Model of coexistence
On a day when the temperature is expected to top 100 degrees, it’s still cool early as I walk under a canopy of thick hardwoods to reach Thorncrown Chapel.
No trip to Eureka Springs is complete without a visit to Thorncrown, named by the American Institute of Architects as the fourthbest building of the 20th century.
“Its uniqueness was recognized almost immediately,” Jeff Shannon writes for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Within a year of its July 10, 1980, opening, it had been featured in many major architecture journals worldwide and had received an AIA Honor Award for design. In December 2005, it received the AIA 25-Year Award for architectural design that has stood the test of time for 25 years. The chapel draws more than 100,000 visitors a year.”
Thorncrown was the dream of Pine Bluff native Jim Reed, who purchased the land that’s now the site of the chapel for a retirement home. Because so many people stopped at the property to enjoy the view, Reed and his wife Dell decided to build a chapel. Reed met architect E. Fay Jones of Fayetteville, and Jones accepted Reed’s offer to design the structure.
Ground was broken March 23, 1979. During the project, Reed realized he was runing out of money. Several days later, a woman from Illinois provided a loan that allowed construction to continue.
“After agreeing to design the chapel, Jones asked the Reeds to allow him to suggest names,” Shannon writes. “Jones and his wife developed two columns of words and tried pairs from each column, finally arriving at the pair (thorn and crown) that sounded most poetic. As an example of Jones’ Ozark style (his regional variant of Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic style), the chapel consists of a rectangular room 24 feet wide by 60 feet long by 48 feet high. It has a simple gable roof with a ridge skylight and is made of native stone, pine and glass.
“The gently sloping site is dense with hardwood trees. The simplicity of the chapel’s basic organization belies the elegant refinement and detailing. Eighteen wood columns line each of the long sides. The columns are connected overhead by a latticelike diagonal web of light wood pieces, creating the building’s most important visual feature. This interior bracing is Jones’ inspired inversion of Gothic architecture’s transfer of the loads of a building to flying buttresses that brace the walls from the outside.”
The wooden structure contains 425 windows and more than 6,000 square feet of glass. The chapel sits atop more than 100 tons of native stone and colored flagstone.
As I sit inside the chapel and meditate, I think of the words written by Randall Connaughton in “Thorncrown Chapel: Divine Light”:
“Thorncrown Chapel is like the utterance of a proverb; it reveals, in a whisper, that silence can speak to us, stillness can enliven us, and being present to the eternal lessons of the earth and its creator can give cause and direction to better our lives.”
Eureka Springs never disappoints. It was my mother’s favorite place to visit, so I’ve been making trips here my entire life. Restaurant owners and merchants report that the summer season was a good one.
During the summer of 1972, Arkansas native and renowned journalist Roy Reed wrote a feature on Eureka Springs for The New York Times. It was headlined “Hippies and Gerald L.K. Smith Make Ozark Resort Town a Model of Coexistence.”
“On one page of Down Home, the town’s new underground newspaper, an article announced the birth of a baby to a popular couple in the ‘freak’ community,” Reed wrote. “The headline, in letters an inch high, said, ‘Welcome to the world, James Aaron Flatdogtales.’ On the next page was a long social note written in straight-faced society page style entitled ‘Gerald and Elna Celebrate Their 50th.’ It described the 50th wedding anniversary reception for the town’s best-known residents, Gerald L.K., Smith, the 74-year-old right-wing crusader, and his wife, Elna.
“So it goes these warm summer days in this astonishingly little Ozark Mountains resort. If municipal corporations were eligible for the Nobel Peace Prize, this town, with its 2,000 oddly matched residents, would probably win it for achieving a marvel of coexistence. The story of how Gerald L.K. Smith learned to love the hippies began in 1964, when he and Mrs. Smith moved into a big stone house on a hillside here and began building a series of enterprises commemorating the life of Jesus.”
After leaving Thorncrown, I drive to the home of Smith’s Christ of the Ozarks statue and Great Passion Play. I find it still going strong.
A man hands me a map and informs me that the play runs on weekends through the end of October. He tells me about the Holy Land tour at 2 p.m. and directs me to attractions such as the Bible Museum, the Sacred Arts Museum, a gift shop, a piece of the Berlin Wall and an Israeli bomb shelter.
Randall Christy, who operates a network of gospel radio stations in Oklahoma and Texas, rescued this place in 2013 after it fell on hard times. He has even partnered with Tom and Steuart Walton’s Oz Trails to open a network of world-class cycling trails on the property.
“With your help, we have paid off over $2.5 million of the mortgage on this property,” Christy writes in a letter to donors. “We still need to pay $180,000 to be debt free. The devil thought he had killed the Great Passion Play. He was so wrong.”
Eureka Springs, often recognized as one of the most gay-friendly towns in the country, celebrated its annual Diversity Weekend Aug. 4-6 with drag shows, music and dancing. Organizers of a Saturday event in Basin Park called Public Display of Affection invited people to “gather under the band shell and kiss the one you love. It’s a great photo opportunity to remember Eureka Springs.”
The coexistence Roy Reed wrote about 51 years ago is still apparent.
“In the 1880s and 1890s, Eureka Springs was a popular health spa for people stricken with scrofula, rheumatism and other ailments,” Reed wrote. “But by the mid-1960s, the town appeared to be dying. About half of the store buildings were empty. The Smiths changed that. First, they built a 70-foot statue of Jesus on a mountain overlooking the town. Then, they opened a play portraying the last week of the life of Jesus, performed in a huge outdoor theater with permanent sets that depict Jerusalem’s famous places.
“They’ve added the Christ Only Art Gallery and the 7,300-volume Bible Museum. This spring, they started work on a $10 million, 167-acre model of the Holy Land. The Smiths and their ‘sacred projects’ became targets of criticism from many who disapproved of Mr. Smith’s long crusade against what he calls ‘the international Jewish conspiracy.’ Nevertheless, the Passion play, the statue and the rest became tourist attractions.”
Reed also wrote about the “200 or 300 young people who call themselves freaks or longhairs.” Some of them, in their 70s now, are still here.
“They come from New York and Little Rock and other cities, drawn in part by … the beauty, the isolation and the promise of peace and freedom. When the young people began to arrive two or three years ago, they aroused the hostility of and suspicion that might be expected in a conservative mountain town. … There have been a few cases of physical harassment of the longhairs by rough young mountaineers. But the conflict has been nothing compared to the tolerance that has developed. Even the police are friendly to the longhairs.”
That’s one thing that hasn’t changed in the past half-century.