The Bottle House
xxxAs a small child in the 60’s, I liked the bottle house at Knotts Berry Farm. In those days people would put notes in the bottles, and visitors would attempt to get the rolled-up notes out and read them. My father would never let me get one out, so I always wondered what they said (still do).
The Knotts bottle house was built around 1960 and was similar to one in Calico, California. Calico was a ghost town that Walter Knott bought, restored, and later copied in his own “Calico ghost town” at Knotts Berry Farm. The Calico bottle house was built by Knott in 1952 and it is not certain that there was an original bottle building. It is thought that the Rhyloite, NV bottle house also inspired Knott.
When I was young, there was no amusement park at Knotts Berry Farm, and everyone could wander into the Calico Ghost Town. The venue was a restaurant and retail location for jams and other goods. However, we were too poor to afford an expensive $1.25 Fried Chicken dinner from the Knotts Roadhouse.
Here is an image of the bottle house built in Calico, California. It is unclear if there was an original bottle house here from the time of the silver mining boom-town, which would make this a restoration, or if this was the creation of Knotts from his own imagination. Regardless, this bottle house still exists as does most of Knott’s restored Calico, which he eventually donated to San Bernadino County.
The other bottle house in Rhyolite, Nevada was an inspiration to both Walter Knott and me.
(Source Atlas Obscura) “A marvel in its own right, the standout among these glass houses was built by a man named Tom Kelly. Like so many others, Kelly had been drawn to the West by the promise of gold. Around the year 1905, Kelly chose Nevada’s Bullfrog Hills as the site where he would finally put down his pan and build a home. In the mining camp of Rhyolite, where the only source of lumber was the ill-suited Joshua tree, Kelly saw construction potential at the bottom of his beer bottle.
With an estimated 50 saloons operating in Rhyolite at the time, Kelly collected 50,000 bottles in less than six months, enough to build a three-room house, complete with a porch and quaint gingerbread trim. Inside, the walls were plastered like a real city home. To miners of the day, this was a castle.
Already approaching 80 years old, Kelly declined to live in the home he’d built and instead capitalized on the hubbub. Upon its completion in February of 1906, Kelly raffled off the bottle house for $5 per ticket. The house was won by the Bennet family, who lived inside until 1914. By 1920, the boomtown had gone bust, and a mere 20 residents remained in Rhyolite. In 1925, the bottle house got a facelift in the form of a new roof when Paramount Pictures used it for a movie set. It was converted into a museum of sorts after filming. From 1936 until 1954, Lewis Murphy was the Bottle House’s resident caretaker, providing tours for all interested visitors. After his departure, the bottle house’s final inhabitants were Tommy Thompson and his family, including eight children, who lived there until 1969 and added the miniature houses that can still be seen scattered across the lawn to this day.
The house has recently undergone some stabilization and repairs to vandalized sections and is still open to visitors.
My Bottle House
Status: The current status of my bottle house could be roughly described as “completed”. Although there is no interior finish out, the walls, windows, and doors are all in place.
The foundation for my bottle house was poured as soon as the water tower was finished. It sat for two years, and I decided it was not large enough, so I added the second foundation. That sat for two years as well. The fact that the two foundations were constructed in separate styles proved to be a problem later, as once the weight of the walls was on them they settled at different rates. We had to jack up one side to fix the cracks, but to this day the cracks come and go.
For more than five years I kept all of my wine bottles (I drink a lot of wine). I was unsure of how many bottles I would need (I still do not know how many were used) and worse, I did not know how many I had in the big pile at the gardens. I guessed that I probably did not have enough, so I started wandering around the backs of restaurants and bars and collected them; for about one year I became a dumpster diver on Sunday mornings to collect the weekend’s bottle trash. We never paid our employees enough so several had second jobs as waitresses and they would bring bottles to me after their weekend jobs. I even brought back empties from my trips to China (sorry United Airlines). Eventually, I found a wine restaurant (The Grove) near my house and the manager agreed to put them out back as long as we agreed to pick them up….Carol was much better at doing this than was I. Near the garden is a winery. They would not agree to keep them for me, but they told me they threw away the empties on Sunday, so I was free to dumpster dive to get them. Occasionally I would visit the tasting room and the staff told me that every week visitors reported some guy in the dumpster, presumably stealing wine. Eventually, I guessed I had enough bottles to begin the project; I was pretty close to having the right amount, but at the top of one wall there are tequila and whiskey bottles that some of the construction guys got from their favorite bars.
There are several Youtube videos on the construction of bottle houses. I knew from trips to Europe where I read signs about the restoration of ancient churches, that I would have to use a sandy mortar to give some elasticity to the buildings
