Bella Vista City Guide

20 | 2023 Bella Vista City Guide In 1976 volunteers in Bella Vista were busy planning the local festivities for the national Bicentennial. ey ended up with so much information, they decided to form the Bella Vista Historical Society which now maintains the Bella Vista Historical Museum. e Historical Society initially met in the old Hill 'n Dale Restaurant that was once located next to Lake Bella Vista. ey needed a permanent location and started looking for a historical building to call their own, Xyta Lucas, the co-president of the current Bella Vista Historical Society, said. But there wasn't an appropriate building that was available. Eventually, Cooper Communities, the company that was still developing Bella Vista, offered to donate to the Historical Society a parcel of land near the corner of Highway 71 and Kingsland Road. e museum is still in that same location. e Society started raising funds for a building. One of their first successful fundraisers was the history book, e Bella Vista Story, published in 1980 and edited by George Phillips. In 1984, the Society began construction of a modular building, which they opened in 1985, on the land that Cooper had donated, Lucas said. About ten years later, they added a room in back that is now called the Cooper Room. It functions as both exhibit space and meeting space. e next addition was completed in 2015 and named for Historical Society President Carole Linebarger Harter. Harter, the granddaughter of one of the Linebarger Brothers, had moved away as a teenager but returned to the area in the mid 1990's and worked hard to keep the museum going. Now the three rooms represent two different eras, Lucas explained, one era being from 1915 through 1964, and the other being 1965 to present. e original space became the Linebarger Room and the exhibits tell the story of the summer resort that got its start by the Linebarger Brothers in 1917, aer Lake Bella Vista was built in 1915. Most of the resort, which included cabins and a hotel, was close to Lake Bella Vista. Back then, everything north of the lake to the Missouri state line was farm land. e Linebargers sold the resort to E. L. Keith in 1952. In 1962, John Cooper started buying that farm land, but the farmers didn't know why. ey later found out when Cooper announced his plans to build a retirement community, and purchased the Bella Vista Summer Resort from Keith. Cooper opened Bella Vista Village in 1965, and the Cooper Room in the museum has exhibits from 1965 to present. e Harter Room, like the Linebarger Room, holds exhibits representing the 1915-1964 timeframe. It also contains the museum office, with the former office becoming a new and improved gi shop. When volunteer Jill Werner got involved with the museum, she suggested creating a new role, gi shop manager, Lucas remembered, and she introduced many of the gi items — everything from Bella Vista T-shirts to jigsaw puzzles — now for sale in the shop. In addition to a variety of other merchandise, the gi shop has available three books on Bella Vista History, which were written in 1993 by Gilbert Fite, in 2002 by Constance Waddell, and in 2021 by Lucas and her co-president, Dale Phillips. Werner also began the practice of accepting private collections, such as one woman's collection of hundreds of salt and pepper shakers, to be sold in the gi shop as a museum fundraiser. In 2018, an old log cabin was donated to the museum by Scott Butler. Built in what is now the Highlands about 1912, it was moved to the Lake Avalon area in 1974, and to the museum grounds in 2019. It was given the name of the 'Settler's Cabin' and furnished as the home of a young settler. All the furnishings were donated by area residents and arranged inside the cabin by volunteer Carol Phillips. But the donation that made a biggest impact inside the museum since Lucas got involved nearly eleven years ago was probably the donation of used display cabinets. ere are 13 cabinets that were once part of the Walmart museum on the square in Bentonville. Carol Harter heard that the cabinets were put into storage aer Walmart remodeled its museum and that they were available to any nonprofit organization that wanted them, so she asked for seven of them to be placed in the Cooper Room. She then suggested to the Historical Society Board that another room be added to the museum for placement of the remaining six cabinets. at is the room that was added in 2015 and named aer her. ere are other display cabinets that were donated as well, Lucas said, and they also improved the exhibit space. "ey all really dress up our exhibits," she said. e museum is still accepting donations that are directly related to Bella Vista history. Recently, they acquired a pair of slot machines that were being stored by another Linebarger granddaughter, Charity Linebarger George, and were used at the Bella Vista resort 100 years ago. Visitor numbers are tracked by the Society's Treasurer, Virginia Reynolds. e year of 2022 broke a previous record, which had been set in 2018 with 3560 visitors. Lucas credits another volunteer group, the Bella Vista Civil War Roundtable, for helping to increase museum visitor numbers. In 2019, the newly formed Roundtable debuted under the wings of the Historical Society, and draws an average of 40 people for each meeting. In fact, Lucas said, they have relocated meetings to Cooper Chapel when they have a nationally known speaker and expect an even larger crowd. People come from all over the region to attend. e Civil War Roundtable meets on at 7 p.m. on the first ursday of each month usually at the Museum. e Historical Society Board is already considering the next addition, although there isn't yet a time line. ere's space behind the Cooper Room, Lucas said, although the land isn't flat and part of the hill will have to be removed. e next addition may be a stand alone building connected to the original museum by an enclosed walkway. It would probably include space for storage, she said. Looking in to the future, Lucas said she could see the museum eventually becoming a department of the City of Bella Vista, the same way the library did several years ago. e City began helping the museum financially at that time but chose not to make it a City department. e museum is operated by an all-volunteer staff, but, she said, the concern is that some day they may not be able to find volunteers willing to be in charge, so it would be great to have a paid professional director who has education and credentials in museum operations. (Lucas is retired from a Human Resources career, and her co-president Dale Phillips is retired aer 41 years in the National Park Service.) History of a history museum | By Lynn Atkins, Special to Bella Vista City Guide

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