Being a border town invited the business of prostitution into the town, and several bordellos were established around the turn of the century. She renovated the building and opened it as a brothel in She repaid her loan in only seventeen months. It was one of the most celebrated bordellos in the Southwest, and her ladies were known as the healthiest and most sophisticated in Fort Smith.
In , business began to falter as more and more people in Fort Smith wanted to do away with the red-light district. Two houses in the district burned to the ground and others were damaged on January 7, , when an oil storage tank exploded, sending the women and their customers into the street. Little is known of Ziegler after that. The area soon deteriorated into a slum, and the house became a haven for drunkards and drifters. Despite the decline in the area, the house at First Street remained a brothel through much of the early twentieth century.
Bertha Dean ran the brothel until her death in She left it to Jules Bartholemy, a man who lived in the house at the time and with whom Dean was rumored to have had a relationship.
The building was eventually abandoned, and in , the local government announced that, unless a buyer was found, the house would be demolished. Donald Reynolds, founder of Donrey Media Group, bought the house and saved it from demolition. The building was selected in for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, and restoration began in Its life as a restaurant was relatively brief, and it reopened as the visitor center in the fall of While it is a simple clapboard building, it does have a mansard roof trimmed in wrought iron and oeil-de-boeuf eye of the ox dormer windows.
These touches make it an example of baroque Victorian architecture. A few original articles remain, including a stained-glass window. The visitor center was moved temporarily to a trailer in the parking lot while the building was repaired.
