Approved by President Chester A. Arthur, an Army-Navy Hospital was opened at Hot Springs in 1887 to give U.S. military patients access to the healing waters. In the 1930s an imposing brick building was erected that still stands above Bathhouse Row.
The facility was the largest in the country for people with polio during World War II and following the war many veterans who suffered wounds or lost limbs were sent there for hydro-therapy – so many that some were housed at the nearby Majestic and Arlington Hotels. In 1960 it was turned over to the state and became the Hot Springs Rehabilitation Center, the only full-scale rehab center west of the Mississippi.
Its mission changed again in 2009 when the Arkansas Career Training Institute was established. It served in that role until being closed in 2019 as part of a reorganization of state government. Named one of Arkansas’s most-endangered historic places by Preserve Arkansas a year later, the fate of the old Army-Navy Hospital remains to be seen.
To learn more, visit encyclopediaofarkansas.net.
