Walter Knott, of Knott's Berry Farm, built this bottle house in Calico around 1951. He had seen and admired a bottle house in Nevada and decided to build one here. It isn't known whether the original town of Calico had a bottle house but mining towns did have them. Apparently this was because some of the first buildings in a mining town were saloons and there were lots of empty bottles that were subsequently used for building material. This bottle house used over 500 bottles.