Tressa Prisbrey

Tressa (Schaefer) Prisbrey was born in 1896 in Easton, Minnesota. At age 15, she married 52-year-old Theodore Grinolds, her sister’s ex-husband. By 1926, she had given birth to seven children as the product of the unhappy union. That year, she left him, pursuing a series of odd jobs around the country including waitressing, singing, and working on an assembly line for Boeing in Seattle.

In 1946, Prisbrey moved to California where she met her second husband Al Prisbrey. The couple purchased a third of an acre of land in Simi Valley where they parked their trailer. Eventually the property became known as “The Bottle Village,” containing sixteen structures constructed of glass bottles and concrete. After the deaths of her husband and three sons, Prisbrey sold the site in 1972, but returned in 1974 as a caretaker and tour guide. She eventually moved away, and the property was deeded to the Preserve Bottle Village Committee upon her death in 1988.

Despite being badly damaged in an earthquake in 1994, the site is open to the public.