One building dominates the skyline and history of Eureka Springs

Eureka Springs history careens wildly from opulence to horror, from zaniness to prestige, from scandal to intrigue. And yet, one building somehow manages to dominate every one of those categories and more: the Crescent Hotel.

Last week, I talked about going through the hotel’s archives. Long before then, I had grounded myself in the many books already written about the 1886 American Gothic palace.

D. R. Woolery’s 1986 The Grand Old Lady of the Ozarks and Susan Schaefer’s 2017 The Crescent Hotel: With Ghost Stories! are the most complete sources for facts and legends of the building’s entire history.

Bud Steed’s 2017 Haunted Northwest Arkansas revealed more of the ghost stories whispered in its halls, while Sean Fitzgibbon’s 2021 graphic novel What Follows is True: Crescent Hotel evoked its sham hospital years.

For the time it was a women’s college, the college’s yearbooks are an invaluable treasure. The Carnegie Library has a small selection available for public view.

But even more invaluable for those years is Rebecca J. Becker’s Crescent College History Project. Her obsessive chronicling of the improbable lives of the institution’s students and faculty is serialized both on Facebook and in the city’s Fun Guide.

Her project gets a shout-out in the chapter I plan to read at next week’s Poetluck. Come enjoy good food, good company, and good stories next Thursday evening at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. The special guest this time around is local artist and entrepreneur John Rankine.