Eureka Springs

I had never heard of Eureka Springs until a woman at a gas station in Missouri told us we’d be fools to drive past it. She was right, and I should learn to trust gas-station oracles more often. We came down into it on a road that switchbacks through the Ozark hills, and then suddenly the town was just there, tumbling down a ravine, all turrets and gingerbread trim and limestone retaining walls, with not a single flat block to be found. Lia pressed her face to the window like a child. Neither of us had expected the American interior to hide something this eccentric.

A town built on water

Eureka Springs exists because of its springs — dozens of them, which nineteenth-century Americans believed could cure everything from rheumatism to heartbreak. The whole downtown is a National Register historic district, and remarkably, none of it has been prettied up or faked. We walked Spring Street with our necks craned, and found Basin Spring Park in the middle of it all, where the healing waters first drew the crowds. The buildings climb five and six stories against the hill, so that a shop’s front door on one street is its third floor on the next. I got happily, thoroughly lost.

The Crescent and its ghosts

Up at the top of the town stands the 1886 Crescent Hotel, a great limestone pile that has been a luxury resort, a women’s college, and — most infamously — a quack cancer hospital run by a charlatan in the 1930s. It is said to be one of America’s most haunted buildings, and we took the evening ghost tour mostly to be contrary. I don’t believe in ghosts. I will also admit that the morgue in the basement made the hair on my arms stand up, and that Lia held my hand a little tighter than usual. Believe what you like; the view from the hotel’s veranda over the Ozark ridges at sunset needs no ghost to be worth the climb.

Artists, bikers, and misfits

What surprised me most was how alive the town felt. Eureka Springs long ago became a haven for artists and free spirits, and on any given evening the sidewalks hold a genuine mix — leather-clad motorcyclists down for a Ozark ride, gallery owners, honeymooners, aging hippies. We ate at a tiny place where the chef came out to ask how our meal was and ended up sitting with us for twenty minutes, talking about French cheese and mountain living. That is the thing about Eureka Springs: it is small enough that strangers become conversations. We left with a hand-thrown bowl and the odd certainty that we’d come back.

Getting There

Eureka Springs is tucked into the far northwest corner of Arkansas, in the Ozark Mountains. The nearest airport is Northwest Arkansas Regional (XNA), about an hour and fifteen minutes by car; Branson, Missouri, is a similar drive to the north. There’s no public transport to speak of, so you’ll need a car — and the drive in, along winding forest roads, is half the pleasure. Once you’re in town, park and walk, or ride the seasonal trolley, because those steep, crooked streets were never meant for hunting parking spaces.