BACK IN TIME

Reimagine with a life-long Eureka Springs resident, the life of the town before it even was a town.

If you were to walk around Eureka Springs today, you would be greeted by charming old houses painted every color in the rainbow, a moving, but not quite busy, Main Street lined with small-local businesses selling art, food and other goods. You would see many local people and many people from all over the United States and even the world. You would sit in the park and enjoy the songs of an old man playing an acoustic guitar. He isn’t playing because he needs the money from tips, but because he loves making the sound. The gentle strums of the guitar are only interrupted by the roars of motorcycles as they cruise into town for a lunch break before continuing on the winding roads of the Ozarks. 

Visitors surround you, meeting up with other family members and wrestling novelties out of shopping bags to boast in their finds. The pure-fresh air is only artificially sweetened slightly by a bakery across the street. It doesn't matter if it is hot because you have plenty of shade from the trees on the hill. A slight chill won’t bother you either. It’s nothing a light denim jacket can’t fix. 

The only problem in your future is deciding on a good local eatery to sample for lunch. Are you up for a juicy burger at The Balcony Bar & Restaurant? Maybe just a chicken salad from Nibbles Eatery will do. Either way, there isn’t a bad decision. 

Eureka Springs evokes an idea of escaping. Getting far-far away from the busyness of the metros or the mundaneness of the suburbs. The idea of the Springs is to flee from whatever is hurting, restraining, hindering, attacking or depressing you and find refuge in the water. 

Today, Eureka Springs is rarely recognized for its natural spring water other than a local bath house and of course the town’s name. But in 1879, the natural springs caused a sensation. A year later, the word about a new spring in the Ozark mountains drew the attention of a family by the name of Johnson. Almost 140 years later, a charming and joyful woman named June Johnson still tells the story of not only her family, but of the people who came to build the quirky refuge that would come to be known as Eureka Spring, Arkansas.

“I was born in Greenwood Hollow,” Miss June began. “You may not have noticed, but just back up the road toward town, there is a street that turns off to the right called Greenwood Hollow Road. If you drive or hike about a mile up the road, you end up in Greenwood Hollow. It’s a very special tightly closed-in, rocky, tree-laden hollows that are so common in the Ozark region. Another mile up Greenwood Creek runs into Kings River which is our watershed area. My dad built a log cabin. They had five sons and a daughter by the time I was born late in the depression. I was born in that log cabin.”

She was born Bonnie June Johnson. She has been a treasure in the Eureka Springs community her whole life. Everyone from the public library to the Eureka Springs touring facilities will tell you: If you are looking for information about the town, Miss June is the lady to see. 

“I worked in tourism since I was 20 years old,” Miss June stated proudly. “I have a lot of fun telling tourists about what it’s like being here in the Ozark region and how important it is to all of us. I moved into town because it was necessary to give up our place in Greenwood Hollow so that we could go to Eureka Springs schools to complete our education. I have never had any desire to be any place else in the world. I never went to college. I became involved in educating myself as much as possible about my own part of the world,” she said. “The first job I ever had was working for the Chamber of Commerce office. There was a wonderful old gentleman who had come to Eureka Springs in 1893. He road horseback back then. He would take people on horseback and wow them with the pristine wilderness we have here. His name was Samuel Alexander Leath. He was Mr. Eureka Springs. He had spent his entire life telling people why they should be in Eureka Springs instead of wherever they were in the rest of the world.”

Mr. Leath served as a fine mentor to Miss June. He taught her a lot (but not everything) she knows of Eureka Springs. The Chamber of Commerce office was wallpapered with photos of the area Mr. Leath had taken, inspiring her love for the land and the town daily. But Miss June’s hunger for knowledge outgrew even that of Mr. Leath. She decided to pursue her own family’s history with the town, which led to a deeper understanding of why people were drawn to Eureka Springs. In fact, much of her mother’s side has been in the area since the early territorial days, before Eureka Springs was even an idea. 

“When the Civil War began,” Miss June explained, “it was unusually difficult because families and neighbors could be totally divided. I know a family who lives just on the other side of the river, where the only two sons the parents had got on their horses and rode off when the war began. One rode north, and one rode south. They both survived and put the whole thing behind them. They lived side by side until the day they died.”

“My great-great grandfathers and their family were unionists. They truly believed that if we lost the Union, it was all over for everybody. It was not a big question of slavery, because that was so little a part of our lives in this region. Most of my kinfolk who fought in the war were union soldiers,” she said.

Miss June’s family, like many others, felt the pain of a land torn apart by war. The invasion of troops who represented their own country, the loss of loved ones and the tension between friends and neighbors created a people in need of an escape.

“It all had to do with the fact that this was a period of time when people suffered greatly,” Miss June explained.

In fact, she partially attributes the success of Eureka Springs to the effects of the war. 

“You could die from almost anything back then because there was no real medical care or the kind of treatment that we know about today. It was a very difficult time and you add to that the trauma of the Civil War, which had been lived out by the first pioneer settlers in this region.”

“They were people who had a great deal of faith in God and the way that God cares for his people,” Miss June said with a soft smile. “They were also constantly on the lookout for something that will help them more immediately. It was common for people who were seeking healing to go to a place where there was water, such as a spring. The area was still a wilderness in April of 1879, when suddenly people began to hear stories of a place with a number of cold water springs,” she said. “They heard about it from word of mouth of men who were there in hunting parties. There was one main spring and a whole bunch of other springs. To find the main spring, you looked for where the Osage Indians had carved out basins in the rocks to catch the water when it came off the hillside.”

Judge Saunders and Dr. Jackson, as Miss June identified them, were two of Eureka Springs’ best advertisers. Dr. Jackson recommended the spring to Judge Saunders, as he knew of no other way to help him to better health. So Judge Saunders took his son and went camping around the springs. When Judge Saunders, who was well known and respected in the region for his role in the state court system, began to talk about the healing he received from the spring water, people began to turn their attention to the spring.

As word began to spread, the people began to gather. People came from all over to drink and bathe in the healing waters. The colorful houses that decorate Eureka Springs today were substituted for small tents or even clothes lines with quilts dropped over to create some illusion of privacy. You would wake up every day and go to the spring basins to fill a pail with the water. You would drink the water, bathe in it, soak pained areas of the body in it and just about anything else to relieve pain or bring about healing both physically and emotionally.  Sure enough, miracles began to happen. 

“They really believed that that were going to find something in this place that would help them,” Miss June explained. “They were sure that others were finding healing and that they were going to find healing, too. You can call them miracle cures because they really happened. There is no doubt about that.”

Was it something in the water? The word “eureka” translates into “I have found it.” And that’s exactly what these visitors believed. Many people did see benefits from the spring water and left the area better than they did when they arrived. However, health improvement was less to do with the contents of the water and more to do with the lifestyles the visitors had adopted. They thought the water had healing properties, so they began drinking lots of it. They walked up and down hills several times per day. They camped outside for long periods of time, and when they weren't getting more water, they were resting. Water, exercise, fresh air and rest all seem like health practices any doctor would recommend. And that is what the patients of Eureka Springs were getting.

It wasn’t too long after people began to gather at the springs that entrepreneurs began to see business opportunities.

“Some very enterprising gentlemen started stage coach lines. They were from all four directions and they ran on a regular schedule, bringing people in large numbers to the camp. The first businesses were built from simple things such as a man from a nearby town called Berryville. His name was Mr. Thornton and he decided to bring in wagon loads of canned goods, dry staple groceries, coffee, sugar and other things that people need. It was sort of the first general store that he just had in the back of his wagon. By 1882, a railroad to Eureka Springs was started, so people really began to plan for a great future for Eureka Springs.” 

“The second business that was opened was a crude bathhouse,” Miss June said. “That provided probably wooden tubes, which we have some at the museum. There really were water-proof tubs that were made out of wood. They are as heavy as can be. The water was brought and heated to certain temperatures. There were all kinds of different opinions as to what temperatures were good for different kinds of treatment.”

The rest is history. The town kept growing and people kept coming. Today, visitors are still drawn to Eureka Springs as a means of escape, though perhaps rather than escaping from turmoil of a civil war or a serious illness they are escaping from high stress levels from work, family drama, depression or any other struggles to seek refuge from. 

“When you get so down and out,” Miss June mused, “and this country was very down and out after the Civil War, you have one thing absolutely left. That’s your faith.”

As good and bad have continued through the century, visitors still have the faith that they can find revival in the hills of the Ozarks. Though most of the springs may be closed, people still seem to go where there is water. What actually revives them, seems to be more up to what they believe, than any other cure.