Reliving History in a Museum of
Gambling
by Bob Brooke
With all the casinos
around the country today, there should be several gambling museums. But
there aren’t. One that does exist is a small one in Hot Springs,
Arkansas—the Hot Springs Gambling Museum.

At
its peak, Hot Springs had the notorious reputation as the site of the
largest illegal gambling operation in the United States. The city made
national headlines in 1967 when Arkansas State Police and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation raided gambling venues throughout the Spa City.
Today, the Hot Spring Gambling Museum captures those illegal dealings of
the 1960s.
Established in 2016 as a partnership between two Hot Springs gambling
history collectors, Lanny Beavers and Chris Hendrix established the
museum in 2016 to display their collection of gambling memorabilia. Soon
after the museum’s opening, Tony Frazier connected with Beavers and
Hendrix to display his own collection of restored slot machines. A
resident of Hot Springs with deep roots in the city, he worked at Spa
City Amusement Company, which both built and serviced slot machines in
Hot Springs at the height of the city’s gambling era in the 1960s.

In
1967, during his time with the company, Frazier witnessed the FBI’s raid
of the facility. The Arkansas State Police also raided his own shop
during the second series of raids. The Museum displays photographs and
objects from that raid. When Frazier joined Beavers and Hendrix, the
group rented additional space in the same shopping center to provide
space for Frazier’s personal collection and repair workshop. Frazier
estimates he owned 300 to 400 slot machines in the 1960s, some of which
he placed outside of his shop on 2nd Street. Today, Frazier restores
vintage gaming machines for private customers in his workshop, located
within the museum.
The museum has an extensive collection of items from notable Hot Springs
venues such as the Vapors, the Southern Club, the Belvedere Club,
Oaklawn Park, and the Essex Park Racetrack. All the items on display
were either used in Hot Springs or are similar to what would have been
used there.

The
collection includes 80 functional slot machines, some of which are 70 to
80 years old and 14 of which had been used in Hot Springs. There are
also 10 gaming tables among lots of other pieces of gambling
memorabilia. Every item in the collection was either used in Hot Springs
or is a replica of what would have been used in casinos there. The
collection also features a wide variety of items including
advertisements, dice, cards, and gambling-related documents.
Visitors can experience the thrill of the early slot machines, using
coins provided by the museum—using visitors’ own money would be
considered gambling. The museum has been set up to enable visitors to
relive history, to relive and bring back Hot Springs’ past.
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