A Woman Who Wouldn’t Quit Built Bottle Village

The first 2026 tour offers a look inside Grandma Prisbrey’s handmade Simi Valley landmark

Built by hand from what others discarded, Bottle Village reflects an independent spirit that has long defined Simi Valley.

(CLAIR.ID | SIMI VALLEY, CA) — Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village will open to the public on Sun., Feb. 22, marking the site’s first tour of the year.

Reservations are required to join the tour at 4595 Cochran St. The tour will begin at 1 p.m. Admission is $10 per person, payable by cash or check on arrival. Guests are asked to wear soft-soled shoes and arrive 10 to 15 minutes early.

Bottle Village was created by Tressa Prisbrey, known as Grandma Prisbrey. According to Visit Simi Valley, she began building the site in 1956 at age 60 and continued working on it until 1981.

Over 25 years, Prisbrey transformed her one-third acre property into a dense landscape of shrines, wishing wells, walkways, fountains, follies and 15 small structures built to house her collections. Everything was made from found materials, most notably tens of thousands of discarded bottles, which gave the village its name.

Bottle Village began as a hobby. Prisbrey opened it to the public and charged a quarter for walking tours, personally guiding visitors through the buildings she constructed by hand.

Today, the site is designated California Historical Landmark #939. It is preserved by Preserve Bottle Village, founded in 1979, and is an affiliate member of Historic Artists’ Homes & Studios.

Prisbrey never framed her work as art or endurance. In archival footage, she shrugs off the scale of what she built and focuses instead on the act of continuing. 

“I didn’t think this would work,” she says. “So I kept on building.” She mixed cement by hand, dug foundations herself and set bottles one at a time, even as arthritis slowed her steps. Asked how she managed the labor, she offers no explanation beyond persistence. 

“I don’t know how I done it,” she says. “But I done it.”

One of the clearest records of Prisbrey’s voice and working life appears in Grandma’s Bottle Village: The Art of Tressa Prisbrey, produced and directed by Allie Light and Irving Saraf and preserved by the American Visionary Art Museum. The film captures Prisbrey in her 80s giving tours and speaking freely as she moves through the village.

In the film, Prisbrey explains that Bottle Village began out of necessity, not ambition. She collected commemorative pencils, more than 17,000 of them, and needed a place to store them. Cement blocks were too expensive.

“I went to get cement blocks to build this house for my pencils,” she says. “My God, they were so expensive. So I went over to the dump. And I thought, I’m gonna make it out of bottles.”

One building was not enough. She built another. Then another.

“I didn’t think this would work,” she says. “So I kept on building.”

According to biographical records compiled by the Judith M. Klein Art Center, Prisbrey was born in 1896 in Easton, Minnesota. She married at 15 and by 1926 had given birth to seven children. After leaving her first husband, she supported herself through a series of jobs around the country, including waitressing, singing and working on an assembly line for Boeing in Seattle. She moved to California in 1946 and later settled in Simi Valley with her second husband, Al Prisbrey, on the land that would become Bottle Village.

Throughout the film, Prisbrey resists being cast as an artist or visionary. She describes herself as a country woman who stayed busy. Before Bottle Village, she says she had been involved in politics in North Dakota. Later, she focused on the work directly in front of her.

“When I built this place, I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. “If I’d known what was going to happen, my God, I never would have built it.”

Near the end of tours, Prisbrey often sang to visitors. As she closed doors behind her, she explained one final rule.

“The last person out of the building has to shut that door,” she says.

On Feb. 22, visitors will again walk the narrow paths Prisbrey built, guided through a place shaped not by planning or polish, but by resolve, repetition and a woman who would not quit.

To view the documentary “Grandma’s Bottle Village: The Art of Tressa Prisbrey,” visit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inOvmkF1fLA

Biographical information about Prisbrey is available through the Judith M. Klein Art Center at
https://www.jmkac.org/artist/prisbey-tressa/