Visited March 17-22, 2022
By Janell
Here we are in Arkansas! I've never been to Arkansas before. Sorry, that doesn't remind me of any songs. Our RV park is Wanderlust RV Park, located in Eureka Springs, which is in the northwest corner of Arkansas.
Legend has it that Native Americans had come to the area now called Eureka Springs specifically for the sacred powers of its natural springs. Then, in 1856, a Dr. Alvah Jackson claimed that the waters from Basin Spring (one of the many springs in the area), had healed his ailing eyes. During the Civil War he established a "hospital" in a local cave and treated patients with the water. Afterward, he began selling the water as "Dr. Jackson's Eye Water". Soon, the word spread that this special water could heal other debilitating diseases as well, and people from all around the country flocked to the springs in search of miracle cures.
The city of Eureka Springs was founded in 1879, and by the end of 1881 it was the 4th largest city in the state of Arkansas -- all due to this "Balm of Life" as some called it.
As you can see above, the folks in Eureka Springs still pay tribute to their city's roots. Thanks to modern medicine, Eureka Springs is no longer considered a place of miracle cures, but it's still very much a tourist destination.
We weren't quite sure what to expect from Eureka Springs, but we found it to be a charming and fun place with lots of character. It's filled with unique shops, lots of Victorian houses, and almost a Disneyland-like feel to the streets.
Eurekasprings.org describes itself as:
Part traditional, part bohemian, all fun, Eureka Springs has the most unique downtown in the Ozarks. It's the only city in America where the entire downtown is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. You'll be struck by a funky mix of architecture that includes Victorian, Queen Anne, Romanesque and more . . .
A Stair-Step Town. Effectively chiseled out of the Ozarks, Eureka Springs is a town where homes are stacked, one behind the other, on 20 steep hills divided by 19 ravines, fortified by 200 miles of limestone retaining walls.
Having seen it firsthand now, that really is a pretty accurate description of the city. The skinny, old streets wind up and down and around town; no right angles; no traffic lights. Some buildings have street-level entrances on two or even three floors.
Just for grins one afternoon, we toured an open house. To look at the face of the house, it appeared to be a one-story home; but it was actually a two-story, as it went down the back side of the hill. We didn't think to take any pictures, but as of this posting it's still on the market.; you can check it out with the Zillow link below, if you're curious.
Built in 1890, it's just over 1,000 sq. ft. The living room and one bedroom are on the street-level, and a second bedroom and kitchen are down a flight. Most impractical! But it was fun to tour!
Many of the homes in Eureka Springs are built right up against these unique rock walls; like the natural rock wall above the band shell in Basin Spring Park (above). In the case of some of the homes we rode past on a tram tour, the house almost appeared to touch the rock wall behind them.
And then there's this home, where they built the home on top of the rock. Pretty crazy, huh?
These rainbow steps just call out to you, don't they? "What's up there", we wondered. More shops!
See the parade watchers above? More to come! Some folks even thought our tram was part of the parade and questioned why we didn't throw them candy. We did get some green beads from a bystander.
Before we move on to the rest of the St. Patrick's Day folks, let me just say that I did research whether or not one could post photos of strangers online. The answer according to smallbusiness.chron is as follows:
If you post pictures from a concert, fair, flash mob or any public gathering, you can post those photos without the specific permission of the people you captured on camera. There are some obvious exceptions. You can't post photos taken when there was an expectation of privacy such as a public restroom, courtroom or hospital.
On that note, I proceed with a mostly clear conscience . . .
Someone has collected enough candy, wouldn't you say?!
So . . . I said that Eureka Springs had a lot of character . . . they also have a lot of characters!
Could one of these "green" gentlemen be the mayor of Eureka Springs?
Looks very "mayoral", doesn't he?
Notice he and the Mrs. have matching sparkly boots! He'd be a "cool" mayor.
Irish funk punk? I am a little concerned about his choice of friends though. Purple or pink for St. Patrick's Day?
The jolly jokester!
The dapper gentleman!
Actually, I don't think any of them are the mayor, but they have so much spirit that perhaps one should be!
This dog is going to be in therapy for years when she grows up!
After the parade, and after the shops, we went to a local brewery. (Of course we did!) And bonus, they just happened to have live music! This is Route 358 playing at Gotahold Brewing. It was a lovely evening for sitting outside, enjoying a beer and listening to them play. They played all their own stuff, including a couple of tunes using a mandolin and a banjo (notice the banjo on the left). They sounded pretty good!
The beer was good too, but the name . . . ??? Marty asked one of the owners what the origin of the name "gotahold" was, and she replied that it "just gotahold of them".
Thorncrown Chapel
Thorncrown Chapel has a Eureka Springs address, but it's located out in the woods, three miles from downtown. Designed by E. Fay Jones, it opened in 1980, and contains 425 windows and over 6,000 square feet of glass! It really is a stunning structure. I'll bet it looks even prettier though, when the trees are all green and leafy or when it's blanketed in snow.
Some interesting scenery along the trail
It was a nice day for a ride!
At the end of our bike ride we cruised through the University of Arkansas campus, which is in Fayetteville. It was a Sunday, so campus was virtually empty. What a beautiful school - more beautiful, no doubt, once things green up a bit.
We thought it a nice touch that they had the names of each year's graduates
imprinted into the concrete paths around campus.
The early years had less than a dozen grads. As the years went on, the number of graduates increased. We figured that they couldn't possibly still be doing this -- with the class sizes increasing every year and the amount of concrete being limited; but we did see a few classes from the early 2000's, so apparently they're still making it happen. Those classes were huge!
They had the grandest looking fraternity and sorority houses we've ever seen.
On another day we drove about an hour in a different direction and arrived at Bentonville. We went there solely to check out a couple of museums. The first one is the Walmart Museum, located on the town square in Bentonville. In 1950, Sam and Helen Walton moved to Bentonville with their four children and opened the first "Walton's 5 & 10". It was Sam Walton's second store but the first one to bear the Walton name. (Sam's first store in Newport, Arkansas, was part of the Ben Franklin variety store chain.)
See the little kiddie car in the lower left corner of the photo? It took me a moment to realize that it looks just like Sam Walton's 1979 Ford pickup truck. The real red and white truck is located inside the museum.
In 1962 Sam Walton opened the first "Wal-mart Discount City" in Rogers, Arkansas. By the end of the decade he had a chain of 18 Walmart stores in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. His strategy was built on the foundation of offering the lowest prices anywhere, anytime.
Sam and his brother "Bud" (James) grew up in the Depression and knew firsthand how hard it was for families to make ends meet. Sam helped his mother run a small milk business by milking the cows in the morning and delivering milk and newspapers after school.
Sam and Bud had a close relationship all of their lives. Bud, three years younger than Sam, worked in Sam's first variety store and then became a co-founder of Walmart.
Sam Walton often wore ballcaps bearing the slogan "Our People Make the Difference". Indeed, apparently he rarely spent time in his office; he preferred to be out on the sales floor, involved with his employees and customers. When he visited a store, his first stop was not the store manager's office -- it was "the people on the front lines".
Much more could be written about the Walmart Foundation and all the good they've done -- and they have done a lot, but I'm going to leave it at that.
Below is a link if you want to learn more about Sam Walton and Walmart.
I will just say this: we're not big Walmart shoppers, but they do happen to carry RV toilet paper. (We cannot use our old brand from when we lived in a regular house.) Even during the Covid panic with a lack of TP on the shelves, we almost always found it in Walmart (probably helped that it's hiding in the camping section -- now I've just given out our vital secret and may regret it if there's another TP shortage!) Of course, you can find RV toilet paper in a few other places such as Camping World, but Walmart sells it for a lot less. Thank you Sam Walton!
The other Bentonville museum we visited, and spent a much longer time in, was the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Crystal Bridges was founded by Alice Walton (and you thought we were done with the Waltons). Alice, 72, is the youngest child of Sam and Helen Walton and their only daughter.
The photo above shows the exterior of the museum. I wish we had a pretty blue-skied, spring day to show you instead of the gray and stormy one we experienced on the second day of spring. We could tell that the grounds were quite impressive even with this dismal day.
The mission of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is "to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature". Crystal Bridges' permanent collection spans five centuries of American artworks from early American to the present and is always free to view.
I think probably the best way for me to tell you the how and why of Crystal Bridges is to share the following three paragraphs from wmagazine.com. I think it's a pretty powerful tale:
Crystal Bridges opened in 2011, but its start -- at least in the public eye -- can be traced back to 2005, when Walton paid a reported $35 million for the Asher B. Durand painting Kindred Spirits, which depicts the painter Thomas Cole and his friend the poet William Cullen Bryant, and has long been considered a prime example of the Hudson River School. The art world was suddenly ablaze: Who was this woman, and why did she think she could just take this masterpiece to a town in the middle of nowhere? In The New York Times, four days after the sale, the critic Michael Kimmelman expressed cynicism when Walton issued a statement about her desire to lend the painting to New York museums. "We'll see," he wrote. "That would be good. So far there isn't even a Walton museum for the picture to go to."
"I was so naive," Walton says now, with the benefit of hindsight. "I figured we'd just put the collection together, build the building, and announce that we're opening the doors, right? It was a rude awakening for me. I had no idea of the coastal dissension toward the heartland, and the elite beliefs that only educated New Yorkers and Bostonians deserve great art. If there's a painting that symbolizes the emergence of American culture and American art, then Kindred Spirits is it. I did as much research as you can on a unique piece like this, and we came up with our bid, put it in. The Met and the National Gallery were competitors, and we barely won."
Soon after, she hired the curator Don Bacigalupi, who was at the time the highly respected director of the Toldeo Museum of Art, in Ohio, and asked the professor and author John Wilmerding, long regarded as an authority on American art, to sit on the board of her fledgling museum and act as adviser. And over a decade later, Walton isn't holding any grudges: "I think if we've done anything right, we've shown that, yes, all people love great art, and yes, everybody deserves access."
All that said, Crystal Bridges is truly a world-class museum, truly impressive, and it's FREE to all!
Following are just a sampling of the many pieces we saw in the museum. You can see that there was a wide variety.
Kindred Spirits
by Asher B. Durand
1849
Alice's $35 million purchase that touched a nerve.
(At the time, this was a record high price for a painting by an American artist.)
Rosie the Riveter
by Norman Rockwell
1943
We the People (black version)
by Nari Ward
1963
This is made with multi-colored shoelaces.
Big Red Lens
by Frederick Eversley
1985
Depression Bread Line
by George Segal (not the actor)
1991
Kaleidoscopic
by Jen Stark
2011
You cannot tell from this photo, but peering into the center of this 3D piece is like peering into a kaleidoscope.
Azure Icicle Chandelier
by Dale Chihuly
2016
Untitled (America)
by Glenn Ligon
2018
From the description beneath this piece:
Glowing in red neon, "AMERICA" beckons the viewer, much like our country which has often served as a beacon of hope for many around the world. However, by coating the front of the tubes in black paint and inverting the word, Glenn Ligon acknowledges that the United States also embodies negative associations tied to dark histories and continuing acts of oppression. Sporadically flashing off and on, Ligon's work visualizes his observation that for many, "America, for all its dark deeds, is still this shining light."
Unfortunately, I didn't make note of the artist's name for this piece, as we were a bit distracted. There was a woman who pushed this little dog around throughout the museum, and she stopped frequently to pose him/her in front of pieces to get shots like this one! We found it very funny! This dog may also need therapy when he/she grows up.
This is the cafe within the museum. The teeny, tiny figures you can see reflected in the hanging heart would be us!
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