#onthisdayinfortsmithhistory August 27, 1906-The City Council votes to use the old commissary building to the 2nd Fort Smith as a museum. The building was showing neglect, and worried that such a historic building could be lost, a group of women involved with various city organizations banned together to save the building. Successful, these women saved a piece of Fort Smith's history from demolition.
However, it would be December 1910 before the "Old Commissary Museum" would open as a museum, telling the city of Fort Smith's story. From 1910 until the late 1950s, the "Old Commissary Museum" operated from the Commissary Building. The name eventually changed to the "Old Fort Museum" and in 1999, the "Fort Smith Museum of History". The museum that started in the Commissary building was Fort Smith’s first museum and 113 years later has become the longest continuously operating museum in the state of Arkansas! Today the Fort Smith Museum of History is housed in the historic 1906 Atkinson-Williams Hardware Warehouse.
The Commissary Building, the city’s oldest public building, was restored and reverted back to federal property as part of the Fort Smith National Historic Site. https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.ar0022.photos?st=gallery
Click this link to see interior photos of the historic Commissary bldg and Commissary Museum: https//www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ar0022/
