May 13, 1989

The restored Fordyce Bath House on Central Avenue’s Bathhouse Row, which remains one of the most elegant structures of its kind anywhere in the world, opened as the Hot Springs National Park Visitor Center. Hot Springs’ transition from a small community to a cosmopolitan spa between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century owes much to Samuel Fordyce, a businessman who spearheaded efforts to build thousands of miles of railway in the South and Southwest during the late nineteenth century, including the Cotton Belt route that crossed Arkansas.