Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village

Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California, is a folk art environment on a one-third-acre lot, created by Tressa Prisbrey, who began building at age 60. Between about 1956 and 1960 she assembled 16 one-room structures with walls of thousands of bottles laid in mortar, floors embedded with found objects, and interiors that housed collections of pencils, dolls, shells and shot glasses. Around them she added shrines, wishing wells, walkways and a cactus garden made from car headlights, television tubes and other salvage gathered on her trips to the local dump. She worked almost entirely alone and without formal training in art or construction. The site is valued as an example of bottle-in-mortar construction and as a record of everyday throwaway goods from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The 1994 Northridge earthquake collapsed or badly damaged several structures, leaving eight structures and nine objects as contributing resources.