Bella Vista Resort — Nature's Gem of the Ozarks
Like huge silent birds, they crouch above the highway, their empty windows looking down on the valley below. Most are deserted now, their walls decaying, their porches sagging. The days when love and laughter filled them are gone — the golden summer days when rich folks from Oklahoma, Louisiana and Missouri flocked to the Bella Vista Resort — “Nature’s Gem of the Ozarks.”
But there are Bella Vistans who remember what it was like to live in one of those cottages that C.A. Linebarger built in the ’20s and ’30s on the mountainous terrain on both sides of present Highway 71.
And they remember that it was glorious.
“Bella Vista was at its heyday then,” recalled Mary Legg, who spent her summers there as a girl in the late ‘20s. “We had the best of it.”
The purchase of a house in Bella Vista Resort was touted by the Linebargers of Dallas, Tex., who had purchased the land from the Baker-Smith Land Company in 1917 as “an investment bearing permanent return in health, happiness and pleasure. The swimming pool, golf course, tennis courts, dance pavilion and stables were clustered in the valley around Lake Bella Vista, in the southern part of the present village. The homes the developer sold, mostly furnished, were “platted and arranged in the most convenient and attractive manner” on the craggy slopes of the mountains on both sides of what was known then as “The Bella Vista Road” (now Highway 71).
In the late ’20s, approximately 500 houses had been built and were occupied during the summer season. Mary Legg summered with her family in their cottage on Cedar Crest Mountain on the west side. The sign over the front door bore the name of her father, Owen Owen, a highly regarded federal judge from Tulsa, Okla.
“People either put their own name or some phrase that pleased them, like “Suits Us” or “We Like a Rest” on their cottages, Mrs. Legg said.
Her father joined his family in their mountain cottage on weekends. If there was a change in plans, he couldn’t “reach out and touch” them by phone. He sent a telegram to Bentonville and Bentonville phoned it to the resort’s Main Lodge, which was on the east side. Someone there typed it out, and a boy on a horse took it across the Sugar Creek dam, across the gravel-topped Bella Vista Road, and up Cedar Crest Mountain to the Owen Owen cottage.
The cottage was furnished with Linebarger-constructed furniture, which had clean, simple lines, and, Mary Legg said, “was as hard as rocks.”
Much of the housekeeping was done by the family’s Swedish maid who later married one of the local “hucksters” who sold berries and cakes door-todoor.
But the ladies did their own ironing.
“If you wanted to iron something, you had to start early, because there were so many other people on the electric line, and they all wanted power too,” she said. Cooking was done on a coal oil stove, and the laundry was sent out. The Owen family had hot running water, although many families made do with cold.
But Mary, like any other young teenager, was only mildly interested in the mechanics of running a household. She and her friends spent most of their time at The Plunge, the large swimming pool built in 1924, which is still open to Bella Vista property owners.
“We would spend all day there swimming and sunning,” she said. “When we’d had enough, we would go to the snack bar in the nearby pavilion.”
At night, the pavilion (on the site of the present Sugar Creek Jamboree), became a dancing paradise. But posted signs warned that “anyone dancing with heads together or doing the ‘shimmy’ will be ejected.” Mary and her friends were too young to be allowed to dance but they watched many a time, their shoulders shielded from the evening chill by sweaters.
But it was Wonderland Cave, billed as “the largest natural place of amusement in America,” that housed the most unique dance floor. It was actually an underground night club, where top bands of the day were featured. But Mary and her young teenage friends explored the cave — then called The Big Cave — long before its transformation into what the Linebargers called “the famous dazzling night club.”
The young people explored some of the tunnels behind the large room that was to become the dance floor.
“I crawled into that cave before the dance floor was ever put in, and before they installed electricity,” she said. “All we had was flashlights, and I remember we crawled into a narrow tunnel, and all of a sudden we came to a dead end.”
After the dance floor was installed, it was always wet, she said. “They used to put wax on it, but it never did any good.”
Forty years later, when Mary and her husband Bud were looking for a place to retire, she remembered her girlhood summers in Bella Vista. But she assumed that the recreational facilities had vanished. When the couple received literature from Cooper Communities, she brushed it aside.
“I said, ‘They’ve got to be kidding. There’s nothing there,’” she recalled telling her husband.
But a visit to the area convinced them otherwise, and the Leggs moved to Bella Vista in 1970, building their present house in 1972.
But the house in Bella Vista Resort where Mary Owen summered for so many years has burned down. Even the old chimney is gone. Like so many other empty lots in the area, the land stands vacant, giving no clue to the laughter and happiness that once echoed through these hills.
And the houses that do remain have become a ghost town, only a few inhabited even in the summer. While Bella Vista Village thrives, Bella Vista Resort has passed into history. It lives only in the memories of those who loved it.