The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South

FOURTEEN. The Mansion on the Hill

FOURTEEN The Mansion on the Hill T he Ozarks never offered land of great value. Rocky, hilly, unsuitable for farming, the Ozarks had a reputation as a sanctuary for the hillbilly, the subversive, the outlaw—a place where polite, educated people dare not tread. Then something of value was discovered and with it the possibility of generating wealth. In what would become Eureka Springs, settlers found dozens of natural springs that bore waters that, according to local legend, carried great medicinal properties. From these waters the town of Eureka Springs sprang. Founded in 1879, hilly Eureka Springs, a town still without a single ninety-degree intersection, quickly became known as a place where the misfits fit as colorful individuals flocked to the town for the baths, joining the mountain folk who now found themselves with a trade to sell and a lucrative new industry found in the water.1 At first they came by the hundreds, and then the thousands, for the healing waters. After the Civil War, high-dollar hotels and resorts began popping up around the natural springs offering spa treatment and healing waters that could cure anything from paralysis to insomnia, scrofula to rheumatism.2 The town hit its first boom in the 1890s, a period that local residents still refer to as the “Gay 90s.” The town hosted hundreds of Civil War veterans, mainly from the North, traveling to eccentric Eureka Springs to treat old wounds and new ills. So many came, in fact, that Eureka Springs is perhaps the only town in the South whose square boasts a statue honoring a Union solider rather than a Confederate one. Entrepreneurs, catering to those too ill to travel, bottled numerous supposedly healing tonics from the springs and shipped them across the country, helping make the name “Eureka Springs” a nationally known place and tourist destination.3 157 Business dried up after the First World War as healing springs and folk cures were replaced by profound strides in modern medicine. As science, chemical prescriptions, and rational explanations took hold, the curious powers of healing waters began to be seen as more hokey than healthy. The town soon became deserted, altogether a hollow version of its former grandeur. The old hotels downtown closed for what the owners hoped would only be a short lull in the tourist trade. As the 1920s were roaring elsewhere, the buildings of downtown Eureka Springs had been boarded up, and many owners had moved on. The Crescent, the crown jewel of the high-end hotel in town, filled its beds by becoming a hospital. Businesses, restaurants, and general tourist services that depended on the hotels closed just as quickly. The quaint Victorian and Queen Anne cottages that made the town so attractive to visitors were abandoned. The charming and winding mountain streets once lined with specialty shops now were all but a ghost town. The town that had boasted a population of over fourteen thousand at the turn of the century saw its numbers slip to just under fourteen hundred by the time the Second World War had come to a close.4 Things finally began to turn around twenty years after the Second World War had ended. During the early 1960s, as the population of Eureka Springs was at rock bottom, the demographics included the elderly from the heyday, mixed with poets and painters and assorted hippies who sought out Eureka as a quiet, almost private space to work, nestled in a serene mountain landscape. With this serenity came cheap real estate. Enter Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith, a man who would transform the tired mountain town and construct an economy based on an identity expression that would later provide inspiration for the town’s queer economy.5 An American fascist and ardent anti-Semite, Smith, without his ventures in the Eureka Springs tourist industry, would have easily found his way into the history books. Close to the infamous Louisiana politician Huey Long, Smith was the national organizer of Long’s “Share Our Wealth” campaign and ran the entire operation after Long’s assassination in 1935. He soon abandoned this national role due to pressure from within and outside the organization. As the Second World War began, having strongly declared his fascist sympathies for some time, Smith 158 MANSION ON THE HILL found himself the subject of an FBI investigation. Having been pushed out of the ailing “Share Our Wealth” program, Smith...