The Little Church of the West opened in 1942 on what would become the Las Vegas Strip. The chapel was originally built as part of the Hotel Last Frontier complex on the Las Vegas Strip. The chapel was moved from the north side of the hotel to the south side in 1954. In 1996, the chapel was moved again to its current location on the east side of the strip south of the Mandalay Bay.
Noted as a wedding chapel in a 1959 Perry Mason season 3-5 The Case of the Startled Stallion.
The church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 14, 1992.
In 2017, the Little Church of the West celebrated its 75th anniversary and remains the oldest building on the Las Vegas Strip.
My mother and natural father met in Hollywood, most likely on a movie set and wrote screenplays together for seven years, until she met the man of her dreams and they fell madly in love. At a critical juncture I was conceived and my birth in 1950 was clouded by whether or not I was the child of a man from the City of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia) or that of an adventurer from North Carolina who went into the jungles of British Guiana seeking diamonds in the Mazaruni River using a hydraulic dredge to comb the river bottom. He came up empty when the money to finance this wild expedition was exhausted. Mom married this man (born in North Carolina yet raised in New York State) and he was the only real father in my life,. He raised me as though I were his own natural son. He is the one I knew as Dad, and I grew up with a brother and sister from this union. It lasted almost 30 years. Then Dad passed away while I was on a Greyhound Bus trip to Chicago. I arrived in coastal Maine, calling Mom to let her know my whereabouts. She burst into tears, informing me that he had died and was already buried in a Los Angeles military cemetery. I had missed Dad's funeral completely!
~ Joseph David Henry Ware Bryan-Royster ~
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