Historic Hotels & Inns in Arkansas

Ways in

Themes in Arkansas

Eureka Springs, the Victorian spa town

Eureka Springs was founded at its springs in 1879, and the National Register district that covers its 1970 city limits takes in almost all of its historic lodging. The Eureka Springs Improvement Company, headed by former governor Powell Clayton, opened the Crescent Hotel on West Mountain in 1886. Downtown, the eight-story Basin Park Hotel went up in 1905 against the bluff at Basin Spring Park, with bridge walks giving each upper floor its own ground-level entrance. Along Spring Street stand the Piedmont, an 1881 boarding house, and the Palace Hotel & Bath House, which its 2005 National Register nomination called the only hotel in town still offering baths in the spring waters. Victorian B&Bs line the Historic Loop above.

Hot Springs and Bathhouse Row

The first Arlington opened in Hot Springs in 1875 as Arkansas’s largest hotel. After its 1893 successor burned in 1923, George R. Mann, primary architect of the Arkansas State Capitol, designed the twin-towered hotel finished across Fountain Street in 1924, facing Bathhouse Row; Al Capone regularly booked its entire fourth floor. On the Row itself, the 1892–93 Hale Bathhouse, the oldest surviving building there, is now Hotel Hale, whose soaking tubs are piped with hot spring water. Across Central Avenue, the 1913 Thompson Building, built for doctors’ offices, reopened in 2017 as The Waters, and in the Quapaw-Prospect district the 1890 Williams House Inn is a Queen Anne B&B.

CCC lodges and cabins in the state parks

From 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps built rustic lodges and cabins of native stone, logs and timber in Arkansas’s state parks, and the state still rents them. At Petit Jean, Arkansas’s first state park, Company 1781, made up of World War I veterans, built Mather Lodge about 1935; the Encyclopedia of Arkansas calls it the only lodge the CCC built in an Arkansas state park, and the park also rents ten CCC-built rustic cabins. The CCC built cabins on Mount Nebo’s summit bluff around 1933, at Devil’s Den in the Lee Creek valley between 1933 and 1942, and at Lake Catherine, in the Hot Springs area, around 1935. Each park also rents newer cabins, so ask for a CCC-era one when you book.

Haunted stays

The 1886 Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs has the biggest reputation: it bills itself ‘America’s Most Haunted Hotel’ and runs nightly ghost tours that end at Norman Baker’s former morgue. Baker, who ran a fraudulent cancer ‘hospital’ in the hotel from 1937 until his 1940 mail-fraud conviction, figures in the stories himself, along with a stonemason called Michael and a patient called Theodora in Room 419. Down the hill, the 1905 Basin Park Hotel runs paranormal investigations, including in its Speakeasy Cave. We report these as stories guests and staff tell, not fact.

Road trip

Hot Springs to Eureka Springs, inn to inn

Hot Springs

Start on Central Avenue at The Arlington, facing Bathhouse Row, or at Hotel Hale, nine suites in the oldest surviving bathhouse on the Row.

Little Rock

Stay at the Capital Hotel near the Old State House, a hotel since 1877, or at The Empress, James H. Hornibrook’s 1888 Queen Anne mansion in the Quapaw Quarter.

Petit Jean State Park

Spend a night at Mather Lodge, built by the CCC about 1935 at Arkansas’s first state park, or in one of the park’s CCC-built rustic cabins.

Eureka Springs

Finish with two nights in Eureka Springs. Pick the Crescent, a downtown hotel on Spring Street or a Historic Loop B&B from our Eureka Springs guide.

Context

History and architecture

Arkansas’s historic hotels follow its spring waters, then the New Deal and the car. In Little Rock, William P. Denckla’s cast-iron-fronted block, begun in 1872, became the Capital Hotel in 1877, two years after the first Arlington opened in Hot Springs as the state’s largest hotel. Eureka Springs was founded at its springs in 1879; the Piedmont took boarders from 1881, and a company headed by former governor Powell Clayton opened the Crescent Hotel in 1886. The Hale Bathhouse went up on Hot Springs’ Bathhouse Row in 1892–93, the Basin Park Hotel in Eureka Springs in 1905, and the present Arlington in 1924. In 1929 the Continental Hotel Company built the Hotel Seville in Harrison. From 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps built Mather Lodge at Petit Jean and cabins at Mount Nebo, Devil’s Den and Lake Catherine, and in 1947 Tall Pines Court opened its log cabins to motorists on U.S. 62 outside Eureka Springs.