During the first week of February, the head of the Crescent Hotel’s landscaping department, Susan Benson, was operating a backhoe on the southeast corner of the hotel when she scraped a capped bottle. She said she picked it up and the earth around it collapsed. So she used her hands to dig a bit, and found bottle after bottle after perfectly preserved bottle.
The Arkansas Archaeological Survey (AAS) at the University of Arkansas, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, amateur diggers, and hotel management got involved in a new and interesting episode of buried Ozarks treasure. More than 400 medicinal-looking bottles have been recovered, some with liquid and some with creepy looking contents speculated to be tumors or tissue.
“Who knows what’s in them?” Jared Pebworth of the AAS said. “We’ve sent some off to Little Rock for evaluation, but don’t have an answer yet.”
The bottles were on shelves where the Baker Hospital once flourished, according to hotel General Manager Jack Moyer. Moyer said Genevieve Bowman told him she worked at the hotel in the 1960s and the bottles lined the break room. Then one day, they were gone.
“It was not uncommon for businesses and residents to toss their trash over the hillside and cover it with dirt,” Pebworth said. “It wasn’t a secret. It’s just how trash management was done in those days.”
If you live here, you’ve likely heard of Norman Baker. Baker was from the Mississippi River town of Muscatine, Iowa, where he invented and manufactured the Tangley Automatic Air Calliope sold to circuses. He dabbled in vaudeville, mind reading and carnival barking, at which he was exquisite.
He denounced water fluoridation, vaccinations and aluminum cookware, which he claimed caused half of all cancers. He also knew that lawsuits, whether frivolous or hopeless, kept his name in front of the public. He started radio stations and a publishing company so he could present his side of any story, generally opposing those referring to him as a quack. He loved to sue newspapers.
Baker was a charismatic politician, radio personality, and paranoid hater of Jews, Catholics and the American Medical Association. While in Iowa, he teamed up with Harry Hoxsey, an insurance salesman turned healer, and the two held outdoor events that drew tens of thousands of people who felt good buying products they thought would cure what ailed them. It made both men rich, but they had a falling out and Baker moved to Eureka Springs in 1937 where he opened a hospital that guaranteed a cure for cancer.
Baker’s Hospital was in the Crescent Hotel, and Norman printed and mailed more than 300,000 brochures around the country advertising that he could cure cancer in six weeks. That claim, among others, eventually landed him in Leavenworth for four years for mail fraud.
But Baker Hospital revitalized the Eureka Springs economy that had been hard hit by the Depression. The original hotel that opened April 20, 1886 as a luxurious spa for the wealthy was built for $294,000, according to Baker historian and Crescent tour manager Keith Scales. Fifty-one years later Baker bought the hotel and surrounding land for $40,000, and went to work filling rooms.
Baker treated thousands of people with injections, and there is no proof he ever cured anyone. He died of cirrhosis on a yacht in Miami in 1958, but it looks like we’ve got his bottled up potions, some of which will likely be on display as soon as they are identified and labeled.