House on the Rock

House on the Rock is a tourist attraction near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It opened in 1959 and was designed by Alex Jordan Jr. The original house sits on top of Deer Shelter Rock, a tall column of rock in a nearby forest. The early buildings, the house itself, the Gate House and the Mill House, have exposed stone, low ceilings, dark woodwork and antiques, and they recall the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, though in a much patchier way.

Over the decades the complex kept growing. It now includes the Streets of Yesterday, a re-creation of an early twentieth-century American town, the Heritage of the Sea with a 200-foot model of a whale-like sea creature battling a Kraken, and the Music of Yesterday, a huge collection of automatic music machines. The carousel, built in 1981, has 269 carousel animals, 182 chandeliers and over 20,000 lights, but no horses, and visitors cannot ride it.

The popular story that Jordan began the house to spite Frank Lloyd Wright is disputed. The official House on the Rock website rejects it and says it was invented to promote the place. Work on the rock began around 1945 with blasting to level the top, and Jordan opened the house to paying visitors on Labor Day 1959. The Infinity Room was built in 1985, and in 1988 Jordan sold the house to a friend who kept building.

Some of the antiques are real and many are not. A good number of the pieces were built on the property: the armor was made for the house, and the instruments that look like they are playing are partly illusion, with their sound coming from organ pipes. In 1978 an employee complained to the state Justice Department about misleading claims, the brochure was rewritten and misleading signs were removed. The exhibits kept their colorful names, and guessing what is real is part of the visit.