Evan and Kathy Thompson Photograph Collection (PH-00042)

Evan and Kathy Thompson were the proprietors of the Bottle House in Rhyolite, Nevada until 1989. In the mid-1950s, Evan's grandparents, Tommy and Mary Thompson, purchased the Bottle House from Louis J. Murphy and Bessie Stratton Moffat, who had leased the house after it was renovated by Paramount Pictures for a film in 1925. The house was originally built by Rhyolite resident Tom Kelly in 1905, and it reportedly took 20,000 beer, whiskey, soda, and medicine bottles, held together with adobe mortar, to construct the house. Tommy and Mary Thompson lived in the house and operated it as a museum and relic shop. Later, Evan and Kathy Thompson also lived in the house, and they were the last to do so. After 1989, the town site was managed by the Bureau of Land Management. In 2005, the year of the Bottle House's centennial, the house was renovated by the Friends of Rhyolite's Bottles, the Central Nevada Museum, and the Beatty Museum.

Sources:

"Vernacular Architecture in Nevada," Online Nevada Encyclopedia. March 18, 2009. http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/vernacular-architecture-nevada

"Tom Kelly’s Bottle House: The Largest of Three Built in Rhyolite," Rhyolitesite.com. August 2010. https://www.rhyolitesite.com/bottle1.html. Accessed September 25, 2015.

"Rhyolite, Nevada Bottle Building," Legends of America. http://www.legendsofamerica.com/nv-quirky.html. Accessed September 25, 2015.