Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village - Bottle Village

Bottle Village

Prisbrey's original idea was to build a wall to keep away the smell and dust of the adjacent turkey farm and to simply create a structure where she could store her 17,000 commemorative pencils. They had spent all their money paying for the property so she resorted to visiting a local dump where she found thousands of colored bottles. She started with a wall and continued to build until she had constructed 16 buildings and structures made of glass and assorted other materials, a mosaic sidewalk, the Leaning Tower of Bottle Village, the Dolls Head Shrine, Cleopatra's Bedroom, the Round House, and more. The Los Angeles Times described Bottle Village as an "eccentric folk-art wonderland."

Bottle Village is seen by art historians and folklorists as a complex work combining the desires of an elderly lady to provide simple shelter for her valued personal collections; memorialize family, friends, and important life events; grieve over the loss of family members; entertain visitors; and leave behind a testament to her very personal vision, exuberance, and inspiration. To national history, Bottle Village is important because it is a significant folk art environment created by an American folk artist of high acclaim, and also because it is a rarity created out of actual mass consumer throwaway from everyday lives of Americans of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

When building bottle village, no help was given and everything is made from hand and all recycled materials. One of the shrines that can be seen at Bottle Village is called The Headlight Garden. This garden was made for her then 35 year old daughter who had been diagnosed with cancer. Her daughter loved flowers so Tressa decided to make her a rose garden made out of headlights and recycled materials. Before her daughter's passing, she would love to wake up every morning and sit by the garden in silence. According to Tressa, the day her daughter died, the headlights stopped working.

There are heart, diamond, and spade stepping stones that symbolize when Tressa was in love with gambling. She made the forms out of cement but then filled them with random recycled things like scissors, etc. Bottle village offers not just buildings made out of bottles but wishing wells made from tiles, the ground is paved with recyclables, a doll shrine, a leaning tower of bottles and much more. Each building also has its own theme. For example, a doll house was built to house Grandma Prisbrey's doll collection which held 600 dolls. Grandma Prisbrey mentioned every day she would go into that house and dress up some of the dolls.

"Anyone can do something with a million dollars. Look at Disney," Prisbrey once said. "But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it." When visitors would come to Bottle Village when Grandma Prisbrey was still alive, she would first take them on a tour but then end in her meditation room where she would allow them to meditate as well as listen to her sing different songs. She would charge only 75 cents a visit but people would frequently give her more.