Sisters recall ‘Old Bella Vista’

Old Bella Vista, primarily nestled alongside Suits Us Drive and including some structures just off U.S. Highway 71, contains some of the last remaining structures from Bella Vista’s early days as a resort community.

Ann Linebarger-Boyd and Carole Linebarger-Harter, two sisters and granddaughters of C.A. Linebarger, who built the original Bella Vista resort with two of his brothers in the early 1900s, both recall growing up in the old resort town.

“There were lots and lots of families that came every single summer,” Boyd said. “There was so much to do.”

Horseback riding, swimming, caving, checking out creeks and exploring the hills were all on the menu, she said.

“We were outdoors all day long in the summer,” she said.

Harter agreed that it was a great place to grow up. As a resort town, she said, they had friends from all over the country and, by the end of the summer, everyone was familiar with everyone else.

“People were trusting,” she said. “Everyone did know everyone at the resort for the summer.”

They lived in a home alongside U.S. Highway 71 that more recently became the Artist Retreat Center, which recently sold, she explained.

The old house was one big room with a ladder to the loft, water was fed in by a spring and sometimes it would freeze and need to be broken up in the winter when the house was warmed by a heater and fireplace, Boyd said.

The family moved to California after their father died, and both sisters came back to Northwest Arkansas to retire in 1996, where they found a very, very different Bella Vista — but the old house and pockets of the old resort town still stood.

Some of those old cabins are still owned by the original families, she said.

Boyd said she was impressed by the development Cooper Communities

has done in Bella Vista over the years, as well, though it’s nice to see the old places she remembers from her childhood.

“It was the place to go. So it’s very special to us,” she said.

Today a handful of Old Bella Vista homes are serving as permanent dwellings served by the Old Bella Vista POA, an entity that is more of a water utility than a traditional POA.

The Old Bella Vista POA serves 43 meters with water purchased from Bentonville.

“There was so much to do.”

— Ann Linebarger-Boyd