “a state that had already erected many Confederate monuments,” and suggested that Hot Springs build its own tribute to its Civil War soldiers.

In 1933, the Hot Springs City Council passed an ordinance to allow the statue to be placed on what was then-called Como Triangle.

In 1953, the city formally gave the UDC the deed to the memorial plot, according to the nomination form.