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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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