Historic Arkansas Museum

Historic Arkansas Museum is a historic-site museum centered on a preserved downtown Little Rock block containing some of the city's oldest surviving structures. Among them are the circa-1827 Hinderliter Grog Shop, the oldest surviving building in Little Rock, and the 1840s Brownlee and McVicar houses, along with a reconstructed early Arkansas Gazette print shop and the relocated Plum Bayou Log House and 1850s farmstead. The museum grew from preservationist Louise Loughborough's campaign to save the historic block and opened to the public in 1941, making preservation of early Arkansas life part of its mission from the beginning.

Visitors can tour the historic grounds and furnished buildings, encounter living-history and traditional-craft demonstrations, and explore galleries devoted to Arkansas-made decorative, mechanical, and fine arts. Interpretation addresses the lives of settlers, craftspeople, families, and enslaved people whose experiences were intertwined with territorial and early-state Arkansas. The mix of original buildings, reconstructed working spaces, hands-on programming, and museum galleries makes the site a strong introduction to both everyday life and material culture in early Arkansas.