Ozark Colony was originally a nearby community, but now is a Sulphur Springs neighborhood. In 1921, Walter R. Eaton, a retired oilman, established the colony with $25,000 capital (equivalent to about $436,200 in 2024) as an intellectual and artistic recreation-based cooperative: people would buy a plot of land and agree to work in community-held ventures with the proceeds going toward their vacation expenses in the colony. People worked in the 100-acre (40.4 ha) vineyard that was owned collectively under the name Ozark Colony Grape Club, and processed the grapes into juice and marmalade to sell. They also made hickory furniture and had a poultry club. Eaton, as president of the Ozark League Commission, also collaborated with neighboring tourist towns such as Eureka Springs to promote and market the home products and handicrafts made at the colony. The colony had more than 40 cottages, a Grecian theater with classical recitals and costumed performers, a lodge with a dance floor and
disco ball, manmade lakes stocked with trout for fishing, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Seasonally, they had artist exhibits, art classes with visiting directors from the
Kansas City Art Institute, music classes, and plays. (which were fashionable in tourist and resort areas at the time), telling the community's history, from a generalized nod to native Americans, to the four springs for which Sulphur Springs is named, then the railroad and airplanes, and a modern city with resort hotels and
John Brown University. Painter John Eliot Jenkins kept a studio in the colony. His paintings are now in state capitols and libraries in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia, and his
Snow in the Ozarks (1925) oil on canvas painting is part of the Foundation Collection at the
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in
Little Rock, Arkansas. ==Demographics==