The Little Church of the West

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

The chapel's sign on Las Vegas Boulevard, photographed in 2011. Haensel und Gretel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The oldest building on the Las Vegas Strip is a wedding chapel, and it has been picked up and moved three times to get out of the way of everything newer. Nevada is where people got married because Nevada is where people got divorced. The state cut its divorce residency to three months in 1927 and to six weeks on the first of May 1931, eight days after the Boulder Dam contract was awarded and in the same session that legalized gambling. Marriage was the other half of the trade: no waiting period, no blood test, no residency. In Clark County in 1932 there were 3,989 divorces and 7,088 marriages. Weddings always outnumbered divorces. William J. Moore built the chapel in 1942 as part of the Hotel Last Frontier, the second resort on the Strip. He wanted a real one, so he went out to the old mining towns of Nevada and California until he found a working church he liked — the nomination form admits nobody recorded which town — photographed it, and had two Las Vegas architects shrink it. The result is forty-two feet long and nineteen wide, cedar outside and California redwood inside, with ten pine pews. It was the first building in Las Vegas put up to be a wedding chapel. The others had been converted from something else. Then the Strip grew around it. It was moved across the Last Frontier's own grounds on the ninth of June 1954. It was moved down to the Hacienda in 1979 to make room for the Fashion Show Mall. And in December 1996, when the Hacienda was about to be blown up for Mandalay Bay, it was picked up whole and carried two-tenths of a mile south to where it stands now. Betty Grable and Harry James married there in 1943. Zsa Zsa Gabor and George Sanders in 1949. Judy Garland in 1965. Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford in 1991. Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton in 2000. By 2002 the chapel was doing six thousand weddings a year and had married a quarter of a million couples. It went on the National Register on the fourteenth of September 1992 — the only building on the Strip that is listed. The rest of the town followed it. The London Daily Herald called Las Vegas the wedding capital of the world in September 1953. Clark County's marriage licences peaked in 2004 at about 128,000 and have not been near that since; the county issued its five millionth licence in 2022. If you were married on the Strip, we would like the chapel and the date. Add it below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.