A short step through the door of the fountain leads the visitor into the Wah Sing Laundry.
Laundries were one of the businesses that Havre’s early Chinese community are known to have operated, and perhaps operated in some of the passages under Havre’s streets.
            It is known however that in addition to washing and pressing the clothes of local citizens, they also operated baths.  Bathing was not a common experience to cowboys and many farmers who spent most of their time on ranches and homesteads outside the city limits.  Running water was nonexistent on most of these properties and Montana’s cold winters did nothing to encourage proper hygiene.  A stop at a bathhouse and laundry was, to say the least, called for when a visit to town was planned.
            Wah Sing Laundry was known to keep an extra set of clothes clean and waiting for the cowboy’s weekly or monthly visit to town so they would have something clean to put on after finishing their bath.
            Laundries were not the only things the Chinese brought to Havre, they also brought opium – a drug of choice among many Chinese and probably a few white men.  The medical profession knew of the properties of opium and it was a common additive in Laudanum – a popular painkiller of the day.  But it was only rarely used by white society in its raw form.
During excavations Beneath the Streets, several items related to the opium market were found leading excavators to believe at least part of the underground was used as an opium den.  A small corner room just off the laundry has been decorated with a bunk bed and a mannequin of a man with an opium pipe.
            While the cowboy was more likely to seek out one of Havre’s many gin joints and brothels for his entertainment, Havre’s upper crust wouldn’t think of going out in public without first stopping for a shave and a haircut.  This he was able to do at the Fountain Barber Shop – the next stop on our journey Beneath the Streets.
            While never located underground, the shop has been recreated using much of the original equipment.  Many of today’s residents can still remember visiting the shop when it was still in business.