Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Dreams on hold
Major investments are needed to invigorate the uniquely quirky tourist destination that is Eureka Springs.
I’m taking my time on this Tuesday morning at the Eureka Springs Historical Museum. Parking isn’t always easy to find downtown, and a museum employee has agreed to allow me to leave my car here when I walk down the street for a meeting with Mayor Butch Berry.
It’s more than an hour until the meeting, and that’s fine, since the history of this mountain community has long fascinated me. The museum is in the 1889 Calif Building, which was purchased in 1971 by the board of the Ozark Folk Festival. A museum opened to the public in October of that year. In 1980, a nonprofit organization known as Eureka Springs Historical Museum Inc. took over operations and began restoring the building to its original appearance.
I look at the old photographs, read the captions, and think about the rich history of this resort town. Eureka Springs remains among the state’s top tourist destinations, but I wonder why it isn’t even more of an attraction given its attributes. Maybe it’s the fact that this isn’t an easy place to reach.
With the wealth that resides next door in Washington and Benton counties, I keep expecting to hear about major investments. There’s charm here, but modern American tourists demand certain things before they’ll spend their money. It’s going to take capital to polish this American jewel. In essence, the goal is to offer 21st-century amenities inside structures built in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Just as the Branson, Mo., area benefited from its proximity to Springfield, Mo., and investments made by Springfield billionaire Johnny Morris, Eureka Springs should benefit from its proximity to the booming Fayetteville-to-Bentonville corridor and the millionaires/billionaires who now call Northwest Arkansas home.
Granted, talk of outside investment isn’t welcomed by everyone in Eureka Springs, where politics has long been a blood sport. There are plenty of people who want the community of about 2,100 residents to remain just as it is.
But this place has a history of attracting those with big dreams, such as former Gov. Powell Clayton in the 1880s and infamous anti-Semitic preacher Gerald L.K. Smith in the 1960s.
Much like Hot Springs, Eureka Springs has seen a mix of charlatans and legitimate investors; those with get-rich-quick schemes and those with a true love of the land and its people.
Put Mayor Berry in the group of those who love the place and want the best for its residents. He was born and raised here.
His great-great-grandfather migrated from south Alabama and was here when the city was formally founded on July 4, 1879.
“Dr. Alvah Jackson is said to have found the springs (and their reputed healing powers) in 1856, but he shared the water only locally at first,” Bethany May writes for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Jackson began marketing the spring water as Dr. Jackson’s Eye Water. During the Civil War, he set up a hospital, Dr. Jackson’s Cave Hospital, and healed wounded soldiers with spring water and other natural remedies he had learned from Native Americans.
“At the invitation of Jackson in the spring of 1879, Judge Levi Best Saunders of Berryville tried the spring water for a
skin disease. After he was healed, he set up camp in the area. Following Saunders’ lead, 20 families set up camp nearby. Saunders’ son Buck reportedly suggested that they call the settlement Eureka for explorer Juan Ponce de Leon’s exclamation after supposedly finding the Fountain of Youth.”
Saunders built the first house in 1879. O.D. Thornton opened a general store later that year as permanent residents began moving in.
“Joseph Perry, owner of hotels across the United States, built a four-story hotel, the Perry House, in 1881,” May writes. “Although the population remained under 4,000 people, thousands more came to the area and set up housing, often small wooden shacks on the hillsides surrounding the 62 springs. The rapid construction of wooden houses — as well as more than 50 hotels, boarding houses and businesses — made the community vulnerable to fire.
“Major fires struck the city in 1883, 1888, 1890 and 1893. Improvements in the fire department and construction of buildings out of stone rather than wood helped reduce the danger of fire after those events.”
Berry’s ancestors found a home in the booming spa. Berry, an architect, lived in Little Rock for 18 years before returning to Eureka Springs. He’s in his second four-year term as mayor, trying to steer a tourism-based economy through a pandemic.
“I would walk through downtown, and it was like a ghost town in the spring of last year,” Berry says. “Frankly, it was scary. We were having a record year to that point when it came to tax revenue. Suddenly, we’re off by 45%.”
By the summer of 2020, people were beginning to visit places in rural areas that offered plenty of outdoor attractions. With the widespread availability of vaccines this spring, the tourists were back.
“I call Eureka Springs the first outdoor shopping center,” the mayor says. “The ability to walk from shop to shop without being inside played to our benefit. Business was just tremendous this spring.”
The rise of the delta variant slowed things somewhat during the summer, but Berry sees an upside to the pandemic. It’s the trend of Americans looking for smaller towns in which to live.
“We had a proposed subdivision come before our planning commission last year,” Berry says. “I can’t remember the last time that happened. I’m seeing a lot of people buy homes. We also have new owners of existing hotels and restaurants such as the Palace Hotel, New Orleans Hotel and Rogue’s Manor.
“We have no stoplights. We have no big-box stores. It seems there are more people looking for a place like this.”
Berry, who headed the Capitol Zoning District Commission in Little Rock from 1988 until moving back to Eureka Springs in 1996, thinks a key to future growth will be better broadband availability throughout the mountains of Carroll County.
“We lose people who otherwise would move here because we don’t have the kind of Internet speeds they need to do their work,” he says. “If we can get the broadband coverage we need, that changes the ballgame real quickly for us.”
Increased internet speeds might also attract developers who would invest needed capital while still respecting the city’s history and architecture.
I visit on this trip with Ann Gray, who announced just before the start of the pandemic that she would open the Queen Anne Mansion as a wedding destination and events space that includes luxury accommodations. The Victorian mansion, built 130 years ago in Carthage, Mo., was disassembled, trucked in pieces, and reassembled in Eureka Springs in 1984. A multimillion-dollar renovation took place in 2006.
Gray, who was living in Florida, came to Eureka Springs in 1993 to help her sister and brother-in-law with a project. She wound up owning a gift shop in the city for a time and later worked as a group travel director for what’s now the state Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism.
She later started a magazine in Northwest Arkansas. In 2018, she began a clinic known as Innovative Wellness in Rogers. She put out a news release in January 2020 stating that the clinic and spa would be among the attractions on the Queen Anne grounds.
The 12,000-square-foot mansion sits on seven acres and includes a swimming pool, putting green, bocce court, seven bedroom suites and commercial kitchen. Williamsburg, Va., real estate investors Steve and Lata Lovell purchased the property in 2005 and later opened it for tours. Gray had leased the property from the couple.
“After the press release went out, I had 48 calls from people interested in having weddings here,” Gray says. “Within days of the start of the pandemic, everything had been canceled.”
Gray had planned a grand opening for April 2020 with 400 invited guests. It never happened.
Two months ago, Gray posted this message to Queen Anne’s social media outlets: “Royale Hospitality International management and staff thank the wonderful community of Eureka Springs for their support and encouragement during the pandemic of the past 18 months. Since opening the doors of the Queen Anne Mansion and Resort in January 2020, it has been our pleasure to host a very limited number of events in spite of reduced opportunities due to covid.
“We’ve decided to narrow our focus to the Innovative Wellness Center and to that end have moved into a location better suited to serving the public and the community. We hope you’ll continue to support Innovative Wellness Center in its new location in Walden Plaza on Passion Play Road.”
The pandemic also put a halt to other projects. I visit on this trip with a Eureka Springs business owner who wants to spend more than $10 million on an adventure and hospitality destination. Bankers, he says, are still slow to loan to the hospitality industry, though he’s not giving up.
“There are dedicated locals trying hard to keep Eureka Springs improving and growing,” a prominent real estate agent tells me. “As a small town with finite government resources and no corporate presence, we’ve come to count almost exclusively on volunteers and nonprofits to enhance our quality of life. We’re also a town of owner-entrepreneurs with an enormous pool of creatives and an older population.
“We don’t have a large percentage of our residents commuting to Benton or Washington counties for work. Therefore, we fall outside that MSA, where all the investment has been focused. We do embody quirkiness and authenticity. The whole of Northwest Arkansas would be better with the inclusion of Eureka Springs in its broader vision. I hope there’s a re-evaluation by area influencers.”
From his perch downtown, longtime Eureka Springs banker and business leader John Fuller Cross has seen it all.
“This town has gone down four times,” Cross says. “Three of them were before my lifetime. I experienced the fourth one. The first were the fires in 1883, 1888, 1890 and 1893. If they had all burned at once, the town would have been totally destroyed. But we are a tough people, and each time, they built back. The second was the moving of the rail shop and its payroll to Harrison in 1914. This would be like taking Walmart out of Bentonville or Tyson out of Springdale today.
“The third was World War I. We were a town dependent on tourists, and nobody travels during a world war. The fourth was the Great Depression followed by World War II. That was 16 years of no tourism. Eureka Springs’ survival can only be attributed to the perseverance, courage and toughness of those here at the time. We’ll get through this pandemic, too.”
After visiting in the mayor’s office, Berry and I eat barbecue for lunch at Bubba’s, a popular Eureka Springs restaurant. That’s followed by a driving tour on winding streets I’ve never traversed. I never cease to be surprised by the things I find in Eureka Springs, which now must bounce back from a pandemic just like it bounced back from four fires in the late 1880s, the loss of hundreds of railroad jobs, and the loss of tourism during two world wars and an economic depression.
Berry and I talk about this town’s colorful history and speculate about its future.
“I appreciate those who have historical perspective because it underscores our culture,” the mayor says. “We’re authentic, diverse, quirky, inclusive and tolerant. Our residents, old and new, are protective of those qualities and understand that’s why Eureka is so special.”
Berry remains convinced that some of the billions of dollars in capital investment now taking place in Washington and Benton counties will one day spill over to Eureka Springs, a place he calls “the best opportunity zone in Northwest Arkansas.”