Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village - Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey

Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey

Tressa Luella Schaefer was born in Easton, Minnesota in 1896. She attended school until the age of twelve and studied mostly politics in North Dakota. At the age of 15, Tressa married the ex-husband of her sister, Theodore Grinolds who was 37 years her senior (52 years old). The marriage with Theordore only lasted 14 years and within those years she bore seven children. After Theodore's passing at age 72, Tressa and her seven children moved up to Seattle where she married an unnamed and unemployed man. Their marriage was very short lived. Over the course of her life, she had witnessed the passing of six out of her seven children (4 boys, 2 girls).

In 1946, Tressa made the move to Santa Susana, California, now known as Simi Valley, California. Ten years after the big move, Tressa met her husband, Al Prisbrey who bought one-third of an acre located on Cochran Street. Both brought in a trailer to live in and removed the tires and hid them in an effort to stay grounded on the lot. When Tressa first moved to Santa Susana, she had a large collection of 17,000 pencils which had previously been her hobby. In an effort to find a place to put them, she decided she wanted to make a house for her pencils to stay. At the age of 60, she began looking around to buy cinder-blocks to build with but came to discover the prices were way our of her range. Tressa stumbled upon a dump where she realized that bottles would be perfect to build with. When she returned home, she realized with her were 1,000,015 bottles. She began going to her sister, Hattie's house and made cement by hand and built her first bottle house by hand. This is when Bottle Village began to take form. Grandma Prisbrey mentioned she did not begin this project to gain attention but as an outpost as well as a place to keep all of her things. She was very much a collector as well as a recycler. She was interested in the fact that everything has a purpose and is special and unique and that is exactly what she brings to bottle village. Not just in the visuals but the overall feeling you receive from being present.

The Village was very much established by 1961 but Grandma kept adding structures and tweaking into the 1980s. She moved away in 1972, but later came back to live in a trailer alongside the village where she continued adding sculptures and flower planters. Prisbrey again left the Village, due to failing health in 1982 at the age of 86, and took residence with her sole-surviving child in San Francisco. In July 1986 the property was gift deeded to the Preserve Bottle Village committee. Tressa Prisbrey died in 1988.