Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village

Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, also known as Bottle Village, is a folk art piece, located in Simi Valley, California.This assemblage is one of California's Twentieth Century Folk Art Environments. In 1956, Tressa Prisbrey, then 60 years old, started building a "village" of shrines, walkways, sculptures, and buildings from recycled items and discards from the local landfill. She worked for 25 years creating one structure after another to house her collections. Bottle Village is California Historical Landmark number 939. It is also a Ventura County Cultural Landmark, and has historic designation from the City of Simi Valley. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.It was officially closed in 1984 and severely damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. In 1979 Bottle Village was named a Ventura County Cultural Landmark. In 1981 it was declared a California State Historical Landmark National Register. In 1996, two years after the Northridge earthquake and still in ruin, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.Tressa "Grandma" PrisbreyTressa Luella Schaefer was born in Easton, Minnesota in 1896. She attended school until the age of twelve and studied mostly politics in North Dakota. At the age of 15, Tressa married the ex-husband of her sister, Theodore Grinolds who was 37 years her senior (52 years old). The marriage with Theordore only lasted 14 years and within those years she bore seven children. After Theodore's passing at age 72, Tressa and her seven children moved up to Seattle where she married an unnamed and unemployed man. Their marriage was very short lived. Over the course of her life, she had witnessed the passing of six out of her seven children (4 boys, 2 girls).