This is our last day in the Ozarks and we wanted to check out the Ozark’s strangest dwelling which is in Eureka Springs. At the very least it’s a tribute to one person’s individuality, creativity, labor and obsession with nature
Mrs. Quigley did NOT like the house she was living in. On a June morning in 1943, after her husband left for work she called her five children to her to make an announcement, “We are going to tear down the house.” She said. And that’s just what they did! When Mr. Quigley got ‘home’ that night the house was no longer standing…everything they owned had been moved into the chicken house.
That’s certainly one way to get a new house. And, to boot, Mrs. Ouigley didn’t want just any old house…she had very particular ideas. There was to be four feet of earth left bare between the edges of the floors and three of the walls in the house. And the upper floors were supported by Oak pillars. Year around sun flowed into the windows until the plants grew to the second story ceiling….She was going to sleep in a ‘tree house’. This house is so close to nature…in the bedroom, the vines are starting to grow into the ceiling!
For three years she carefully covered the outside of the house with ‘found objects’. Close together on the North wall are a piece of petrified wood, a fossilized turtle shell, the prehistoric imprint of a deer hoof, and Indian grist stone, a rock shaped like a Prussian helmet, and ordinary marbles her sons had played with through childhood!
And the gardens are filled with rock covered objects and bottles with the sun blazing through them….the joy of it!
As the poet, Sandy Brown, might say… “Mrs. Quigley never learned to “color in the lines!”