The first lawsuit in Eureka Springs, according to the old-timers, was caused by a woman who lived in one of these terraced homesites. She carelessly threw dishwater out of the backdoor and down a neighbor’s chimney, damaging the furniture.
Vance Randolph tells about a drunken farmer who was found in the streets of the town one Saturday night. The pavement is not level by any means and the poor farmer was walking with one foot on the sidewalk and one in the gutter. A woman came along and the fellow called on her for help. “You’re just drunk,” she told him. “Is that it?” he said, much relieved, “My gosh, I thought maybe I was crippled.”
Eureka Springs is laid out with 238 named streets with no direct cross intersections. (One or two right-angle crossings have been found since Ripley featured this item in his “Believe It or Not.”) On the map the streets look like a bewildered maze with the letters U and V formed fifty-one times, the letter S thirteen times, O, seven times, and perhaps other alphabetical curiosities in this labyrinth of streets. There are five street levels on West Mountain from Main Street in the valley to the Crescent Hotel on Prospect Avenue.
Many exaggerated tales have been told about this “crazy quilt” town. There is the fellow, for instance, who doesn’t need a picture window in his house to observe the scenery. He merely looks up the chimney and watches his neighbor drive the cows home from the pasture. And don’t forget the well digger who was digging a well on East Mountain. When down about forty feet the bottom of the well fell out and he landed (on his feet) right in the middle of Main Street. They had to change their plans and dig the well up instead of down in order to strike water.
Eureka Springs has only two business thoroughfares, Main Street in the valley from Planer Hill to the railroad station, and Spring Street which branches off of Main at the City Auditorium and winds around the mountain to the Crescent Hotel. Once, in the early days, a feud developed among the merchants on Main (then called Mud Street) and they built a high board fence right down the middle of the street. This made the traffic lanes so narrow that a wagon could barely squeeze through. The fence was soon removed by order of the city authorities. Spring Street is lined with flowing springs—Sweet, Harding, Congress, Crescent, Grotto, and Dairy on the Harmon Playgrounds, once the site of the old auditorium. This street was engineered by Governor Powell Clayton (they always called him “governor”) who helped dress up the town in the early eighties. Sweet spring was “moved” from the hollow behind the post office to its present location on the Spring Street level.