Miss Hattie's Bordello Museum

San Angelo began as the town across the river from Fort Concho, and from the start it ran on soldiers' pay: saloons, gambling and prostitution, enough that the fort's officers stayed inside after dark. Concho Avenue was its first street, and numerous bordellos did business along it.

The building that holds Miss Hattie's went up in 1896, and it still has its original ceilings, floors and stairs. In 1902 a young couple named Hatton bought it as an upstairs and a downstairs. Mr. Hatton ran a saloon on the ground floor, in the space that is now Legend Jewelers, and the couple lived upstairs. They soon filed for divorce, and the settlement split the house the same way: he kept the saloon below, and she kept the rooms above. With the space and the neighbors she had, the museum says, Mrs. Hatton turned to the oldest profession. For fifty years soldiers, cowboys and travelers knew the place simply as Miss Hattie's, until the Texas Rangers shut it down for the last time in 1952.

The rooms reopened as a museum in the 1970s. Almost everything inside dates from the bordello's working years, 1902 to 1952, and some furnishings are original to the house, including all of the bed frames. Tours are guided, run twenty to thirty-five minutes depending on the group, and start with a ticket bought inside Legend Jewelers.