Jesse R. Smith

Jesse R. Smith and his family.

Courtesy of University of Arkansas - Alfred P. Smith Collection

Finding Freedom in the Valley of Vapors

In Hot Springs, Black men and women came to the Valley of Vapors looking for work and a chance to support their families. Jesse R. Smith did that and much more. Smith came to Hot Springs from Virginia and worked as a bathhouse attendant after the Civil War. He also served as a pastor at a Hot Springs’ Baptist church. By 1910, Smith became manager of the Crystal Bathhouse, the first bathhouse operated exclusively for African Americans that used the national park’s thermal waters. Jesse and his wife Mamie nurtured a family whose children grew up to become doctors and advisors to presidents.

But Jesse Smith also lifted up his race through tireless activism. Aware of the injustices African Americans faced in the Jim Crow South, when locals in Hot Springs called for a town-wide celebration on national park property in 1911 to commemorate the town and park’s rapid rise to fame, Smith noted, “over the park gates written in invisible letters [reads] ‘No Negroes Admitted.’” African Americans “ceased to be ‘a citizen’ in the common acceptation of the term.”

Through these setbacks, Smith organized bathhouse attendants in 1911 to improve working conditions for African American men and women in town. He also supported libraries in Black neighborhoods when bathhouse attendants were required to go to school and pass examinations for employment. Jesse Smith’s story is just one of many that celebrate the fight for freedom well after Emancipation Day.

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