In 1956, Simi Valley -- then known as Santa Susana -- was a tiny, rural community that had so few services that residents had to take their own trash to the town dump. It was there that at age 60, Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey, an artistic homemaker and collector of everything from pencils to dolls, took note of the thousands of bottles -- some of them quite colorful -- that people were simply tossing away each day.

She began carting them home, initially to use the bottles as an inexpensive building material for a wall between her and a neighboring turkey farm, to divert the steady influx of turkey feathers that ruined her trailer home and the wash hung out back. Over time, she transformed her one-third acre rural lot into Bottle Village, a folk-art fantasyland of shrines, wishing wells, mosaic walkways, fountains, follies, and 15 structures to house her collections - all made from found objects.

After her death in 1988, the "village" suffered many ravages -- from weather, neglect, the severe 1994 Northridge earthquake, some looting and vandalism, and the simple passage of time. But beginning in 1979, with the help of the California Conservation Corps, which helped gather strewn bottles and clean up the property, Preserve Bottle Village, a non-profit organization, acquired and set about restoring the privately owned, historic property.