“Everywhere that an abode can be constructed, houses of every description, tents and shelters, sprang up all over the mountain tops, hanging by corners on the steep sides, perched upon jutting boulders, spanning gulches, or nestling under crags in the grottoes. It is a most peculiar looking place, presenting an apparent disregard to anything like order and arrangement.”
The town had two disastrous fires in the eighties. The first one came early in the morning of November 3, 1883, destroying the business section on Mountain and Eureka streets. A fine drug store was located in the V-junction of Mountain and Eureka, a livery stable where the Christian Science church now stands, and a bakery across the street. The second big fire came in 1888 and burned the business section along Spring Street from Calip Spring to the Presbyterian Church. 480 houses were destroyed. Only four frame houses were left standing in the area.
According to Goodspeed, T. J. Hadley brought a printing press from Olathe, Kansas in November, 1879 and established the first newspaper. The date of the first issue of the Echo is given as February 21, 1880. Within two or three years, the town had two additional newspapers, the Dispatch and the Herald.
Eureka Springs has had its full share of legend and folklore and some of the fabulous tales are told with tongue in cheek. Take the marital swap of “Uncle” Adam and “Uncle” Dick. A couple called “Adam and Eve” lived in a rock shelter across the road from Johnson Spring. Dick and his wife occupied an adjoining shelter to the south. One day Adam traded Eve to Dick for his wife and got a horse and buggy and a dog to boot. Dick and his newly acquired wife left the country soon after the swap, but it is reported that the woman came back later and lived with Adam. This happened, according to the old timers, about the turn of the century.
Vance Randolph, in Who Blowed Up the Church House?,[19] gives a different version of the wife-trading story. He heard the anecdote from an old timer in Eureka Springs about 1950. Here is his version:
“One time there was two old men lived up Magnetic Holler, right close to a little branch they call Mystic Spring nowadays. One of these fellows was Uncle Adam, and he had a wife. The other one was knowed as Uncle Dick, and he didn’t have no wife, but he had two cows. They got to trading jackknives and shotguns, and finally Uncle Adam swapped his wife for one of Uncle Dick’s cows. Folks used to trade wives pretty free in them days, and nobody said much about it. Lots of them wasn’t really married anyhow, so there wasn’t no great harm done.