The mission of the Fort Smith Museum of History is to collect, preserve and share the history and culture of Fort Smith and the surrounding region. Our regional area is Sebastian, Crawford, and Franklin counties in Arkansas and Sequoyah and Leflore counties in Oklahoma.

The museum was established in 1910 as the Old Commissary Museum with the purpose of saving the city’s oldest building from demolition, the 1830s Commissary building to the second Fort Smith. For decades, what is now the Fort Smith Museum of History, was housed in the old Commissary building; that building is now part of the Fort Smith National Historic Site. In the late 1970s, the FSMH moved to the Atkinson-Williams Hardware Warehouse. Over the span of more than a century, The Fort Smith Museum of History's collection has grown to approximately 50,000 artifacts chronicling the city's and surrounding region's history.