"Ninety Years in the Desert, The Story of Clark County Museum"

The museum's history extends deeply into the history of the county, back to the arrival of a young woman at the Las Vegas Railroad Depot in 1911. The story of the museum provides a revealing look at the history of Las Vegas and Clark County. 


Museum Video Uncovers History
The main gallery at the Clark County Museum is the Anna Roberts Parks Gallery, named in honor of the pioneer whose collection of artifacts was the basis of the first public museum in this valley. Originally a project of the Henderson Chamber of Commerce, the museum was first called the Southern Nevada Museum and was located in the old school gym on Water Street. Beginning in 1949, it had an even earlier incarnation at the corner of 21st Street and Fremont in a lonely used military barracks packed with history. The Museum was open at no charge for anyone who contacted Anna Parks.

Anna  does not appear in local history books, probably because of her gender; any man who made the contributions Anna did would stand astride the histories and have streets and schools named after him. It's surprising there isn't a history written about Anna because, in addition to her contributions to building Southern Nevada, her story offers scandal and the kind of human interest that can help people imagine life in the early days of Las Vegas, when she plunged into activities few would have expected of a woman.

Anna came here unmarried and 22 years old in 1911, when Las Vegas was six. She was then Anna Nuhfer, accompanied by her 55-year-old boyfriend/partner, William Roberts, the survivor  of two wives. They started the People's Store downtown, which spent most of its existence where the  Horseshoe Hotel stands today. Anna's granddaughter, Anne Welsh, still has the store's 1915 account book, which lists customers by name and enumerates what they bought and how much they paid. On October 18, for instance, venerable Las Vegas pioneer Helen J. Stewart paid $3.50 for a corset. For most of the time, Anna seems to have run the store herself. In 1912 Will Roberts lead a group including Bill Elwell, whose son later built the Elwell Hotel, Anna and her younger sister Theresa Nuhfer. They created Nevada Lime and Plaster, a limestone mining operation at Sloan, a few miles south of Las Vegas. In 1945, when the highest quality limestone and dolomite was exhausted, the operation moved a few miles north of Las Vegas, to Apex, where the Chemical Lime Company continues to mine. The original site is now a quarry for lower grade crushed limestone, and provided the foundations for all the runways at McCarran Airport.

Anna's family vaguely remembered she had a connection to the mine in Sloan, but time had erased the details, except for the story that she had traveled to her native Pennsylvania to sell stock in the company. The easy assumption was that Anna's connection to the mine came strictly through her husband. But inquiries with the Nevada Secretary of State turned up ancient corporate records, which, combined with a little genealogy, revealed that $64,000 of Nevada Lime and Plaster's startup capital over 90% came from Anna's  relatives. She must have had tremendous energy and self-confidence to raise that kind of money at the age of 23. She was voted corporate secretary, and for the first four years, hers was the signature on all the company's contracts, land deeds and other documents.

Anna and Will were finally married in the middle of 1914. In January, 1915, a scandal erupted in Las Vegas. A boy playing in the desert wilderness east of Fifth Street found a dead baby. It was traced to the town's mortician, Lloyd Smith. The mother had paid Smith $12 for its burial. Smith had paid a man he met coming out of the Eldorado Saloon $2 to bury the baby anywhere outside of town.

Smith was arrested, but finally released from the charge of improper disposal of human remains when his lawyer pointed out that the legal definition stipulated a "human" must have drawn breath and established an independent circulation. The baby in question was stillborn, so was not "human" under the law. Smith was freed, but left town in disgrace.

Will Roberts had been a mortician in California, so he promptly opened Las Vegas Undertaking Company. Anna traveled with him on out-of-town calls to mining camps like Goodsprings and Eldorado Canyon, and began to learn embalming.

In 1921, Anna entered embalming school in Los Angeles. By then, she was quite experienced, but wanted her license. Will opposed her going to school; he apparently preferred she stay home and attend to him. When she finally passed her exams in early 1925, Anna found Will was living above the mortuary with a married woman named Ethel Nace. Anna went there while Will and Ethel were out, snatched all the financial records she could find, then filed for divorce. She spent months compiling a mountain of evidence that Will had built a house for Ethel in Southern California, given her a car and routinely introduced her as his wife. Will denied everything.

In the summer of 1926, Anna won a hefty settlement. Then with a daughter and an aging mother to support, she bought a boarding house at First and Carson, the Cottage Hotel, which had been damaged in a fire. She had to travel to Los Angeles to consummate the deal. While there, she bought a little palm tree. When she returned, she planted the palm in front of her building. She opened a funeral parlor and named it Palm Mortuary.

Starting in 1911, probably inspired by Helen Stewart, Anna traded with local Paiutes for Native American blankets, arrowheads, baskets and so on. Then she began exploring the desert and finding artifacts, fossils and minerals herself. She began collecting mining equipment, Edison gramophones, household appliances. Her family says she never threw away so much as a piece of string. The upcoming video will introduce the local public to Anna Roberts Parks and at the same time detail the museum's history, its deep holdings and its continuing space problems, which leave it unable to exhibit what it holds, most of which was donated by other collectors since the museum opened. A planned expansion would allow the museum to blossom, and we feel the video makes a strong case for expansion. By uncovering and preserving Anna Roberts Parks' story as a slice of local history, the video will also demonstrate the importance of the museum's work.

This article about Anna Parks was written by Patrick Gaffey.