New York railroad financier William P. Denckla built this three-story commercial building in downtown Little Rock in 1872, importing a cast-iron facade originally manufactured for a New York merchant who’d abandoned his own plans to use it. Denckla’s building, known as the Denckla Block, housed shops, offices, and bachelor apartments, and it sat directly across from the scene of Arkansas’s 1874 Brooks-Baxter War, when armed supporters of a losing gubernatorial candidate stormed the governor’s office in the Old State House nearby.
When a fire destroyed the city’s leading hotel in December 1876, Colonel A.G. DeShon leased the Denckla Block within weeks and converted it into the Capital Hotel, adding gas lighting and fine carpets to match its ornate exterior. It opened in January 1877 and hosted President Ulysses S. Grant in 1880, whose stay produced a persistent legend that he used the hotel’s oversized elevator to bring a horse up to his suite.