Bentonville's Best-Kept Secrets

I caught myself mispronouncing a lake in this video and fixed it on air. Two minutes later I handed Frank Lloyd Wright credit for a building designed by an architect who deserves it more than almost anyone in Arkansas — and did not catch that one at all.

That is the correction here. The rest of the list holds up.

1. The Witching Hour

Real, and it is a food trailer rather than a brick-and-mortar restaurant — at 704 SW A Street in Bentonville, at the corner of SW A and 8th. Run by T.Z. Foods.

The horror theme is as committed as I said. The menu includes the King of Monsters and Candy Man burgers, Pennywise Cheese Fries and Redrum Cake.

One detail I cannot verify: I said "they stamp all the burgers" with the name. I can find no source for it, so I am leaving it as unverified rather than confirmed. Everything else about the place checks out, including the thing I actually cared about — that the food holds up independent of the gimmick.

Check current hours before you drive over. A trailer's schedule is not a restaurant's schedule.

2. Lake Atalanta — and credit for catching myself

I said "Lake Atlanta" several times and then caught it mid-segment: "not Lake Atlanta, that was my fault, Lake Atalanta." Good. That instinct is exactly right and I want to point at it, because it is missing from the next item.

The details check out. Lake Atalanta is a 236-acre park and reservoir on Prairie Creek in Rogers, built in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration and renovated in 2016. Paved walking paths, off-road mountain bike trails, fishing, pavilions, playgrounds. And I was right that the Railyard Bike Park is next door with a trail connecting the two — eight jump lines, open since November 2015, funded partly by the Walton Family Foundation.

Also right that it is in Rogers, not Bentonville, which I flagged up front.

3. Cooper Chapel — and the architect I short-changed

The chapel is real and worth the trip. It is the Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel at 504 Memorial Drive in Bella Vista — 31 tons of steel and 4,460 square feet of glass, first used in February 1988 and dedicated that April. Open daily, 9 to 5, free, with guided tours.

My "mini version of Thorncrown" description is fair and commonly used. Jones designed it along similar lines. And my access note was roughly right, though I overstated it — it is easy to drive past and you will want GPS, but it is not hard to reach.

Now the part I got badly wrong.

I said: "Frank Lloyd Wright built a lot of homes and cool things in Northwest Arkansas, one of them being Thorncrown Chapel."

Frank Lloyd Wright did not design Thorncrown Chapel. He did not design Cooper Chapel. He never built anything in Northwest Arkansas.

Both chapels are the work of E. Fay Jones — Cooper Chapel with his longtime partner Maurice Jennings, and Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs by Jones alone, opened in 1980.

And Jones is not a footnote to Wright. Thorncrown won the AIA National Honor Award in 1981, the AIA 25 Year Award, and was ranked fourth on the AIA's list of the best American buildings of the twentieth century. It went on the National Register in 2000. Jones himself won the AIA Gold Medal in 1990 — the highest honor American architecture gives — and by the account of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas he is the only one of Wright's disciples to receive it.

He was based in Fayetteville. He taught at the University of Arkansas for 35 years and was the founding dean of its architecture school, which has been named the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design since 2009.

The Wright connection I was reaching for is real but narrower than I made it. Jones met Wright in 1949, visited Taliesin West in 1953, and joined the Taliesin Fellowship in 1954, returning annually for about a decade while running his own practice and teaching in Arkansas. It was a genuine apprenticeship, though not a formal long-term one, and Jones built an independent career on top of it.

There is exactly one Frank Lloyd Wright building in Arkansas, and it is not one he built here. The **Bachman-Wilson House** is a 1954 Usonian home Wright designed for a site in New Jersey. It was disassembled, moved more than 1,200 miles, and rebuilt on the Crystal Bridges campus between 2013 and 2015, opening to the public that year — more than fifty years after Wright died.

So the "Chicago architecture baked into Northwest Arkansas" story I told is backwards. What is actually here is a homegrown architect from Fayetteville who studied under Wright and then made work good enough to rank fourth in the country on its own merits. That is a better story, and it is the true one.

4. The Way of Color

I had the name right and did not know it. It is The Way of Color, a 2009 skyspace by James Turrell, on the Crystal Bridges Art Trail — reachable from the Compton Gardens entrance on North Main or the A Street trailhead.

My advice was correct: go at dawn or dusk, not midday. Sunrise sessions start roughly 30 to 45 minutes before sunrise, sunset sessions about 10 minutes before, each running 30 to 40 minutes. Free, no reservation, but seating is limited so arrive early.

One refinement on the mechanism. I said the LEDs "make the sky look red" or the opposite color. The lights do not recolor the sky — they set a controlled color against the open aperture, and your eye reads the patch of sky as a different hue by contrast. It is a perceptual effect, which is Turrell's whole practice. My "am I tripping" description was the right reaction to it.

5. First Fridays

Confirmed in full. Organized by Downtown Bentonville Inc. and branded First Friday Live, on the square and surrounding streets — food trucks from 11, vendors from 3, live music 5 to 9, with monthly themes.

And Bentonville's Got Talent is a real recurring component, which I threw in as a "sometimes." It runs roughly 25 acts across singing, dancing, comedy, magic and stunts, judged by a panel plus the audience, with the winner featured at a later First Friday.

Still the thing I would tell a visitor to plan a trip around.