The Bottle House of Rhyolite
Tom Kelley built a house from 30,000 beer, whiskey, and champagne bottles and cement because regular building materials were too costly.[1]
“High prices for materials, labor, rentals and necessities of life were forgotten in the urgent demand for everything purchasable. Money was easy. It came easily and thus it went, until one day the people awakened to the fact that the climax of the boom had been reached. The inevitable followed.”[2]
People were in such a hurry to build up Rhyolite and make it the flagship town of Nevada that they would use anything to build, like the cement and bottles seen in Kelley’s Bottle House. The house began deteriorating around the 1920s and was renovated to be used as a film set in the 30s and 40s.
[1] James R. Moffat, Memoirs of an Old-Timer: Rhyolite, Nevada 1906–1907 (The Sage Brush Press, 1963), 3.
[2] Harold and Lucile Wright, Rhyolite: Death Valley’s Ghost City of Golden Dreams (29 Palms, CA: Calico Press, 1953), 16.
