TAKE A STEP BACK IN TIME WITH A VISIT TO OLD TOWN,
If you visit Texarkana’s Old Town in the 200 block of East Broad Street, you stroll back roughly 120 years or so, rolling back to a bygone day.
Texarkana’s Old Town, true to its name, recalls the vintage days of Texarkana’s youth, when it was a bustling town of immigrant business owners, thriving shops along Broad, travelers coming in by railway and a busy downtown cultural life.
Texarkana’s core business district was the place to be, where you could find, among other places, a furniture shop, a bank, meat market, saloon, a men’s shop or shop for ladies, photography studio, hardware store, livery stable, paint and wallpaper shop or a cigar store.
To that end, Dr. Beverly Rowe, a history professor at Texarkana College, has turned the entire second floor of her Lindsay Railroad Museum building into a replica of one downtown streetscape with all 11 of those businesses, each one modeled after one that actually existed here.
Stroll past them, look through the window, discover what’s inside. With her own funds and Advertising and Promotion dollars from Texarkana, Ark., Rowe built a labor of love that opens to the general public May 12 and 13. Tours will be given by costumed guides Fridays at 7 p.m., then again Saturdays at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
“It’s a recreation of Broad Street in the year 1890,” said Rowe, dressed in her 1890s best. Of the 11 stores she’s created, nine of them you can walk into to visit. “They’ve been fitted out with goods that you might have been able to buy back then, from local sources mostly.”
On the Old Town tours, the guide will share the history of shops like like O’Dwyer and Ahern Ladies Shop, Josh Whealdon’s photography studio, Texarkana National Bank, Sam Ragland Cigar Shop, Booth Furniture, Nick Braumiller Meat Market, Sharp & Brewer Men’s Shop, Chatfield-Buhrman Hardware Store, Blythe Livery Stable and Angell’s Paint & Wallpaper.
Generations ago, Texarkanians would’ve known each of these stores as daily parts of their lives. The Old Town street winds all the way to the Michael Cassidy Saloon, where you conclude the tour with a beverage. Fancy a sarsaparilla?
“Our town had a great, booming downtown business district. We just had everything, and a lot of people that live here now don’t have any connection with that so they don’t know what it was like in the old days before the interstate,” Rowe said.
What’s that sound you hear as a guide leads you downtown? A soundtrack loop of the auditory hubbub you might have heard along Broad back then: horses, church bells, delivery wagons and more. You might also hear the very real trains rumble past outside. Rowe also uses large, life-size wall wraps of old, historic photographs made by DE Wraps here in town. Situated in the shops, they picture the past.
Props conjure the past, such as the fancy dresses and hats gracing the ladies shop. “These ladies are wearing the style that they would have sold in 1890,” Rowe said. Or stacks of cigar boxes, a cigar mold and pipes you can see through the the cigar shop window. Nearby, Ragland himself is pictured standing inside his store.
“We’ve been able to find some pretty good vintage pieces to put in each of the stores,” Rowe said. “Some of the display cases are also vintage.”
Inside the photography studio, visitors can snap photographs with their cell phones, four backdrops are available to stand beside as if you’re in an old time portrait studio. Rowe aims to have costumes available for folks to don a costume for the picture.
“And get all duded up like it would’ve been 1890,” said Rowe, who was assisted by Brandy Aaron on doing the work for this vast project. Larry White Construction served as the contractor while Knock on Wood Vintage Supply and Logan Electric helped with supplies, too. Some items came from the Texarkana Museums System.
Across the “street” at Booth Furniture, you can see the types of things you might have ordered for your home during the 1890s: trunks, quilts, chairs. Even a cage to keep birds.
“It was a sample shop, so you could come in and say, ‘I like that chair, I want to order 12 of them. And I like that dining room table so I want one of those,’” Rowe said. Goods were delivered via train.
In the store for gentlemen, you find manly items like a wool swimming suit, suspenders, a day coat, trunks, ties, snazzy hats and detachable collars that you could slap on and take off as needed. Rowe raided second hand stores in town to find the right things to display.
A livery stable was necessary. “Because everybody had a wagon or carriage and horses. We didn’t have cars yet. This is where everybody would’ve kept them (their horses),” Rowe said. At the Old Town livery stable, the horse poking his head out of a stall is Ragtime, or Rags for short, acquired from a bakery in France.
At the hardware store, one could buy it all, everything from children’s toys to chamber pots, fuses to tools and jugs and anything else you can imagine. “Probably if you couldn’t find it there, you didn’t need it,” Rowe said of hardware stores like this that had it all on the shelves.
The real Michael Cassidy Saloon was situated across the street from where TLC is now. “We’ve recreated the saloon here. And this is where
you end the tour and get your refreshments,” Rowe said. With the deep, dark brown wood of the tables and bar, the lighting, mirrors and bottles that look as if liquor will flow freely from them, the saloon replica has an authentic ambiance.
Rowe, who serves on the Arkansas-side historic commission, got her idea to build Texarkana’s Old Town from a similar one she saw in Michigan. She put her own money into the three-year project, to the tune of $70,000 to $80,000, she estimates, along with $40,000 from the A&P Commission.
As a history professor who loves downtown, she’s looking ahead to her two museums as a place to devote time upon retirement.
“This will be a place to play when I retire, if and when, and so, I’ll get to do this,” Rowe said. She’s treating Old Town as separate from the downstairs museum, which focuses on Texarkana’s railroad roots.
She hopes to run upstairs tours with up to 10 people, to teach them about the old downtown business district as the place where Texarkana showed itself as a player in banking, railroad and lumber.
“I hope, and this is the history teacher in me, I want people to be proud of Texarkana. We have an amazing history. More and more as people go out to Richmond Road they don’t teach their kids about our history. And really, this is it. This is a great history,” Rowe said.
Expect tours to last 30 to 45 minutes. The upstairs museum is not handicapped accessible, but Rowe will make video tours available at the downstairs Lindsay Railroad Museum.
(Admission: $10 per person. Additional tours available by appointment only. Texarkana’s Old Town is located at 202 E. Broad St. For more information and to arrange a tour, contact Beverly Rowe at bjbhurst@ yahoo.com or 903-748-1235. You can also visit www.facebook. com/TexarkanasOldTown.)