In the spring of 2012, a new volunteer took a docent shift at the Bella Vista Historical Museum. By that summer the editor of the Weekly Vista had asked the same volunteer for a monthly history column, and it ran five years; the museum has the whole run up as PDFs, filed by year and title. New exhibits arrived the same way, between 2010 and 2012, when members of the Blowing Springs chapter of Questers, an antiques-and-preservation society, pitched in and built them. The log cabin on the grounds, which C. C. Cooper raised on land he bought in 1912, sat for years in a couple's back yard near Lake Avalon until a fundraising push paid to haul it over in March 2019; residents furnished it with period pieces, and you can walk through it. What all of that holds is a town that turns on one year. The entry hall and the 2015 addition carry the resort decades, 1915 through 1964. The Cooper Room, past them, begins at 1965, when John Cooper Sr. opened the retirement village, and comes all the way to now. If you moved here without a local to explain the place, this is the afternoon that does it. All-volunteer, no admission charge, and afternoons only: one to five, Wednesday through Sunday, nothing on Monday or Tuesday. The museum is asking for docents, which is where the columnist started.