Grandma Prisbrey; 92; Eccentric Known Worldwide for Folk Art in Bottle Village

Tressa (Grandma) Prisbrey, the inveterate, eccentric hobbyist who created a world out of bottles in order to house a collection of 17,000 pencils, dolls, shells and countless other strangely ordinary objects that crossed her path during her long life, has died.

She was 92 and died in San Francisco, the Associated Press reported Friday.

A longtime Simi Valley resident, Mrs. Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, made from junk found at a local dump during more than 20 years of collecting, was known worldwide to thousands as an example of American folk art.

But to others her village was a worthless eyesore and not worth the lengthy campaign it took to preserve it and its contents.

A measure of the village’s international flavor was that it was listed among the attractions for visitors to the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles even though it was closed at the time.

(It remains closed although hopes are high that once the buildings are brought up to earthquake standards and sufficient funds obtained, the village will be able to reopen.)

Grandma Prisbrey herself was often featured on television and a documentary on her work was shown nationwide.

Mrs. Prisbrey originally owned the property where she built her village of more than a dozen structures in the 1950s and ‘60s while living in a small trailer on the property. There the wiry, cantankerous old woman led tours of her artwork. But after her husband died she was unable to keep up the mortgage payments and sold the land in the early ‘70s. For a time she was permitted to stay on as caretaker, but then the new owner in turn sold the land and Mrs. Prisbrey was ordered off the premises so condominiums could be built where her old television tubes and bottles created what once was described as an atmosphere of “cathedral-like lighting.”

Defense Committee

A group called Preserve Bottle Village Committee came to Mrs. Prisbrey’s defense against the condominium proposal.

In 1987, the committee launched a $100,000-fund drive to restore the 13 disintegrating buildings that she had constructed of bottles and cement and to landscape the premises at 4595 Cochran St. in Simi Valley. It was estimated that another $125,000 was needed to refurbish the interiors and then retrieve Mrs. Prisbrey’s collections of pencils, dolls, seashells, books, old school desks and other bric-a-brac from storage and install them in their new surroundings.

As described in 1987 by Suzanne Muchnic, The Times art writer, the village was an “acre-lot full of funky buildings, mosaic walkways, wishing wells and assorted constructions made of materials rescued from a nearby dump. Some devotees have described the meandering creation as a priceless example of ‘divine disorder,’ while detractors have characterized it as a worthless eyesore.”

While all this was going on Mrs. Prisbrey, who in the 1950s had decided to utilize bottles to house her varied castoffs because she couldn’t afford more conventional concrete building blocks, found that her health was declining. She moved to San Francisco to live with her daughter and son-in-law. She died in a convalescent home there Wednesday.