Summer Road Wander, Note #1

Fort Smith, Arkansas was a main destination for my summer road trip. Yes, the Fort Smith, and neighboring Fort Chaffee, that I maintain are at the center of the American empire.

Along the way, I meandered through Hot Springs, Arkansas. President Andrew Jackson created a natural reservation at Hot Springs in 1832 to preserve the healing qualities of water for the American people. He was simultaneously pursuing the forced removal of indigenous nations east of the Mississippi River and their relocation to new territories in the Indian Territories. (The formal reservation system would come later.)

What drew me to Hot Springs was not its mob town or boyhood-home-of-President-Clinton history. Instead, it was a little 'Did You Know?' note on Hot Springs' NPS website noting that the US Public Health Services had run a bathhouse and clinic in Hot Springs. I am always intrigued by instances when the US when government-run health services seem appropriate. 

When I arrived, I asked a ranger where the PHS's clinic had been located. She called another ranger, who not only printed photos of treatments at the clinic, but also told me about a Depression-era transient camp that PHS also ran. 

The Libbey is a modest piece of Mediterranean Revival architecture; its white walls and a red clay tile roof would be a fit in southern California. The Park Service still owns and maintains the building, but it’s no longer open and they’re looking for a new owner or concessionaire for the space.

Camp Garraday is not on the map, but the kind ranger gave me directions to the transient camp. It is only a few minutes outside of town by car, but hidden from the road and fully enclosed by fencing. It is now being used by the local school district.

Camp Garraday was established by the state of Arkansas and Federal Emergency Relief Administration specifically for treating poor people with venereal diseases. I hadn’t heard of Depression era transient camps – and this got me thinking about the labor history of CCC camps – nor did I know much about PHS’s involvement in providing medical treatment.

Hot Springs’ history as a VD-treatment center—for rich and poor--is not exactly tourism material. Neither is the relationship between Hot Springs and the Tuskeegee Trial. Only after I left and began some reading did I learn that Oliver Wenger was head of PHS’s Venereal Disease Clinic in Hot Springs. Wenger, who also helped establish Camp Garraday, developed a method for mass administration of an intravenous arsenic solution, which was a leading treatment for syphilis until the use of penicillin in the 1940s. 

Wenger also advised on the Tuskeegee Trial, which observed the progression of syphilis in a group of Black men in Alabama, well after the time when penicillin had proven an effective treatment. Historian Susan Reverby, in Examining Tuskeegee, writes that Wenger favored treatment, but it remains unclear to me how Wenger’s experience at Hot Springs and Garraday shaped his input on the trial. (An article by Walls notes that Wenger’s treatment model was replicated at Rapid Treatment Center hospitals implemented nationwide and jointly run by PHS and State departments of health.) I am interested to know about the conditions of treatment at the Garraday transient camp in their own right. Were white and Black patients (who apparently were housed elsewhere) treated differently, and how differently were poor patients treated from ones who could afford to pay for medical treatments? Even the hot springs aren't far from camps and reservations.