Eureka Springs Brotherhood Co-op
The Eureka Springs Co-op was in the old Cook and Border building, previously an auto repair shop on First Street, owned by Ray and Muriel Stanbaugh. The large wooden post-and-beam construction was admired as a leftover from a bygone era. It was the summer of 1972, I think, but no one seems exactly sure of the starting date.
Ted Cooper, Hank Kaminsky and Ritchie Campbell were looking for a place to work, call it studio space, and a few good wood-working tools, such as a table saw, radial arm saw, drill press, lathe, reliable power source, and so forth.
A retired engineer from Florida, Ken Dane and his wife, Lily, had just moved to Eureka, and were friends with Louis and Elsie Freund, long time artists and residents here. Ken had the tools and liked the idea of a cooperative workspace.
Ted and Hank, both metal workers, set up a small foundry and kiln and started sand-casting bronze objects. A few others built a candle-dipping system and turned out a beautiful line of scented candles. Work benches and production tables were assembled and lots of folks got busy.
Larry Kolden, an artist from Chicago, set up a photo studio in the main floor office, called Watermelon Sugar, which later moved to the third floor of the building on Spring Street that housed The Greenery, a café owned by Dick Turner. Larry made photo-intaglios of street scenes downtown.
The co-op seemed to be an innovation that suited the temperament of the times, a collective workshop, the sharing of space and tools and camaraderie of manual labor applied to crafts. Eureka Springs was a struggling Ozarks town that provided cheap rental spaces and a comfortable lifestyle for young artists and crafts folks, simple as that.
There was even a Fall Folk Festival on the calendar which seemed the perfect opportunity for raising a little money.
Metal workers cooking up a giant pot of beans and a couple bushels of field corn (as opposed to sweet corn) were probably not the best of ideas for feeding tourists. The huge pot of beans was set up the morning of the festival, along with a grill for grilled cheese sandwiches, and a boiling pot of water to cook fresh corn-on-the-cob for tourists and folks on the streets. The corn was tough and not very sweet, and the beans tasted burnt and did not sell well. I lost track of the corn, which was dumped in someone’s chicken pen, probably, but I took the beans home for my compost heap, which suffered that massive lump of beans for at least 2 years before it finally broke down.
Al and Lynn Larson made candy apples. Of course, some of the other co-op members may have objected to the sugary treat, but we were all trying to gather enough money to make it through the winter. Toby and Anita, whose last name is lost to memory, made sumac tea, calling it sumac-ade, but it didn’t sell well, either. She was a yoga teacher, and they had a little bookstore. Jane Tucker made apple cider and gingerbread men.
On the wall of the co-op was a phone, and once word got out that young, strong workers looking for temp jobs were available, the phone started ringing. Al took a call one day from Eloise Brown on Howell Street, who needed some help. The going rate for labor was $2 an hour. She had lots of cats and was a big fan of Emmitt Sullivan, the artist who built Dinosaur Park and Christ of the Ozarks. Al drummed up a few other jobs just by hanging out at the cooperative and answering the phone. Housekeeping and cleaning jobs were popular among the older residents.
The cabinetmakers and candlemakers plowed ahead, and real salable products appeared in gift shops.
The co-operative looked for a name: The Eureka Brotherhood, The Eureka Co-op, The Great Eureka Forgery. None of the names actually stuck. But the success of the collective proved that we could make good things happen. Another job co-op members picked up was working as cast members for The Great Passion Play, which opened in 1968. Long hair and a beard were considered an asset for characters in robes and sandals. It was regular, part time work. Captain Don opened his hippie-friendly bar across from the courthouse, creating more jobs for bartenders and waitresses.
Other young artists moved here, and several happened to have pretty good business sense. Besides Captain Don and his quite successful bar, Gary Eagan began the Spring Street Pottery under Woody Kane’s Mama Slicks coffee shop, next to the New Orleans Hotel. Jim Nelson started Nelson Leather. Other retail stores in town began to flourish.
Word spread to Memphis, Little Rock, Tulsa, Dallas, nearby cities where art schools and crafts people abide, that artists, and hippies, were more or less welcome in Eureka Springs, where housing was cheap. Artists had lived and worked here for years, which no doubt, engendered the feeling of welcome to us.
The Spring Street Pottery produced more than a handful of apprentice potters. Hank built a foundry out on Blue Spring Road and later moved to Fayetteville where his public work was so acclaimed, he was designated finally, “An Arkansas Treasure.” (Eleanor Lux and Doug Stowe are two other early Eurekans who have been awarded Arkansas Treasure titles from our town.)
Ted went to work at a foundry in Tulsa, moved East and created Studio Bronze in Pennsylvania, supplying New York City designers with lighting fixtures and furniture fabricated in bronze.
Young writers, artists, craft folks, musicians, hippie carpenters, photographers, wanderers, herbalists, scientists, philosophers and clerics joined the local population of country lawyers, doctors, public school teachers, older more established artists, theater nerds, retired teachers and others, found out they could work cooperatively to build a town with schools and entertainment, and an environment with real intellectual content.
It may not be the only small town in America that experienced a rebirth in the late 19th century, but it was one of them. To us, who were called collectively hippies, misfits and college dropouts, it was like earning a graduate degree in reality, putting our hours in on small town streets instead of college campuses. We were part of a broader social change that included The Whole Earth Catalog, the Beatles and the Watergate Hearings. It confirmed our sense of worth in a way that only comes with venturing out of your comfort zone to get something done.