Cliff Cottage B&B Inn - Luxury Suites & Romantic Cottages

Cliff Cottage was Sears' very first kit home and it arrived into Eureka Springs in 40 boxes on the first trip into town of the new ESNA Railway in the 1880s. The boxes were delivered by horse and wagon to the present site by a fellow who owned a livery business right below the property. This chap took great interest in the house as it was being built and although he knew he didn't have enough money to ever buy it, he began lusting after the house that was to be the city's first mayor's house.

One afternoon, after my inn had been open about three years, the door bell rang and I greeted a very large burly very old gentleman whom I thought looked a bit like what the famous logger Paul Bunyan must have looked like. He was very tall and a bit fierce-looking, I remember, and was a man of few words. He informed me that he had grown up in Cliff Cottage in the 1930s and asked if he could see through the house. As we wandered from room to room with him pointing out various features and changes in the lovely old Victorian, he told me about his father who owned the livery business.

Apparently, the father had become obsessed with the mayor's house and spent his waking hours trying to figure out how he could buy it. He decided that the only way he could get it away from the mayor (who had a reputation for living the "high life") would be to increase his own financial situation. So, in the large vacant lot below Cliff Cottage (which is perched up on a hillside overlooking all of downtown), the fellow established Eureka's social event of the week...an auction every Saturday morning. He'd stand up on a pile of boxes and auction whatever anyone brought that morning....horses, piggies, goats, veggies, muffins, millinery, quilts, dresses, silk stockings. Almost everyone in town came every Saturday morning....not so much to buy things but to see what everyone else was getting for their "stuff". Slowly, he amassed a little nest egg from the auctions and his wagon deliveries, but still it was not enough. So he took the nest egg and bought the property across the street below Cliff Cottage and established the town's first grocery store.

At this point in the story, the son turned to me and said in a very gruff almost angry voice, "Now, let me see that cave!" I wondered why he referred to it with such obvious animosity and imagined that maybe his father might have locked him up in it from time to time with all the bats and snakes and things that go bump in the night in dark spooky caves. So I said, "Why sure, but it sounds like you don't like the cave." Bruskly came the reply, "I HATE that cave!" "Why is that?" I boldly ventured. "When I was a boy, in the summertime, when all my boyfriends were either off playing baseball or fishing, I had to stay in that dang store because my father had a huge sign in the window, "ICE COLD WATERMELON" and everytime a little old lady came in and asked for one, I had to climb up the hill and retrieve one from the cave!" I unlocked the door and he peered in. "How come you shored up the back of it like that, making that back wall so much smaller?" he asked. "Well, when I bought this place, I crawled way back there and wondered why someone had done that," I said. "Know what I found on the other side of that smaller opening? A lot of beautiful fine rich topsoil. And then, look here," I said, pointing to some very heavy-gauge wiring. "Someone had some pretty large spotlights back there on the other side of that opening."

Turning to him with a little smile, I said, "Now, what do you suppose those hippies that had been living in this house for years -- the ones who painted it bright red and white, inside and out -- now, what do you suppose they were growing way back there in the cave all those years?" He looked straight at me with piercing eyes without saying a word, but I noticed the hint of a faint smile cross his lips. It's interesting to note that for the first few years that I owned the property, every Thursday afternoon, a helicopter would fly very low overhead and I could see a little man with the door open, pointing some sort of electronic device down towards my property. Someone told me that the infrared can't see through the thick limestone rock. Those hippies were certainly a clever bunch! I guess the man in the helicopter finally figured out that the hippies had gone because after a year or so, the helicopter stopped flying overhead.

In the meantime, the cave makes a fantastic place to store wine! And one day, I think I'll try to grow shitake mushrooms way back there!

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