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Philadelphia Toboggan Company

When last I focused heavily on carousels, it was October of last year, and I was telling you about the amazing Dentzel/Looff Carousel down at Seaside Heights in Florida. Well, that was a different time. It’s now March, we’re all inside, and recent updates are that the Dentzel/Looff Carousel has been disassembled for storage and refurbishment. 

This turned my mind to other carousels out there, so I went digging, and I found the subject of today’s episode: PTC #15. To explain, we must start at the beginning, and to start at the beginning, we must begin.

It starts with a guy, as always. Two guys. Henry Auchy, and his buddy, Chester Albright. In 1904, the two joined up and started a company. That’s what you did back in the day, you started a company instead of a podcast. They wanted to “build finer and better carousels and coasters”. These two guys did something smart, which was to purchase inventory from the E. Joy Morris Company.

E. Joy Morris

Now E. Joy Morris was a small carousel manufacturer right around the turn of the century, really lesser known, even in carousel circles. If you recall from the last carousel episode, there are three major styles of carousel carving: Coney Island style, Country Fair style, and Philadelphia style. It’s the latter that we’re going to talk about today, possibly unsurprising given the name.

So EJ Morris Jr. was a Philly man, born in 1860. Interesting tidbit, his father EJ Morris Sr, was US Minister to Turkey under Abraham Lincoln. With the family money, because of course there was family money, Morris was able to get in on the nascent amusement park trade. He patented a roller-coaster related invention in the late 1890s, and established his own company to build figure 8 toboggans (rollercoasters), carousels, and water chutes. Morris loved animals, loved children, and wanted to make them happy.

The famed Gustav Dentzel was Morris’ direct competition, and Morris aimed to outdo him by embellishing and adding incredible small whimsical details, perhaps also in a nod to his own playful nature. Morris also did something unique by keeping an inventory on hand. Prior to this, carousels were built on demand, but Morris’ firm built many carousels at once, perhaps as a way to keep the craftsman retained during slower months, or perhaps as a way of getting a leg up on Dentzel by being able to deliver carousels to customers faster.

Late in 1903, after building and selling well over 20 carousels and/or coasters, Morris’ business plans changed. For the sum of about $30,000, EJ Morris sold over 200 completed carousel figures to Auchy and Albright, allowing them to build four carousels outright and to jumpstart their business, recouping their investment almost immediately. 

Why’d EJ Morris sell his business? It appears to have been health problems – it’s said he was in the hospital shortly before he sold the manufacturing business, and though he lived another 20-some-odd years afterwards, it seems his health was always in decline. Though he divested himself of the manufacturing side, he did remain active in the business end of the amusement rides he already owned through about 1920.  

Philadelphia Toboggan Company

Morris then was a huge inspiration and jumping off point for the newly-formed Philadelphia Toboggan Company. As I said earlier, they quickly established themselves as a company after their inception in 1904, building four carousels in short order with their acquired E.J. Morris stock. Interestingly, this is why Morris isn’t as well known these days – his work is often mistaken for PTC work.  Neither Auchy nor Albright were carvers, unlike most other carousel companies at the time, so their house style varies quite a bit based on who was head carver at the time. 

I loved this quote from a 1904 Topeka State Journal article about Vinewood Park, one of the first PTC locations in the world. “The word carousell is probably a new-one in the west. The machine, which bears the name as its “official title,” is a revolving, circular platform about 80 feet in diameter, upon which is built a regular modern menagerie. All of the animals are fitted with saddles, and one can get a ride on anything from an elephant to a jackrabbit. The scheme is a new one, and has only been out of the factory for a few years. A number of the eastern parks have put in carousells, and they are proving very popular.”

Vinewood Park, interestingly, was one of the first Philadelphia Toboggan Company locations: carousel and rollercoaster #2 were both shipped to the same park. In fact, the first ten carousels and the first ten rollercoasters manufactured by PTC went to the same theme parks (ie, the park ordered both at once).

The carousel we’re interested in wasn’t built until 1907 – PTC #15. The PTC carousels are fairly unique in that each was numbered on their massive central poles. For historians, the numbering system did become confusing, as sometimes a new number was assigned to the same carousel after it went back to the factory for refurbishing. However, overall, it appears that the company kept excellent records based on the articles I’m reading. 

PTC #15 was built in 1907. This was PTC’s first four-row machine, as well as PTC’s first all-horse carousel (no other animals, no “menagerie” in carousel parlance). And, all the horses jumped (traditionally, the outer row of most beautiful carved horses were “standers” – stationary) – another first. Master carver Leo Zoller, head carver at PTC from 1906 to 1910, is said to have been responsible for many of the carved horses, as well as carver Daniel Muller, who often worked at Dentzel’s shop. 

PTC #15 was gorgeous, featuring large and highly animated figures with exquisitely-carved details. From the National Register of Historic Places entry, the horses on this carousel are “among the most realistically carved pieces ever done anywhere”. The carousel also featured two large, rare, well-carved lovers’ chariots, and handpainted rounding boards depicting animals frolicing in a mythical landscape. (Rounding boards, if you’re uncertain, are the painted boards decorating the tops of carousels – they hide machinery, and attract guests with both paintings and lights. Since they go “around”, the name is rounding boards.)

PTC #15 was built in 1907. (You already said that, I hear you saying.) That was one hundred and thirteen years ago. How many different places do you think this carousel has been since then? Let’s find out.

Fort Wendell / Fort George Amusement Park (New York, NY)

PTC #15 was initially delivered to Fort George Amusement Park in New York. This was located in New York City along the Harlem River, around West 190th St. This location is the northernmost tip of Manhattan, what is now Highbridge Park and George Washington Educational Campus, where George Washington fought the British during the Revolutionary War two hundred and fifty years ago. At the time of its construction, the park was of course, a trolley park, at the end of the Third Avenue Trolley Line. 

Fort George was known as Harlem’s Coney Island, and did its best to rival its Brooklyn amusement counterpart. This was a classic turn of the century amusement park resort, full of dance halls, roller rinks, fortune tellers, gambling, beer halls, restaurants, hotels, and of course, the latest in amusements: Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and carousels. It was less of an amusement park as we might think of today, and more of an amusement district, with many different owners and operators and many different smaller “parks” within the area. 

PTC #15 was actually not the first carousel at Fort George. In fact, 1905’s PTC #8 was the first carousel there, at Paradise Park within Fort George. (And though the RCDB lists the Fort George rollercoaster as “unknown”, a 2010 Carousel News and Trader article confirms that the first ten PTC carousels and coasters operated at the same parks. So PTC coaster #8 also would have operated here at Paradise Park at Fort George, a classic Figure 8 coaster similar to Leap-the-Dips, a coaster still operational today.)

Paradise Park was opened by two brothers, Joseph and Nicholas Schenck, who saw the potential in the area and wanted to develop it further with this separate, extra-admission park. They indeed made the park a huge success for the time – estimates in contemporaneous articles state 50,000 people in one evening in June 1906. The park was located on a hillside, and I saw an anecdote that in the earliest years, some guests had to climb unsafe ladders up the hillsides before more permanent stairs were added.

Different places will describe the location for PTC #15 differently: Wendell’s Park, Fort Wendel, and so forth. This was actually a small resort hotel owned by one Captain Louis Wendel, famed for its rooftop panorama views across the river. Here is where PTC #15 was said to have lived, a few years after its sibling began operation, and was operated by Henry and Frank Kolb. A contemporary photo from the Museum of the City of New York shows Fort Wendel located just across the street from the large Paradise Park entrance. A large faux castle turret facade stands atop the hotel roof, hoisting a big sign labeled “Wendel”.

It all must have been very glamorous at the time, especially on a hot summer night – feel the breeze off the river to cut some of the summer heat, have a drink, go dancing or roller skating, buy an ice cream or a beer, and ride an amusement ride: a coaster, a ferris wheel, a chair swing, a carousel. 

By 1910, however, public opinion of the locals was souring. Newspaper reports had headlines like “police will have their hands full there”, and other references talk about Fort George’s history describe “public drunkenness, noise, crime, and racial tensions”. Neighbors began pressuring the various local authorities and committees to shut down the amusement district.

The next year, 1911, saw an arson attempt. Perhaps related to the neighborhood sentiment, but who’s to say. The district reopened in 1912 after repairing the damages. Unfortunately, then came 1913. In June of 1913, another arsonist started a fire. Damages were reported at over $100k, with the entirety of the Paradise Park section destroyed completely by fire. 

This time, Fort George Amusement Park couldn’t recover. The local political groups ultimately took over the property and incorporated it (at the time) into Highland Park.

Now luckily, our hero, PTC #15, was located at Fort Wendel, across Amsterdam Avenue. Though the fire was said to have jumped across the street, where it destroyed a “four story frame building”, it did not apparently destroy PTC #15. 

With the destruction of Paradise Park and the generally unfavorable neighborhood sentiment, any remaining amusements likely moved out over the next few years. 

(Oh, and remember Joseph Schenck? He ultimately moved to California, became president of a little company called United Artists, created the company Twentieth Century Pictures (which of course became Twentieth Century Fox), and then was said to have played a key role in launching Marilyn Monroe’s career.)

Summit Beach Amusement Park (Akron, OH)

Park #2 for our carousel is a bit of a question mark, in that it’s uncertain when exactly PTC #15 moved to Summit Beach or when it left. 

Summit Beach Amusement Park was located in Akron, Ohio. It went by the names “Akron’s Fairyland of Pleasure” and “Akron’s Million Dollar Playground”. Local businessmen conceived of the idea in 1914, and had incorporated an amusement company by 1916. They took applications from independent concessionaires to fill the park: the Dixie Flyer, a huge coaster; a Whip and a Ferris wheel and a motordrome, for racing. And of course, a carousel. 

Now here is the point of contention, because the recent 2017 retrospective newspaper article about Summit Beach claims that the carousel at the park was a Dentzel menagerie from 1917 with a Wurlitzer band organ. Indeed, another article (Akron Beacon Journal, 2010) shows many pictures of the carousel, and it’s definitely a menagerie – black and white photos show children gleefully perched atop lions and pigs, neither of which are on a equine-only PTC #15. 

However, despite this, the fairly official and well-referenced history of Philadelphia Toboggan Company from Carousel News and Trader states that PTC #15 did go to Summit Beach Amusement Park. 

One possibility is that PTC #15 went not to Summit Beach, but to the adjacent Lakeside Park, which was later absorbed by Summit Beach as it grew. Lakeside began as a trolley park and picnic grounds back in 1886, and was primarily known for its casino theater. One image, which I’ve only been able to find in a Google Books preview of a vintage Ohio postcards book, does show this carousel – located not far from some canoe rentals, next to an open air building. The carousel is decently visible, with at least one horse in the outer row. The scan or photo aren’t clear enough, but it’s possible that this was in fact a four-row all-horse carousel. 

However, the provenance on PTC #15 at Summit Beach is not very clear at all. So let’s not dwell on it. We’re all tired, it’s March of 2020. Let’s call it a mystery and come back to it another time.

(Summit Beach was ultimately quite successful, absorbing Lakeside Park and operating for about 40 years before shutting down in 1958. It was primarily notable outside of the local amusement scene for the 1918 coaster derailment that killed several.)

State Fair Park (Milwaukee, WI)

From here, PTC #15 moved to Wisconsin for a while, heading in 1924 to the newly-opened permanent amusement park at the state fair in Milwaukee. Land of some of my favorite food groups, beer and cheese! 

To talk about the Wisconsin State Fair, we’ve got to go back – way back. The first fair was held in 1851! That year, the fair had between 13,000 to 18,000 guests, and was the largest gathering in Wisconsin at that point. Abraham Lincoln delivered the annual oration at the 8th annual fair, in 1859, and spoke about free labor. For many of the early years, the fair rotated through Wisconsin’s bigger cities: Madison, Milwaukee, Janesville, and Fond du Lac. In 1892, the fair’s 40th year, a permanent home was chosen: West Allis, a Milwaukee suburb. Apparently this was a controversial choice, as many at the time were campaigning instead for a home in Madison, where Camp Randall Stadium is today – right on the university campus, in the middle of the crowded downtown isthmus. By contrast, West Allis was out in the middle of nowhere (at the time) near Milwaukee. It’s interesting to think how that one simple choice could’ve drastically changed an entire city’s downtown! 

Interesting anecdote for the football fans – apparently for several decades (between 1934 and 1951), the Green Bay Packers played several of their regular season games at the State Fair Park, including the 1939 NFL Championship. 

1924 saw the introduction of the signature Wisconsin State Fair food: the cream puff. But it was predated by a few years by the Midway, in 1922, the “old State Fair Midway” (https://www.westalliswi.gov/DocumentCenter/View/362/Historical-and-Architectural-Resources-Survey—Volume-1-of-2?bidId=) and the PTC #15. The midway was “Disneyland before Disneyland”, according to Jerry Zimmerman, the state fair historian, in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article from 2007. This new midway was a spot for permanent rides, operating under the care of a guy named Charles Rose, and supplemented by the annual travelling shows. Rides were open from Memorial Day to Labor Day. By some accounts, the area was called Fun City.

“”It had a great roller coaster that ran from the front of where the Expo hall is now down to Greenfield Avenue. There was a Ferris wheel, the bug, the hammer, the whip, the octopus, the electric scooter and the old mill that was a tunnel of love, and a great penny arcade,” Zimmerman said. 

The carousel, old PTC #15, was a fair staple for decades at State Fair Park in Wisconsin. I’ll link to a couple of historical photos. https://www.flickr.com/photos/uwmadarchives/5938518204/ https://content.mpl.org/digital/collection/HstoricPho/id/6027/ (Great photo gallery of the entire fair history here.) Apparently Zimmermann used to pretend he was the Lone Ranger when he rode it as a kid at the fair each year, which is an image of great delight to me. 

As these things always go, the old State Fair midway didn’t last. The fair saw a downfall in attendance after World War II, and it was nixed. The fair is still there in West Allis today, but the “old” permanent midway closed at State Fair Park after the 1960 season. 

Dandilion Park / Muskego Beach Park (Muskego, WI)

Following the closure of the permanent midway at State Fair Park, rides were sold to new homes. Our friend Carousel #15 didn’t go far – only about 15 miles southwest, in what is today an outer suburb of Milwaukee, a town called Muskego. 

At that time, the carousel’s new home was called Muskego Beach Amusement Park, or Muskego Beach Resort.

Muskego Beach Amusement Park had been in operation almost as long as the Wisconsin State Fair itself – since 1861! Not much information is available about the earliest years, but regular listeners could probably make a safe guess: that it started out as a picnic grounds type of park. It was opened by Civil War veteran John C. Schuet in 1861, a man called the “King of Muskego” in 1880s politics.

Back then, it was called Muskego Lake House and Beach Resort, where visitors could partake in “picnicking, fishing, boating, swimming and dancing”. (Here’s an interesting tidbit for you – the Muskego Center Cemetery was established on that property in 1881, bordered on three sides by the park. The little pioneer cemetery weathered poorly, stones weather-worn and indecipherable, described in an article as “a nuisance to the community.” Validity of that opinion is up to the individual, but it does seem the small cemetery had lost most interest. It wasn’t until 1955 that all the bodies in the cemetery were exhumed and moved to a different cemetery, Prairie Hill Cemetery in Waukesha.)

Schuet owned the park for over 60 years, selling it in 1928 to its second owner, a guy named William Boszhardt. The details are vague, but Boszhardt definitely added to the amusement park side of things, and is credited with changing the name to Muskego Beach Amusement Park. And while Boszhardt was the owner, a familiar name did the managing: Charles Rose, the same guy from the state fair. 

By 1929, a classic wooden John A. Miller coaster called Cyclone had been installed by Charlie Rose. There were all kinds of our favorite early and mid century theme park rides, like The Whip. But why Muskego?

Here’s the connection for you, and likely the reason that the carousel went where it did. In 1944, in the middle of the war, Charlie Rose bought Muskego Beach Amusement Park from its then-owner, the recently widowed Mrs. William Boszhardt – birth name Nellie Lou Krebs. The park was shut down for the war, but Rose reopened and renovated it afterwards.

For the better part of two decades, then, he owned both the midway at State Fair Park as well as Muskego Beach Amusement Park. When the midway shut down, it was a simple decision that most of the rides would be acquired by Muskego Beach Amusement Park (which Rose also owned), replacing the older and smaller rides at this regional park with bigger rides worthy of a state fair. And Muskego was a short electric rail ride away from downtown Milwaukee, too.

Under Rose’s ownership, the park expanded and developed further. There was a ballroom for dancing operated under private ownership called the Starlight Ballroom, operated by Elsie and Robert Schmidt. Open only on the weekends, it held an air of mystery for younger daytime park visitors. During the weekend days, the ballroom was used as a rollerskating rink. Weekly dances and regular bands were hosted there, and it was said to be a popular evening event. Big names like the Everly Brothers performed, all the way down to smaller local bands.

Other items around the park were upgraded as well. There was an even larger beach for bathing. New rides like the Rolloplane were added, and massive increases made to concession stands and other outbuildings. A man named George gave boat rides on the lake in a fancy Chris-Craft boat from Dandilion Park that were fondly remembered.

TailSpin Coaster at Dandilion Park / Muskego Beach Amusement Park (WI)

The Cyclone coaster closed in the 1950s. I did see one news report of a death on the ride due to a rider standing up while the coaster was in motion and falling off. However, a line from another newspaper article indicates the Cyclone was damaged irreparably in a storm, so this may be the reason for the closure. Indeed, another short blurb from a 2015 issue of Amusement Today notes that the Cyclone was damaged twice in 1950 by wind, with some saying that it “fell over like a set of playing cards”.

Most of the broken ride was removed by the beginning of the 1951 season, according to Amusement Today. Rose was savvy, though, and 700 feet of the Cyclone’s easternmost turnaround was retained and incorporated into the newly-built TailSpin coaster, which opened in 1955. Rose himself designed the TailSpin, built to the tune of about $75,000.

TailSpin had a rough start though. A huge windstorm knocked over 250 feet of the TailSpin tracks, crushing the new Whip and Caterpilar rides in the process, two weeks before the park was set to open for the season and debut the coaster. Damages were estimated at around $125,000, but all save for the coaster were able to open on time two weeks later.  When TailSpin finally did open, it was worth the wait. This coaster is the park’s most famous and memorable. Remembrances online indicate this was a very good coaster – said to be one of the fastest and the steepest for its kind. The drop was a very high 75 feet!

Decline and Closure of Dandilion Park / Muskego Beach Amusement Park (WI)

In or around 1968, the park was sold to a man named Willard Masterson, who changed the name to Dandilion Park. It continued to be a popular place with local school groups, employer celebrations from small businesses and giant Milwaukee area manufacturers alike, reunions, and so forth. 

Around the same time, we had another addition to the park – choo choo, it’s time for The Abandoned Train! Yes, Dandilion Park rode the wave of all of the other theme parks in the mid-1960s and got itself a miniature steam train. Not only a generic train. Nope, Dandilion Park purchased a Chance C. P. Huntington direct from the factory in Wichita, serial number #61. It ran for the remaining years of the park’s operation. 

Trouble started brewing in the early 1970s, though. A young boy fell from the Ferris wheel and died, which may have led to rumors about the park’s safety. Additionally, rumors of a new, massive park being built only an hour away in Gurnee, IL. See, Marriott, the hotel chain, wanted to branch out in the tourism industry. They had three different regions planned: Chicago-Milwaukee, San Francisco, and Baltimore. The Baltimore park was to be the flagship park, but faced a series of bueracratic and local opposition. Ultimately, it was canceled. 

And in 1976, Great America opened, a park you now know as Six Flags Great America. With only two months separation, Marriott opened a Great America park in California and a Great America park in Gurnee, IL. The park was an immediate success, both due to the timing (the 1976 bicentennial) and the use of the licensed Looney Toons character theming. 

And Dandilion Park, only an hour away, felt the pinch. Milwaukee and Chicago residents started going to Great America over Dandilion Park. Why did Dandilion Park / Muskego Beach Amusement Park close? The inevitable economic cycle began – lowered crowds, less money, maintenance falters, crowds stay away, and eventually it became unprofitable to continue operating Dandilion Park. 

Dandilion Park closed in 1978.

The park stayed SBNO, standing but not operating, for several years, until 1983. Ultimately, the land was purchased in order to be turned into condominiums. The park was burned down as practice for the local fire department. Gone up in flames, all but memories.

(That’s not entirely true – the sign from the TailSpin was recovered, restored, and today is owned and displayed by the Muskego Historical Society. The CPH also did not get burned. It was sold to the Tulsa Zoo in Tulsa, OK, where it still operates today, with CPH #90 and #358.) At one point around 2010, a proposal went around to potentially rebuild a beach park at the lake. I’m not sure if that actually went forward or not. And as I said earlier, the land where the park used to be became condos. So it goes. 

Lost Years for Carousel #15

You might be saying, where did the carousel go?

Don’t worry, it didn’t get burned up. That sucker is 70+ years old by this point in our story and has already survived multiple theme parks and at least one fire. This little planned fire wouldn’t stop it.

Carousel in Oshkosh

No, our friend PTC carousel #15 survived. It was purchased prior to the fire by a private group in Oshkosh. At the time, the trend was for carousels to be broken up, selling the desirable horses at higher individual cost to private collectors. The Carousel of Oshkosh, Incorporated group was formed to prevent Carousel #15 from being served the same fate.

The goal was for the carousel to become part of a park in Oshkosh, WI, home of a very good chocolate shop, Oaks Candy. This was to be a new park located near the Oshkosh Airport, to open in 1980. “Scheduled to open in May, 1980, the park will be themed to the turn of the century and will include other amusement rides and attractions typical of that era.”

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that this never happened. Oshkosh is an incredibly small town, and the startup costs for a theme park are very large. 

Carol and Duane Perron of the International Carousel Museum of Art bought the carousel in 1984 from the defunct Carousel Oshkosh park company to the tune of $150,000, and began restoring it – almost 80 years old at this point, and the big carousel could certainly have used a day at the spa by then.

The Perrons lived on the West Coast, so the carousel got to take its biggest trip yet by this point, all the way to Oregon. Between 1984 and 1986, they restored the carousel fully to perfect working condition.

Touring with Carousel #15

1986 saw the carousel being sent out of country for the first and only time, up to Vancouver, British Columbia for the Expo ‘86. Interestingly, this move resulted in the carousel being removed from the National Historic Register, as the move was done without consulting the Register first. 

I had to Google this one, but Expo ‘86 was another classic World’s Fair, held in fall of 1986 in Vancouver. World’s fairs are designed to be places for nations to showcase their achievements for one another, and may or may not be themed. (These World’s Fairs are still a thing, by the way, if you didn’t know. I didn’t. The 2020 Expo will be held in Dubai, UAE in October of this year, 2020, should gatherings of more than 10 people be allowed by then.) The very first Ferris wheel was invented for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, for instance, as a rival for the previous stunner, 1889’s Eiffel Tower.

Anyhow, back to the Expo ‘86. The theme was “Transportation and Communication: World in Motion, World in Touch”, so you can see how a carousel fit nicely. In a quote from the NY Times writeup: “Its scientific theme should not dissuade vacationers because there is something for everyone, from rival United States and Soviet space stations to a painstakingly restored 1907 carousel with hand-carved and painted wooden horses.” (Again, sidebar: another interesting attraction from this Expo was something called “McBarge”, a floating McDonalds. It’s the subject of a great Bright Sun Films YouTube documentary – check it out.) The carousel lived at the Expo for several months, and was quite a popular attraction, especially for young guests. Here’s a video of the carousel in action at the fair – fast forward to timestamp 19:26.

After the Expo, Carousel #15 spent the next three years traveling on various exhibits up and down the West Coast. While the carousel was not built as a portable model per se, it was clearly able to be assembled and disassembled without much fuss.

Carousel #15 at the Mall

As Robin Sparkles might say, let’s go to the mall, today! Well, at least virtually Following the carousel’s travels with Perron’s International Carousel Museum of Art, Carousel #15 was installed at a California mall.

Puente Hills Mall (City of Industry, CA)

The Puente Hills Mall is located in City of Industry, CA, a made-up-seeming town name that is in fact real, and located in a Los Angeles suburb. The mall opened in 1974 and is still operational today. My perusal of Wikipedia tells me it was most notable for being the filming location for the parking lot scenes from Back to the Future, aka “Twin Pines Mall”. Puente Hills also was home to the first ever Foot Locker store, apparently. 

One of my newest favorite YouTube channels is called Retail Archaeology – videos of malls from active to “dead malls” – malls that are on the verge of closure. Erik from Retail Archaeology did a 2018 video on Puente Hills, and it was nice to watch that last night while doing podcast research on the topic. 

Anyhow, in 1991, our friend Carousel #15 moved to the Puente Hills Mall. It was located on the first floor, in the center of the plus-shaped mall, underneath some massive skylights that really illuminated the newly refreshed carousel. Patrons shopping on the upper levels could easily look down to watch the carousel spin in the atrium below. The carousel seems to have done well for a period of time, and I’m sure all the wooden horses appreciated being inside a nice air-conditioned space instead of weathering decades of Wisconsin winters and summers.

Unfortunately, the late 90s were a period of struggle for Puente Hills Mall, and they had less than 50% occupancy around this time, a terrible sign for a big mall. Things did slowly rebound, but our friend Carousel #15 was removed in 1998 – too expensive, and losing money for the mall operators. 

Today, Puente Hills Mall is operational but struggling again, despite a 2007 remodel. Where the carousel once stood is now just boring carpet, and where visitors once walked through bustling halls, today few gather. Several of the larger stores have been closing in the last few years, including Sears and Forever 21, and anecdotal reports online are that more store closures are inevitable. 

Dead malls are a topic I don’t think I’ve touched on at all here on the podcast yet, but they’re fascinating and I’d say quite relevant given our present day state. Check out Retail Archaeology, Sal’s Expedition Logs, or Dan Bell’s Dead Mall Series on YouTube for days of interesting content on the subject.

Palisades Center Mall (West Nyack, NY) 

So 1998, the Philadelphia Toboggan Company Carousel #15 was removed from Puente Hills Mall in California. It didn’t stay idle, however. 

No, the carousel went on another cross-country trip, back to New York, back to another mall. 

This mall was brand new at the time, though it had been under plan and development for around 16 years. Palisades Center Mall was built on the site of two former landfills, surrounding an old cemetery, and faced down opposition from locals who feared noise and crime well before any construction was even begun. When it opened in 1998, it became the second-largest shopping mall in the New York metro area, and the eighth-largest shopping mall in the US. 

PTC #15 was installed in the third-floor food court, a glorious anachronism against modern tubular white architecture and pipes (“industrial style”). There it spun, tinkling organ bouncing amongst the fast food restaurants and tables and trashcans, shimmering and brightly colored against the white of its surroundings.

Palisades Center Mall is apparently popular on YouTube with elevator enthusiasts, for having high speed “Montgomery Kone traction elevators”. (Did you know there’s an elevator Wiki? Of course there is. https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Montgomery_elevator_fixtures)

Here is where the carousel was re-added to the National Register of Historic Places, in 2001. The carousel lasted for eleven years there in the mall food court, until mall management decided to replace the vintage machine with a modern double-decker masterpiece. In 2009, then, the PTC #15 was last seen operational in public, there in West Nyack, New York.

Carousel #15 in Oregon

Evicted from Palisades Center Mall, Carousel #15 was returned to the Perrons in Oregon. 

For some time, there were plans for a physical carousel museum. Well, there was a physical carousel museum, in Hood River, Oregon. It opened in 1999, and featured over 100 carousel animals on display for visitors to photograph. From an article about the museum, I learned that basswood is what both carousel horses and rulers are made out of, as it is a wood that doesn’t buckle, sweat, crack, or change shape. (The more you know!) 

Whether one or more horses from Carousel #15 was ever on display is not clear, but it’s unlikely, given that the carousel returned to Oregon in mid-2009.

The museum closed in 2010, with the intent of relocating, but this never occurred, and the museum stayed permanently shuttered. 

Conclusions

This then is the last time we hear from the Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel #15. By all accounts, the carousel is in storage there in Oregon, awaiting a new home. Out with a whimper and not a bang.

As recently as 2018, Jerry Zimmerman at the Wisconsin State Fair was still hoping to get PTC #15 back to Wisconsin – a news article from 2018 described it as his white whale.  “I have tried for years to find someone to bring that back, and I would like to tie that merry go round into a standalone unit on State Fair Park, anchoring a Wisconsin State Fair historical collection,” he said. “I would need a sponsor for about $1.5 million to bring it back to Milwaukee.”

At the height of the American carousel boom, there were said to be thousands of carousels, big and small, mostly handcarved. As the Depression wore on, production slowed, machines were dismantled or lost to fire, and today, there are said to be less than 150 vintage carousels remaining, with less than 50 of the caliber of PTC #15.

At this point, the magnificent carousel is still is storage somewhere in Oregon, under the care of the Perron family after Duane Perron passed away in 2018. Waiting.

56 horses. 52 feet in diameter. Many “firsts”. 600 lights. Four theme parks. Two malls. 

One truly historical carousel: Philadelphia Toboggan Company’s carousel #15.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

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The post Carousel #15 appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

Intro

Today, I’m going to start with the story of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the person behind Anne. Then I’ll talk about Anne of Green Gables and her international fame, particularly in Japan. Finally, I’ll go over the theme park: Anne of Canadian World. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery

You know her name. I’ve said it at the end of every episode of The Abandoned Carousel. But who was Lucy Maud Montgomery?

I’m so glad you asked. Did you know that she’s an incredible person who did a lot of interesting things? It’s been so delightful to research such a strong and brilliant woman, making her own way (to paraphrase another woman, one of my favorite Tweets of all time from the exceptional Blair Braverman about her amazing sled dog Pepe). 

We all know Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables. But how did she get there? Who was this ineffable being? “To write has always been my central purpose around which every effort and hope and ambition of my life has grouped itself,” Maud wrote in her 1917 autobiography.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was the writer who wrote Anne of Green Gables, and all associated books. She was born in a small village on Prince Edward Island (Canada) in November 1874. 

In her 1917 autobiography, Maud includes a section from a poem called To The Fringed Gentian, describing it as the keynote of her every aim and ambition from childhood onwards:

“Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep
  How I may upward climb
The Alpine path, so hard, so steep,
  That leads to heights sublime;
How I may reach that far-off goal
  Of true and honoured fame,
And write upon its shining scroll
  A woman’s humble name.”

How much do we want to get into it? Well, Maud’s life was filled with difficult situations from a young age. Her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery, died of tuberculosis when Maud was almost aged 2. Her father, Hugh John Montgomery, was a bit of a flake by many accounts, and gave Maud into the primary care of her maternal grandparents. He slowly moved himself away bit by bit in search of “business” to Prince Albert (North-West Territories, now Saskatchewan) some 44h by car in the modern era. He fully awayed himself after Maud survived a bout of typhoid fever around age 5.

And before I go further, I hear you saying, but why are you calling her “Maud”? Though she was born as “Lucy Maud”, in nod to her maternal grandmother Lucy Macneill, Maud herself once wrote “my friends call me ‘Maud’ and nothing else”; later, she wrote ““I never liked Lucy as a name. I always liked Maud—spelled not ‘with an e’ if you please.””. Maud with no e, she was very firm, and so who am I to go against her stated desires?

Maud had a lonely childhood. As I said, she’d been given into the care of her grandparents, the Macneills, who had never approved of their daughter Clara’s marriage to Hugh John in the first place. Her childhood was a constant tightrope between the “passionate Montgomery blood” and the “Puritan Macneill conscience”. Tall, thin, severe old Grandma Lucy loved her daughter in her own way, and Maud back, but it was never well-expressed. Only later, in the fictional character of Marilla Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables, does Maud ever truly celebrate her grandmother. 

In the face of her father leaving, Maud let out her anger only towards her grandparents, never saying a word against the flaky absent parent Hugh John. Grandma Lucy had to play peacemaker in the house: between her husband, anti-social Grandpa Macneill who did not want to parent another child after already raising several to adulthood, and the angry semi-orphan Maud, desperate for socialization. Grandma Lucy pleased neither in the process. 

Maud’s Childhood Friends

Maud’s “ancient” aunt Emily, the Macneill’s daughter, got married off, leaving Grandma and Grandpa Macneill alone with Maud. As the Dictionary of Canadian Biography puts it, “their stern Scottish Presbytarianism became more rigid as they aged”. Think about living in a remote area, 11 miles from the railways and 24 miles from the nearest town, population about 1000, at the turn of the 1900s, and you might begin to see the scope of Maud’s isolation, especially as an outgoing tween and teen. It was a constant cycle between Maud’s flights of fancy causing town gossip, which her strict grandparents then agonized over.

However, Maud had it relatively good – a nice roof over her head, plenty to eat, clothes to wear. Her family was considered high status in Cavendish at the time. And despite the small population, there was a school and two churches and a meeting hall, there were cousins and friends throughout her early years.

Her grandparents boarded two orphan boys for four glorious years, when Maud was between 7 and 11 years old: Wellington and David Nelson, or Well and Dave, both around her age. These were incredible years for Maud, having siblings like she’d always dreamed, built-in playmates to roam and adventure with. They had free range of the world, to create and imagine and dream, telling stories, foraging for apples, and fishing. Summers were spent wandering the shorelines, collecting shells and talking with the mackerel fishers. 

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last. One morning, with no explanation, Well and Dave vanished, their room cleaned up, possessions gone. Perhaps the Macneills realized Maud was getting too old to be spending so much time with boys, or perhaps they simply thought it was kinder this way. 

Maud had the occasional schoolfriends, but nothing and no one gave her the companionship she craved. She constantly perceived feelings of being an outsider, orphaned and alone, however. As she herself said to her journals, “Materially, I was well cared for … it was emotionally and socially that my nature was starved and restricted.” In her autobiography and other public-facing forums, Maud remained neutral, calling her childhood “very quiet and simple” and saying “Some might think it dull. But life never held for me a dull moment. I had, in my vivid imagination, a passport to the geography of Fairyland.”

Her journals are a subject I should mention, as they are often referenced when talking about Maud’s life and Anne of Green Gables. Maud wrote ten volumes of journals over the course of her life. As she gained fame in the 1910s, she began to edit and type up her journals. Maud was savvy, and she knew that the journals would eventually be published, so she began to shape them to reflect her life in the way she wanted to be perceived.

Here, then, is a biased source, an unreliable narrator. We do get insights into the private reality of Maud. However, Maud rewrote and retyped her journals, burning items that didn’t fit her desired image, so clearly Maud always had a public audience in mind. 

The other interesting thing is that unlike contemporaries Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott, Maud’s journals were kept private for several decades. It took until 1985 before abridged versions of the journals were published, and prior to that, only a handful of scholars even had access to the unedited versions.

From these journals, we get a deeper sense of the person. Maud was lonely. She felt like an outsider in the small town of Cavendish, though Maud herself was forever fervently passionate about the place, calling it “hallowed ground”. She invented imaginary friends, who lived in the glass doors of a cupboard in the Macneill’s parlor: Katie Maurice, a girl her own age; and Lucy Gray, an elderly widow who told “dismal stories of her troubles”. Maud had free range of the beautiful natural environment of Prince Edward Island, where she learned to make fun and merriment everywhere, out of the personalities of even the trees and the cats. Everything had a name, everything had feelings.

Writing and art were not seen as appropriate for well-bred ladies of the time in Cavendish, marking Maud, with her constant habit of writing and journaling as an oddity at best. And unfortunately, Maud’s extended family ridiculed and disparaged her early interest in writing, as mere “scribbling”, and later with harshed words. These were comments that she would perpetually remember and resent. 

Harsh comments were the ones Maud dwelled on forever. Her autobiography recalls a time when she was perpetually called by a boys’ name, much to her anger. “That experience taught me one lesson, at least. I never tease a child. If I had any tendency to do so, I should certainly be prevented by the still keen recollection of what I suffered at Mr. Forbes’ hands. To him, it was merely the “fun” of teasing a “touchy” child. To me, it was the poison of asps.”

At age 15, Maud received a summons from her father, Hugh John Montgomery, who’d gone and remarried and had children with his new wife. He invited her out to stay with him for a year, and she jumped at the chance to spend time with her father, whom she still idolized. Her paternal grandfather, John Montgomery, accompanied her on the six-day-long train trip out to Saskatchewan, for propriety’s sake.

Things weren’t great in Prince Albert, and Maud wasn’t welcome with the open arms she’d expected. Her stepmother Mary Ann MacRae wasn’t much older than Maud herself (she was 23 years younger than Hugh John Montgomery, her husband!). Maud spared no kind words for her, saying that she was “a woman whose evil temper and hateful disposition made [Hugh John’s] life miserable.” Maud was essentially treated as hired help. In fact, wicked stepmother Mary Ann pulled Maud out of school, setting her to tend the house and care for her stepsiblings, including the prodigal son and heir to the family name. 

There were few bright spots, all writing-related. Maud had her first works published: a poem “On Cape LeForce”, and an article discussing a visit to a First Nations camp on the Great Plains. Of the experience, she wrote: “ The moment we see our first darling brain-child arrayed in black type is never to be forgotten. It has in it some of the wonderful awe and delight that comes to a mother when she looks for the first time on the face of her first born.” Maud later claimed that the days she spendt sending out her poetry around this time were where she learned “the first, last, and middle lesson — Never give up!” 

What she had hoped would be a wonderful time in Prince Albert ended up being far from it, given all this, and Maud was grateful to return to Cavendish and her maternal grandparents, to her private bedroom where she could write in peace. With no accompaniment from Grandfather Montgomery on the journey home, Maud had to travel alone, finding her own accommodations in the evenings every time the train stopped. This was quite the feat as a young single female, not socially acceptable, but Maud handled it with aplomb.

Maud’s Higher Education

Maud was desperate to escape from the bleak path that lay ahead for unmarried women of that time, and knew she had to get out of town, despite her love for Cavendish. She applied to Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, in order to obtain her teacher’s license. With money having long run out, Grandma Lucy stepped in, loaning Maud her own money to help her attend school. With only enough money for a single year, Lucy Maud Montgomery was forced to complete the two-year program in a single year (1893-1894). She graduated with honors and described it as “the happiest year of my life”. I did tell you this was a story about a kickass woman, right?

She immediately began to teach. This was the days of one-room schoolhouses, where there was a teacher for an entire town, poorly-paid and exhausting work in (usually) rural communities. Maud taught at Bideford, Belmont, and Lower Bedeque: schools of 20-60 students between 6 and 13 years of age. The sense that I’ve gotten is that Maud Montgomery was a beloved teacher. She also spent part of each day writing fiction and poetry for submissions to the rapidly expanding newspaper and magazine market.

In 1895-1896, she took a break from teaching and studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This was quite the rarity for a woman, especially of her means, to seek higher education at this time; women were expected to teach until they married and then raise families and tend house. Grandmother Lucy Macneill came through for Maud yet again, scraping together her personal funds to set Maud through a year of school, but only a year. While Maud’s male cousin Murray Macneill received familial financial support to continue university, there was no such support for a female.

Starting in 1897, you really regularly see Maud publishing poetry in the Canadian papers [name them]. It was only in 1895 that her first payment for a published poem came: $5 Canadian, and with it, Maud bought a multivolume book set of poetry, people like Tennyson and Byron and Milton.

Maud’s Love Life

Here’s something I didn’t expect when I began researching this topic. I never would’ve guessed that Maud had the varied love life that she did. Apparently in a January 1917 journal entry, she sat down and ranked the men she’d had love affairs with, though she was careful to remind the reader that most of them held no sway over her affections.  

Childhood Loves

Nate Lockhart was one of the boys Maud knew in her tween years. On the cusp of womanhood or some other flowery phrase, Nate developed feelings for Maud, and proposed (at age 14!). Maud didn’t feel the same way, and “retreated”, trying to maintain his friendship. 

In Prince Albert, she had two suitors. John Mustard was actually her school teacher, and he spent much of the year delivering unwanted advances to Maud. He went so far as to regularly call at her stepmother’s house against Maud’s wishes, and stepmother Mary Ann let him in every time! Will Pritchard was Maud’s friend, or the brother of her close friend there, to whom she complained about John Mustard. Both men proposed to her, and she rejected both of them.

Edwin Simpson

In 1897, Maud was working in Bideford when she received a proposal from a distant cousin, Edwin Simpson, who was off studying to be a Baptist minister. She accepted, as she later wrote, out of a desire for “love and protection”. Maud felt her prospects were slim, she felt herself lonely and trapped in her rural teacher’s position, and thought she wanted the family life. Edwin was attractive and her intellectual equal.

However, though Maud was initially attracted to Edwin on a physical level, her opinions shifted, and she began to feel trapped and repelled by him, finding him self-centered and vain. It’s reported that she felt physically nauseated by his presence. 

(George) Herman Leard

The next school year, 1897-1898, Maud moved to Lower Bedeque to teach. Here, she boarded with the Leard family. And here, Maud had a passionate affair with the man she later said she loved the most out of all her suitors: Herman Leard. He was the opposite of Edwin – a salt of the earth farmboy type, a “himbo” in modern parlance. And 23-year-old Maud was smitten.

Her diaries are filled with Maud’s descriptions of their affair, which, like I said, was unexpected. “our lips met in one long passionate pressure – a kiss of fire and rapture such I had never experienced or imagined. Ed’s kisses at the best left me cold as ice – Hermann’s sent flame through every fiber of my being”. 

As the school year rolled into the springtime, Maud took herself to task, resolving in her diary that she must stay faithful to her fiance Edwin Simpson, but it was to no effect. Yes, both Maud and Herman behaved badly this summer. Maud was still secretly engaged to Edwin, and Herman was publicly courting a local girl named Hattie, squiring Hattie about during the day and sharing secret kisses with Maud at night. Maud’s journal entries that year were filled with her feelings for Hermann Leard: “wild, passionate, unreasoning love that dominated my entire being and possessed me like a flame – a love I could neither quell nor control – a love that in its intensity seemed little short of absolute madness.”  

And though it’s perhaps not the topic for this particular podcast, Maud definitely reached multiple bases with Herman Leard, as we might say. Despite the strict Presbytarian upbringing, Maud still did plenty of “preliminary lovemaking” with Hermann when they were alone in the house. Maud’s words, not mine.

It was not to last. 

In an unfortunate set of coincidences in spring of 1898, Maud broke it off with Hearmann. Soon after, he died from the flu. Maud wrote about it in her diary, saying Herman was “all mine in death, as he could never be in life, mine when no other women could ever lie on his heart or kiss his lips.” Around the same time, Maud broke her unhappy engagement with Edwin Simpson, too.

Not only that, but Grandpa Macneill died suddenly. All of this change and chaos happening at the same time! 

With her engagement and affair broken off, Maud chose to move back in with her widowed Grandma Lucy Macneill. Under the guise of taking care of her elderly grandmother (age 74, so certainly elderly for the time), Maud was able to avoid any more male entanglements or shenanigans. She was done with romance, she’d decided. Instead, she took care of Grandma Lucy, who in her own way had cared so much for Maud in her childhood, and ran the post office, still in the farmhouse kitchen. In doing so, Maud won respect from the Cavendish community. Professionally, Maud was able to write full time, getting the gossip from the townspeople coming and going from the post office, which she could then write into her books. And since she was postmistress, she could send items off to publishers without anyone being the wiser, avoiding the negative comments she so dreaded. 

Between 1898 and 1911 when Grandma Lucy Macneill finally passed away, Maud published like mad: stories, articles, poems, and her most famous book, Anne of Green Gables. She also worked for a brief period of time as the only woman at the Halifax-based Daily Echo, but gave this up in order to do battle when her uncle (John Macneill) attempted to evict Grandma Lucy, his mother, from her house where she and Maud lived. 

Ewan Macdonald and Oliver Macneill

During these halcyon days, a new minister moved to town, in 1903, the Reverend Ewan Macdonald (spelled both Ewen and Ewan). Ewan spoke Gaelic and was smitten by Maud conversation, sense of humor, and charm. In return, Maud too found him attractive, kind, and pleasant. There was never a language of passion for Ewan the way Maud had written of Herman Leard, but there was at least fondness.

For the first few years of their acquaintance, they were friendzoned. 

Around 1906, however, Ewan was heading off to study in Scotland, and proposed to Maud before he left. She accepted, one one condition: the engagement had to stay a secret until Grandma Lucy Macneill died. They lived far away from one another for the intervening years, due to Ewan’s remote posting after his studies concluded.

Maud wasn’t entirely faithful during the engagement, perhaps weighing a second possible future with a different man. Following the success of Anne of Green Gables, Maud had a brief and secret fling in fall of 1909 with second cousin Oliver Macneill, recently divorced farmer on the rebound. “I am again playing with fire,” she wrote in her journals. Whether the townsfolk were setting them up or not was unclear (her engagement to Ewan was secret, after all), but it’s clear the two held passion for one another. Oliver proposed multiple times during his short six-week stay on Prince Edward Island, but ultimately gave up. 

Oliver and Maud stayed in touch via letters, with Oliver even sending Maud a book of love poems. Summer of 1910 saw Oliver visiting again, with another set of “frantic scenes” that went nowhere, as Oliver quickly found and married another Cavendish local, one of Maud’s former students. 

Maud later ranked him second after Herman Leard in her journal a decade later, of people to whom she responded with “power of the senses”. (This passage in her journal was apparently directed towards her children and grandchildren, so that they would see her as a woman, that she had not always been “old and gray-haired and hug-me-tighted”.)

Not until her grandmother’s death in 1911 did she marry Ewan, some five years later at age 36.  This was an incredibly smart move on Maud’s part, in my opinion. She knew that Uncle John was going to get the house, at which point she’d need a new place to live. She also wouldn’t have the postmistress job, and would need a better financial situation in order to keep publishing. Thus, the good minister with his solid prospects: a pragmatic choice. 

They married in July of 1911, and moved to Leaskdale, Ontario, where Ewan had obtained a church position. Maud described what she felt upon marriage, sitting there at her wedding feast: “I wanted to be free! I felt like a prisoner—a hopeless prisoner. … But it was too late—and the realization that it was too late fell over me like a black cloud of wretchedness. I sat at that gay bridal feast, in my white veil and orange blossoms, beside the man that I had married—and I was as unhappy as I had ever been in my life.”. A son Chester quickly followed in 1912; son Hugh was stillborn in 1914; and son Stuart was born in 1915. 

Life for Lucy Maud Montgomery was Not Easy

I suppose my section title is a bit on the nose, as life is difficult for everyone, but married life wasn’t what Maud expected, it seems, and things got contentious as the years went on.

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Journals

The first few years of marriage likely went by in a flash, with babies and honeymooning and moving to a new town and starting a new church congregation. (“Those women whom God wanted to destroy He would make into the wives of ministers,” she once said.) 

Not only that, but Maud didn’t stop writing. The Story Girl and its sequel, The Golden Road, came out in 1911 and 1913, respectively. Anne of the Island came out in 1915. A short story collection, Chronicles of Avonlea, came out in 1912, as well as at least fourteen different short stories that had been published individually in newspapers and magazines during the early years of her marriage. 

As I mentioned earlier, Maud journaled throughout her life. Though abridged and edited versions of the journals were published between 1985 and 2004, it’s said that 50% of the material was edited out, including much of the darker side of her private life. These more negative parts were kept under wraps even until very recently, available only to a select few. Lucy Maud Montgomery historian Mary Rubio at the University of Guelph began publishing the unabridged journals starting in 2016, available under the title “The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery”. 7 out of 10 unabridged volumes have been published at the time of this recording. 

Basically, Maud was a minister’s wife, as well as a famous writer at this point. She couldn’t tell people what she actually thought – she could only tell her journals. And what she told her journals was that this was a dark time in her life. Her increased writing pace was at least in part a form of escapism. 

World War I and Lucy Maud Montgomery

With the onset of war in 1914, the relatively settled pace of small Leaskdale life was destroyed. Most of the young men in the community went away to fight, causing terrible social upheaval, both locally and globally.

Maud became outspoken politically, a passionate supporter of the Allied war effort. She published articles and essays appealing for volunteers to join the forces, and began campaigning for women’s suffrage, stating that women on the home front were also crucial to the war effort. (The federal government granted women suffrage between 1918 and 1922.)  

Mary Rubio, one of the pre-eminant Lucy Maud Montgomery scholars and biographers, observed: “Increasingly, the war was all that she thought of and wanted to talk about. Her journals show she was absolutely consumed by it, wracked by it, tortured by it, obsessed by it — even addicted to it.”

Depression and Disease

In topical history, 1918 and 1919 saw the Spanish Flu pandemic, killing 50-100 million people over two years. This was actually the first H1N1 pandemic, though we associate that term with the 2009 “swine flu” outbreak. 500 million people (27% of the world’s population at the time) were infected, and between 3-5% of the world’s population died of the disease – one of the deadliest epidemics in human history. It’s said that poor medical conditions and government misinformation contributed to the high mortality rates. 

Maud contracted Spanish flu, nearly dying of it. She later wrote “I was in bed for ten days. I never felt so sick or weak in my life,”” about the ordeal. Her friends helped care for her through the disease, but not, it’s said, her husband, who had been indifferent to her throughout her illness. 

Maud considered divorce after this, which was very difficult to obtain in Canada before 1967 – only 263 divorces out of 6 M people between 1873 and 1901. Ultimately, she decided that it was her duty to God to make the marriage work.

Maud eventually realized that she could not find intellectual stimulation from her husband. For much of her adult life, she carried on regular correspondence with other men, such as Scottish journalist George Boyd MacMillan and teacher Ephraim Weber. She also enjoyed the company of other men in person, though I’m sure it was proper, spending time with the “dashing” Reverend Edwin Smith, who taught at a different denomination in town.

1919 was the year Maud described as “a hellish year”. Her dearest kindred spirit, Frede McFarlane, who I haven’t had time to talk about, died of the Spanish flu. Frede lived with Maud for many months out of the year, and helped Maud raise her children. Her death was a huge blow to Maud. Other things weren’t great either. Locals were gossiping about Maud, who had the audacity to hire a maid. Maud’s troubles with her publisher, which I’ll get into, came to a head. And church politics in Canada at that time sharted shifting, which would eventually result in the creation of a new denomination from several old ones, known as the United Church of Canada. (Maud was indifferent to the church by this point, writing a very modern sentiment: “the Spirit of God no longer works through the church for humanity.… Today it is working through Science.… The [church] ‘leaders’ are trying to galvanize into a semblance of life something from which life has departed.”) 

And Maud’s husband Ewan didn’t make life easy, though not entirely his own fault. Throughout his life with Maud, Ewan had suffered from mental health problems. During his professional training in Scotland, Ewan had a nervous breakdown, and was forced to leave the program early without obtaining any further degrees. He was only able to find a preaching position in remote communities where they didn’t have much choice. And his mental health was never stable, which Maud didn’t understand the scope of until well after their marriage, due to the limited time they’d spent together. Ewan’s mental health symptoms increased at the beginning of the 1920s, with signs of schizophrenia and clinical depression. 

He lashed out at Maud, telling her that he wished she and the children had never been born, and that she was going to Hell. Ewan saw women as of no intellectual importance and not “worthy of a real tribute”. He refused to do housework or any form of childraising, and increasingly spent his time staring off into space for hours, shouting, or driving recklessly. Indeed, in 1925, he nearly ran over a Methodist minister who was promoting the United Church of Canada; had he not been a minister, this would certainly have been labeled attempted murder.

It was decided that in 1926, a change of pace was in order, possibly as a result of this incident, and the family moved to Norval, a Toronto suburb. Maud continued to be involved in the church events, as well as continuing her popularity as a public speaker and a presence at literary events. She was increasingly famous, her books as popular as ever, and spent time with the literary scene there. Ultimately, she won the nearly decade-long battle with her publisher, as well, which again, I’ll get to shortly. Maud saw Norval as a place with the charm of her beloved Cavendish, and hoped to stay there permanently.

They would not.

Maud’s dear son Chester was causing Maud headaches, with behavioural problems and poor grades, not to mention a secret marriage and the birth of his full-term child after only six months of marriage. Stuart was less of a handful, although he did court girls Maud didn’t approve of.

More than anything, it was Ewan’s mental health causing familial stress. More often than not, he was unable to fulfill his church duties, requiring heavy doses of barbiturates to even stumble across the lawn to give a sermon, according to Maud’s journals. In 1934, he was committed to the Homewood Sanitarium and spent two months there as a result. He became paranoid, catatonic, and physically abusive towards Maud in turns. After arguing with the church elders about his salary in 1935, Ewan resigned from his post and retired in a fit. 

Journey’s End

With both Chester and Stuart studying in Toronto, Maud and Ewan tried to find happiness by moving closer to their sons. Maud purchased a house she called “Journey’s End” there in Toronto in 1935, the only house she ever truly owned. And for a few years, things seemed good again, with slight child-related hiccups here and there. She was named to the Order of the British Empire by King George V, a great honor.

Maud continued to promote Canadian writers through the primarily-female Canadian Authors’ Association, and continued to publish and speak. However, critics, especially male critics, began to disparage Maud as being out of style by this time, examples of Victorian sentiment that wasn’t right for modern Canadian literature. Maud was ousted from the CAA board in 1938 as a result of this tide of sentiment.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Combined with the Great Depression, with extended family borrowing money and not returning it, with her sons’ personal and professional failings, and with her unhappy marriage and Ewan’s mental illness, Maud was diagnosed with a heavy clinical depression. She’d suffered from depressive periods throughout her life, but this was a big one.

Medication at the time for both Ewan and Maud was barbiturates and bromides, both strong medications whose damaging secondary effects were not understood at the time. (Read: addiction.) Barbiturates are mostly out of favor today, but you might be aware of names like phenobarbitol and sodium pentothal. Husband and wife relied on ever increasing doses of the drugs, resulting in a downward spiral of anxiety and depression from the late 1930s onward. 

As a result, heer writing, her one constant form of enjoyment, was something she could no longer concentrate on. Being cut off from that fundamental joy and emotional support also cut her off financially, and in her last years Maud would constantly worry about finances. Not only that, but the second World War had begun, causing Maud incredible anxiety. She wrote only one journal entry in 1941, including the line “Such suffering and wretchedness.” In a letter to a friend in late December of 1941, she wrote of her family struggles: son Chester’s wife left him, husband Ewan’s “attacks” which had “broken me at last”, and the fear that son Stuart would be conscribed to war, leaving Maud with “nothing to live for”.  A month before her death, Maud wrote in a letter to her friend that she “had doubts that she would still be there in a week”.

On her last afternoon in April of 1942, Maud packaged up her last manuscript and mailed it to her publisher, went to her bed, and died, a heartbreaking end to an often difficult life.

Today’s scholars are divided on the manner of Maud’s death (whether the presumed drug overdose was intentional or accidental), which has only come to public discussion since 2008. The family, as described by granddaughter Kate Macdonald Butler, Stuart’s daughter, came forward on the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables’ publication with a new piece of information, previously kept secret within the family. The intent was to bring the information to light in order to help lift some of the stigma surrounding mental illness. A piece of paper was dated two days prior to her death, discovered on her nightstand by her son Stuart, and is considered by many to be a suicide note, kept private for almost a century. 

In this last note, Maud wrote: “I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare to think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes.” 

Anne of Green Gables

Let us pause here, then, and return to consider the point of all of this, that book, Anne of Green Gables, which inspired so many. 

If you’re at all familiar with English-language literature, then you’ve at least heard of the Anne of Green Gables book series, about the life of a plucky red-head named Anne Shirley. You might also have a sense for how generally beloved this book and series is. It will not come as a surprise to you the reams of paper, real and digital, that have been covered with text analyzing these seminal novels.

I’m about to say something controversial, then. I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables. I’ve watched literally only five minutes of any show or film adaptation of Anne prior to the start of my research for this episode. (The five minutes of televised Anne content I watched prior to this were when Netflix suggested “Anne with an E”. I found it inoffensive – simply not to my taste in TV. If I recall correctly, at the time, I moved on to the next episode in my Star Trek first-time watch, TNG’s “Darmok”. It was a great night of TV.) As of the start of this episode’s research, I literally had no personal opinion about Anne of Green Gables.

I can sense the letters coming in already. Don’t stop listening, don’t stop reading! 

You might think that this background makes me ill-suited for this topic, but what my theory presupposes is … maybe it makes me the perfect person?

We shall see.

Writing Anne of Green Gables

As mentioned in passing earlier, Maud began an intense period of writing around 1901, after she moved back to Cavendish to care for widowed Grandma Lucy when none of Lucy’s children would care for their mother. Short stories, articles, poems, and books – all went out in secret through Maud’s position at the post office, thus avoiding the negative comments from the townsfolk, who disapproved of such an “old” unmarried woman, especially a (gasp) writer. “The dollars have silenced them,” she wrote in 1905 of her judgy neighbors, “but I have not forgotten their sneers. My own perseverance has won the fight for me in the face of all discouragements.”

It is naive to think that a single source could be pointed at, to say “ah, here it is, the source of inspiration for Anne of Green Gables”. Maud was an excellent writer, taking bits and pieces from her own tribulations, from family stories, from news reports, and so on. Still, we’re all human. Like many writers, Maud kept a notebook with story ideas – words and phrases, interesting articles or clippings, pictures, etc. In her own words: “In the spring of 1904 I was looking over this notebook in search of some idea for a short serial I wanted to write for a certain Sunday School paper. I found a faded entry, written many years before: ‘Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent to them.’ I thought this would do.”

Indeed, this probably sounds familiar to an Anne fan, as it is the basic premise of the story. The concept was said to be a fairly popular one at the time, called “formula Ann” stories, since one would know the formula of the story right off. (The same holds true with many stories today – if you’re into transformative fanworks and fanfiction, you will immediately know what happens in a story I describe as a “coffee shop AU”.) Maud distinguished her character from others by calling her “Anne with an e”. Ah, there it is! (I will say that I was only able to find references to “formula Ann” that were primarily about Maud and Anne of Green Gables, so take that as you will.)

The story idea was not from a newspaper clipping, as some have claimed, but from a family happening, a routine adoption notable for the “mistake” in requested gender. In 1892, one of Maud’s local extended family members, Pierce Macneill, requested an orphan boy to help on the farm. A three-year-old girl was sent by mistake, and was summarily adopted into the Macneill clan anyways. Maud knew her, this distant cousin: Ellen picked up the family’s mail at Maud’s post office, Maud often borrowed a buggy from the family’s house, and Maud may have even taught Ellen at the local school on occasion. However, Maud was frustrated by suggestions during her life that Ellen had played even the slightest role in sparking the character or story of Anne. Maud was later quite judgemental about her cousin, saying “there is no resemblance of any kind between Anne and Ellen Macneill who is one of the most hopelessly commonplace and uninteresting girls imaginable”.

Maud began as she always did (“Write a book. You have the central idea. All you need do is to spread it out over enough chapters to amount to a book.“). She wrote in the evenings after her day’s work was done, up at the window desk in her little gable room. She wrote and wrote, and began to know that the story she was telling was too big for a short story serial in a Sunday School paper. She wrote it up into a full-fledged book between spring 1904 and October of 1905.

I’ll let Maud herself tell the story of the publication, quoted from her public domain 1917 autobiography, The Alpine Path.

Well, my book was finally written. The next thing was to find a publisher. I typewrote it myself, on my old secondhand typewriter that never made the capitals plain and wouldn’t print “w” at all, and I sent it to a new American firm that had recently come to the front with several “best sellers.” I thought I might stand a better chance with a new firm than with an old established one that had already a preferred list of writers. But the new firm very promptly sent it back. Next I sent it to one of the “old, established firms,” and the old established firm sent it back. Then I sent it, in turn, to three “Betwixt-and-between firms”, and they all sent it back. Four of them returned it with a cold, printed note of rejection; one of them “damned with faint praise.” They wrote that “Our readers report that they find some merit in your story, but not enough to warrant its acceptance.”

That finished me. I put Anne away in an old hat-box in the clothes room, resolving that some day when I had time I would take her and reduce her to the original seven chapters of her first incarnation. In that case I was tolerably sure of getting thirty-five dollars for her at least, and perhaps even forty.

The manuscript lay in the hatbox until I came across it one winter day while rummaging. I began turning over the leaves, reading a bit here and there. It didn’t seem so very bad. “I’ll try once more,” I thought. The result was that a couple of months later an entry appeared in my journal to the effect that my book had been accepted. After some natural jubilation I wrote: “The book may or may not succeed. I wrote it for love, not money, but very often such books are the most successful, just as everything in the world that is born of true love has life in it, as nothing constructed for mercenary ends can ever have.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, 1917

On June 20th, 1908, Maud wrote the following in her journal: 

To-day has been, as Anne herself would say, ‘an epoch in my life.’ My book came to-day, ‘spleet-new’ from the publishers. I candidly confess that it was to me a proud and wonderful and thrilling moment. There, in my hand, lay the material realization of all the dreams and hopes and ambitions and struggles of my whole conscious existence – my first book. Not a great book, but mine, mine, mine, something which I had created.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, 1917

Inside Anne of Green Gables

Anne was an orphan who was mistakenly sent to live with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, in the fictional town of Avonlea, on Prince Edward Island. Beyond that, the novel is sort of plot-light, mostly a series of vignettes showing Anne settling in to her new home. Clearly we can see influence in the basic structure from Maud’s own life, straight away: Marilla and Matthew draw from the grandparents Macneill, Avonlea is heavily based off Cavendish, and so forth. 

Anne’s trials were drawn from Maud’s own. Imaginary friend Katie Maurice, who existed solely in the reflection “in the fairy room behind the bookcase”, was dropped full cloth into the book. Anne’s love of nature was heavily influenced by Maud’s own childhood wandering through Cavendish. The rough structure of Anne’s life is Maud’s own: getting a teaching license at age 16 in one year instead of two, pursuing a bachelor’s degree at a fictionalized version of Dalhousie University, the sudden death of paternal figure Matthew requiring Anne to return to Avonlea and stay with the aging Marilla…the bones are all Maud’s. 

Other influences came from magazines of the time, such as the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book. Anne’s image was drawn from a 1903 photograph Maud had clipped from New York’s Metropolitan Magazine, pasted on the wall of Maud’s bedroom to remind her not of Anne’s physical looks, but of Anne’s “youthful idealism and spirituality”. (The image is gorgeous, showing a radiant young woman with a floral headband, gazing upwards innocently into dramatic, gorgeous lighting. Evelyn Nesbit was a Gibson girl, a “glittering girl model of Gotham” in the first years of the 20th century. Before Anne of Green Gables was published, though, Evelyn became the star witness of the first “Trial of the Century”, a sensational case where her millionaire husband shot and killed her rapist and lover, architect and socialite Stanford White. Absolutely beyond the scope of this podcast, but I’ll include links to some relevant reading and listening on the topic in the shownotes for the interested.)

It would not be a discussion of Anne if I don’t mention her looks, because what I’ve learned is that the character of Anne is obsessed with them, and much of modern Anne culture too. She despises her appearance, her thin frame, her pale skin with freckles, and of course, the iconic red hair. Originally her hair was brighter shades of red, later dulling to descriptions of Titian red, like later fictional characters Nancy Drew and Dana Scully. (And as I’ll get to shortly, in Japan, the series is known as Red-haired Anne. Iconic!) This hit the zeitgeist of the time it was published – red hair was all the rage that year.

Reception of Anne of Green Gables

Having no personal experience with Anne (where was I the day that the Anne books were read?) I reached out to some friends to get a sense of their feelings towards the Anne books in general. To no one’s surprise, reactions were almost universally positive. My friends expounded with much praise in particular for the themes of female friendship found in the books, for the sense of optimism and positivity that Anne brought to her challenging situations. Indeed, gallons of real and digital ink have been spilled about the beauty of the relationships in Maud’s books, which I cannot distill here without cheapening them.

It’s hard to collapse what makes the book so beloved into any brief space. The book still retains its popularity and eternal nature, even now, 112 years after its original publication. Though the book is firmly ensconced in the time period in which it was published, it speaks to readers on an intimate, emotional level, with the trappings of a fairytale. The sense in Anne was that even if things are bad now, they will get better. 

I love too this comment that I found: Anne books are feminist texts, even if they’re outside of the standard “empowering” literary tropes, because “they insist that the lived experience of women matters, across class and georgraphy and age”.

Anne of Green Gables was an instant success in 1908. It sold over 19,000 copies in its first five months, and was reprinted ten times in its first year. Not only were Canadians interested in the book. It had a broad reach, and notable people like Mark Twain himself liked the book. Twain is quoted as saying that Anne Shirley was “the dearest, most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice.” A typical newspaper review at the time called Anne of Green Gables a “sweetly simple tale of childish joys and sorrows of a diminutive red-haired girl” and declared it “the literary hit of the season with the American public.” The Toronto Globe reviewed the book at the time with another typical review, saying “Anne of Green Gables is worth a thousand of the problem stories with which the bookshelves are crowded today.”

Maud Battles Her Dishonest Publisher

Earlier, I talked about how the mid to late 1910s were a tough time for Maud. Much of this was related to her battles with her publisher at the time, L. C. Page & Company. I read an excellent essay entitled “The Robber Baron of Canadian Literature”, and I think that’s an apt description for Lewis Page. 

Page was not a good guy, we’ll start there. He was ruthless, hacking apart author’s texts without shame, taking massive shares of the profits without distributing to authors their dues, and other dishonest publishing acts. Page took and took and took, with an attitude of “so sue me”, knowing that then as now, lawsuits were a long and costly business out of the reach of many poor writers.

Maud was somewhat desperate by the time she shopped her book to L. C. Page. Based on her journals, she had some indication when she met with Page that he was a shady guy. But she signed the contracts without any apparent negotiation within three weeks, in May of 1907. The contracts were wild, with their requirements for sequels and their low royalties (10% on the wholesale price “over and above the first thousand”) and the five-year binding clause. 

Maud did get a small concession, for the books to be published under the gender-neutral “L. M. Montgomery” as opposed to Page’s preferred “Lucy Maud Montgomery”. She did not get her way with the illustrations, which she apparently disliked for how they suggested an ending that the book had only hinted at. 

Maud went to work on the contracted Anne sequels, though she was already falling into a love-hate relationship with her most famous character. 

By July of 1915, things were coming to a head. Page had threatened to stop promoting her books unless she signed another five year contract, which she did, begrudgingly. He published an unsanctioned book of “castoffs” called Further Chronicles of Avonlea. He gambled away the profits her books had made, his personal life was full of sexual immorality, and the payment of royalties based on wholesale pricing rather than retail pricing made the process more opaque, and therefore made it nearly impossible to track how much Maud should’ve been making. It turned out she’d been getting 7 cents per dollar on each book, instead of 19 cents per dollar on each book. Beginning in 1917, she switched publishers and sued Page. He tried to get her back by selling the rights to one of the sequels, Anne’s House of Dreams, but Maud stood firm. Those rights didn’t belong to him to sell, and he’d withheld the royalties she was actually due. She was going to get her own. 

“There is something in me that will not remain inactive under injustice and trickery”. She went on to say that Page and his company had “traded for years on the average woman’s fear of litigation.” Finishing with a bang, she said “very few authors can afford to go to law with them, especially when they can’t expect to get money out of the result. They have done the most outrageous things to poor authors who can’t afford to seek redress.””

It took almost a decade to get that redress, and five different lawsuits. Page fought Maud at every turn, trying to take the case all the way to the US Supreme Court (they were not interested). Maud stopped writing about Anne in her journals, saying that although she’d made money, “it’s a pity it doesn’t buy happiness”. 

Page, meanwhile, had sold the film right to the Anne books back in 1908. Maud had no say in either the 1919 or 1934 film versions of Anne of Green Gables, and the money made from them went to Page and not to “Mr. Montgomery”, as one foolish American journalist reviewing at the time said. Maud was furious over the 191 film in paritcular, saying “I think if I hadn’t already known it was from my book, that I would never have recognized it.” She went on to slam the New England setting, saying “A skunk and an American flag were introduced – both equally unknown in PE Island. I could have shrieked with rage over the latter. Such crass, blatant Yankeeism!”

The Massachusetts courts ruled in Maud’s favor in 1925, finding that she had been cheated out of money she’d been owed. Page used every trick in the book to continue to try and avoid his fate, even saying that Maud’s lawsuit had caused his brother’s 1927 heart attack and harassing Maud via constant negative telegram. (Page and his brother were not close.) Finally, however, he had no choice, and in 1928, finally, Maud received the check for $15,000, the sum the courts decided was owed to her. This ended up being only about $4,000 after paying her lawyers, and Maud sensibly invested the money in the stock market. However, of course, the stock market crashed the next year, and Maud lost much of her recovered savings.

Ironically, of course, today the rights to Anne are incredibly profitable, held jointly by Maud’s heirs and Prince Edward Island through a licensing corporation. 

It’s very much beyond the scope of the podcast, but Anne of Green Gables has become a licensing and merchandising magnet. There were 1952 and 1972 BBC adaptations, a 1956 and 1958 CBC TV musical. The premiere in 1965 of “Anne of Green Gables: The Musical” in Charlottetown marked the beginning of the longest-running annual musical theater production, per Guinness book of world records. Kevin Sullivan’s 1985 CBC miniseries is perhaps the best-known adaptation, winning an Emmy amongst many other awards. Sullivan did three more sequels in 1986, 200, and 2008. There have been PBS versions and the most recent CBC adaption, distributed by Netflix, Anne with an E. Anne is big money, and a popular draw for audiences of all ages in all decades.

Anne in Japan

Nowhere is Anne’s popularity more striking than, of all places, Japan, and the story of how Anne of Green Gables became popular there is well worth hearing.

Loretta Leonard Shaw

We begin by considering Loretta Leonard Shaw, a contemporary of Maud’s, and a fellow Canadian, though the two never knew one another personally. Loretta was a decorated, highly-educated student from St. John, with a BA in English, French, and German, and a teaching certificate with the highest possible marks. However, it was missionary work and not local students that she was most passionate about. 

Loretta was accepted for missionary service in Japan, and in less than a year, Loretta learned Japanese and moved to Osaka. She taught young girls there for a number of years, and although education of girls was not considered important in society at that time, enrollment at her schools increased tenfold over the course of her teaching tenure, partially due to her skills and curriculum. Loretta sensibly commented that it was “unwise and unmoral” for women and girls to be given lower educational standards based on outdated cultural concepts of gender inferiority.

Throughout her life, Loretta was instrumental in representing the two cultures to one another as much as she could, bringing items and ideas from Japan to Canada and likewise from Canada to Japan. In 1932, Loretta became the head of the women’s and children’s literature department at the Christian Literature Society of Japan, where she brought translations of “wholesome” Western literature to Japan. 

Here is where a friendship made an incredible difference larger than they’d ever have guessed. In the late 1930s, just before Loretta’s health-related furlough back to Canada, she gave a copy of a favorite book to a friend of hers, in memory of their friendship. This was Anne of Green Gables: hardcover, with a cream cover, green-shaded portrait of a beautiful young girl on the front cover.

Hanako Muraoka

This friend, of course, was named Hanako Muraoka. She was born from a small, impoverished farming town, and with luck, attended the prestigious school in Japan founded by the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church of Canada, known as Toyo Eiwa. There, she studied Japanese subjects in the morning and English (Canadian) subjects in the afternoon. This foundation gave her the skills and interest to begin translation as a career and passion, publishing a collection of translated short stories soon after her formal education was completed. This was not only a difficult task, but it was a challenge for a time when women were not encouraged to have independence or careers.

Her life became difficult after World War I; her husband’s publishing company was destroyed in an earthquake, and her son died suddenly at a young age. Her translations were her solace and coping strategy, starting with Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper” in 1927.  

Loretta and Hanako met in the early 1930s, when they were both working as editors at the Christian Literature Society of Japan. There, they worked on a magazine “Children of Light”. Loretta Leonard Shaw published a 1936 article entitled “Utopia” in this magazine, in both English and Japanese, discussing how she and her fellow editors saw themselves as ambassadors for their respective cultures, and that the best and fastest way to do this was “by introducing the best books of each nation to the other”. 

In 1936 (some sources say 1939), Loretta left Japan. Before she did, she gave Hanako Muraoka a copy of Anne of Green Gables, with the hopes that she would translate it to Japanese. Hanako is said to have been “enchanted” by it, and began translating it shortly thereafter in her leisure time. The book resonated with Hanako’s early childhood – the pastoral natural setting, the love of poetry, words, and literature.

Hanako used her language skills in other ways, as well. Beginning in 1932, she presented a daily five minute news program plainly explaining the news to children over the radio. She was incredibly popular, and was known as “Aunty Radio”. She also participated in simultaneous translating, for instance translating speeches by FDR live on air. With the start of the war approaching as the decade came to a close, however, English-language content began to be seen seen ever more as the enemy. Hanako quit her job at the radio, not wanting to read the hostile war-centered news to children, as well as not wanting to speak badly of the Canadians, many of whom she considered friends.

And at the same time, Hanako had to hide her translation efforts of Anne of Green Gables. The world was at war, and Canada was now the enemy of Japan. English was the language of the enemy, and it could get you arrested. But Hanako carried on, secretly translating Anne of Green Gables from English to Japanese as the war went on. Her translations were so precious to her that she reportedly took them with her into the air raid shelters.

Post-war, people could once again hope for Utopia. It took until around 1950 for the publishing houses to recover from the physical damages of the war, and Hanako Muraoka published her Japanese translation of Anne of Green Gables in 1952 as “Akage-no-An” or “Red-Haired Anne”. The book, unsurprisingly, became a bestseller. Hanako published the subsequent Anne translations between 1954 and 1959. By the 1970s, her translations were added to the curriculum in Japanese schools.

Hanako intended to visit Prince Edward Island in 1968. Unfortunately, this never happened. She passed away after a sudden stroke in October of 1968, never having visited the place, embodying the spirit of Canada, that had occupied so much of her time throughout her life. In the end, said her granddaughter in an interview with a Japanese news source, “it may have been for the best that the island she knew was the perfect one she had created with her translation”

Hanako Muraoka is today closely twined with the story of Anne coming to Japan, and has become a figure of some legend and renown, it seems, based on the articles I read. Her granddaughter, Eri Muraoka, published a biography about Hanako entitled “Anne’s Cradle: The Life of Muraoka Hanako”. A dramatized version of the biography was made into a serialized TV drama in 2014, and was a ratings success, keeping the love alive for both Anne and those who had a hand in her development.

Akage-no-An

Red-Haired Anne, as can be evidenced then by this tale, was and still is an incredibly popular figure in Japan. Anne of Green Gables is sort of an expected childhood book here from the US where I write – a passing, common reference, a generic childhood book here that’s perhaps seen as a little out of date. Did you read Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie or Call of the Wild as a kid? Did you read Hatchet or Brighty of the Grand Canyon or Where the Red Fern Grows? Etc. But none hold the place in the US, in my opinion, that Anne appears to hold elsewhere, in both Canada and Japan. In Canada, Anne is sort of a national icon, up there with maple syrup in terms of souvenir popularity. But it’s more unexpected that Anne would be so incredibly popular in Japan. (If I type “why is anne of green gables” and let Google autocomplete that phrase, the top search terms are “why is anne of green gables an orphan”, “why is anne of green gables an orphan”, and “why is anne of green gables popular in japan”.)

The popularity started of course with Hanako Muraoka’s translations in the 1950s. It was sort of a backlash against the wartime strictures against Western language and literature. 

But why was Anne popular? From what I’ve read, it is as simple and complicated as this: it was a good book with a good message. The message of Anne resonates very strongly with the messages of Japanese culture: basic morality of life and examination of life’s questions in a simpler setting that is so attractive. Anne is about finding happiness, and presenting lessons applicable to all in a straightforward setting. Not only that, but Anne’s world is very kawaii – cute. 

From a 1998 essay by Judy Stoffman, too, we have this interpretation of why the Anne books took off in 1952: “The book’s success was due in part to there being almost no realistic Japanese children’s literature, particularly for girls. A female in traditional children’s stories usually turns out to be a ghost or a malevolent spirit.” Anne also fits with the Japanese cultural lessons of filial devotion, and parallels the tale of Momo-taro, about a boy raised by an elderly couple. And at the time, the first wave of Japanese readers were quite poor after the war, so they could feel at one with Anne when she described puffed sleeve dresses and layer cakes. 

In today’s Japan, Anne is used by some teachers as a way of discussing gender roles, long considered a taboo topic. Nowadays, Anne is seen as a “safe bet” by publishers, and has been translated by multiple translators in Japan. Early translations have been criticized for their omissions both large and small. Modern translations have been set as “complete” translations, including notes and explanations on the translated text, literary allusions, and so forth.

Not only is Anne popular in translated books, but in ancillary works, children’s books, and more. A musical version has been in operation since 1980. There have been travelling museum exhibits.

Perhaps the most famous and most innately Japanese are the anime. The first of the two is the most famous – 1979 series, 50 episodes, called Akage no An. The people involved are noteworthy in the right circles: directed by Isao Takahata, and scene setting/layout/animation from Hayao Miyazaki. These two names are notable across the globe for cofounding the incredibly popular Studio Ghibli, known for critically acclaimed works like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. Like their other works, Akage no An is full of characteristic charm and whim. You can watch all 50 episodes for free, legally available on YouTube, right now. A prequel, Konnichiwa Anne, came out in 2009. The anime increased Anne fever to a new high, and helped continue the waves of Anne obsession in Japan for decades to come. 

Canadian World (カナディアンワールド)

Anne is so popular in Japan, then, we can finally hit the theme park for the day. Yes, there is an Anne of Green Gables theme park in Japan. 

Now, of course Green Gables is a huge tourist destination on Prince Edward Island in Canada, as it has been for most of the last century. Anne is spread throughout the bones of Prince Edward Island. You can visit Green Gables, the real Macneill home that inspired Anne’s Green Gables. You can see the foundations of the original Cavendish home, you can walk down Anne’s Lovers’ Lane, you can visit the birthplace of Maud, and so forth.

About a half hour away in the big city of Charlottetown, you can find the Anne of Green Gables musical, lauded for being Canada’s longest running musical, and the Guiness world record holder for “longest running annual musical theatre production in the world”. Queen Elizabeth herself has seen the show during the 1964 season. 

But just as the Canadians are not the only nation to have a deep fascination with Anne, so too it is that another country also devotes some tourism resources to Anne. This, of course, is Japan. Ashibetsu, Hokkaido, the sister city to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, since 1993. Home to Canadian World, the Anne of Green Gables replica park.

Canadian World (1990-1997)

In 1984, the city of Ashibetsu in Hokkaido, Japan was looking to revitalize. Ashibetsu, or “village where the stars fall”, had previously been a prosperous coal-mining town. However, the closure of most of the town’s coal mines throughout the 1960s led to a population decrease, as people moved elsewhere to find new jobs. 

With population moving out, Ashibetsu sought a new way to bring people to the town in either the short or long term. It was decided that tourism would be the way, with a theme of stars, celestial objects, and so on, and a “restful village concept”. By late 1987, a proposal had been floated to create an Akage no An themed park, including a massive indoor water park, to be located in the valley on the site of one former coal mine. Of course, costs being what they are, the next year saw the water park proposal withdrawn, and a new proposal for Canadian World as it stands today was put out in its place.

Why Anne? Reportedly once of the officers who was in charge of development had visited PEI and seen the climate similarities between it and Ashibetsu. “The fact that he was a fan of this led to this proposal,” goes the quote.

The project is reported in the Japanese-language Wikipedia entry to be on the order of between $37-48 M USD, including mining site preparation, an Anne of Green Gables themed park, and a giant lavender field.  

Lavender planting was begun in June of 1989, and Canadian World officially opened in July of 1990. The park was “Japan’s largest theme park with a Canadian theme”, logical considering I couldn’t find any other Canadian-themed parks out there. It was less of an amusement park and more of a leisure park or a historical recreation park. Prince Edward Island was faithfully reproduced there in Ashibetsu: Green Gables, Mrs. Lind’s House, the clock tower, and so forth. An artificial lake was dug, Anne’s Lake of Shining Waters, and spruce trees were planted to make the Ghost Forest and Lovers Lane. Next to the lake, a central plaza and curving walkway, lined with dozens of Canadian-style buildings in a row, looking out across the water and the beautiful landscape. A train station on either end of the park, a field of lavender, and of course, the Green Gable house, set back on its own among a beautiful garden. 

Words don’t do the scope of the park justice. The place is absolutely huge: 450,000 m2. The main central plaza is located in the bowl of the old mine pit, and then other buildings scattered throughout the grounds. Getting down to the central plaza is easy – walk down a long downhill path. Getting back up – harder. Each little house looks like anything you’d find in Canada: clapsboards painted white and cream and blue, brightly colored shutters, pointy roofs, porches suitable for rocking chairs. Inside most are little shops and activities – the quiltmaker’s shop, the woodcarver’s shop, the chapel, the kids’ playground area. Different zones are present: Kensington Zone, Colts Zone, Craft Village Zone, Avonlea, Terrace du franc zone, Bright River Zone. This is a link to Hokkaidofan.com where there are many photos. https://hokkaidofan.com/canadian-world/

A CD was released by EMI Music Japan as the official park soundtrack, and a picture book for children featuring photos of the park was also produced. Crosspromotions occurred with local transportation systems to encourage visitors. And of course, as noted earlier, Charlottetown PEI and Ashibetsu became sister cities to mutually encourage tourism.

However, Canadian World didn’t take off. Despite the continued success of Anne as a Japanese cultural icon, and the new 1990s translations of Anne of Green Gables and related works, Canadian World floundering, unable to be tied into the success of the brand.

The park carried on. 1991 saw the highest number of yearly visitors: about 270,000, well below the target estimate of 400,000. New features were added to the park: a large restaurant called “Heartland” in 1991, a miniature SL (steam locomotive – choo choo, it’s The Abandoned Train!) called “Canadian Rocky” in 1992, painted green and gold, with a 2-4-4 wheel configuration. There was also a museum for antique music boxes in 1995, and so forth. Guests could rent rowboats or ride horses from the Canadian Riding Club. 

Despite the beauty of the natural landscape and the faithfully reproduced Canadian-style buildings, it seems there was some dissatisfaction about how well Canadian World reproduced Prince Edward Island. The location of the park meant that when winter came, it was difficult to get to and not necessarily a pleasant experience to visit (snow!) so tourism numbers in the winter seasons were low. The park is set on an incredibly hilly patch of land, so it’s actually a little difficult to get around the park, and elderly people were discouraged from visiting. There was very little for small children to do, though a small playground with a slide was added at one point. Outside food was not allowed to be brought in, making repeat guests unlikely.

And internally, the Japanese Wikipedia says that there was poor management and various internal management conflicts. The translation on the Wiki page isn’t great, but it seems that the way the assets and souveniers and goods were managed was done so poorly, which contributed to high costs.

Plans were made to expand Canadian World to better position it as a year-round business. The most major of these was Canadian Sports World, a project planned for 1994, to feature a ski resort, hotel, and golf course on site. Unfortunately, the economy struck. As I talked about in my Takakonuma Greenland episode, the economic bubble collapse in Japan in the late 90s caused problems across the country, especially for the many theme parks which had popped up. Here in Ashibetsu, it meant that there would be no more plans for Canadian Sports World. 

At Canadian World, employees were laid off, but the financial problems snowballed, and it seems from the translation I was reading that the park went bankrupt, shuttering in fall of 1997. The location was poor, the economy was poor, and there were other (some might say “better”) theme parks out there, competing for visitor attention. 

Ashibetsu Municipal Canadian World Park (1999-2019)

With the park closed, the community met to figure out what to do. Through a series of public meetings and financing agreements, the park became a public, free, municipal park, and reopened in July 1999. 

While there had originally been 34 buildings or facilities, not all were reopened. Anne’s Green Gables reopened as a museum, with photos of Maud, vintage Anne books, and a complete setup from Anne’s Green Gables, just like back in PEI. and the post office and Mrs. Lind’s house also reopened, managed by the city. Ten other buildings were occupied by separate tenants. 

Unfortunately, this was not enough. Maintenance costs on the site were huge, amounting to almost $1M USD annually. And attendance was low – 50,000 people in 1999, 70,000 people in 2001, and then nothing but decreases – 30,000 in 2012. 

By 2007, the city had to renegotiate the bankruptcy agreement to reconfigure the debts owed on the Canadian World site. The mediation allowed the reduction of the operating costs for the park, but this “free” public park was still costing the city a ton of money. 

Canadian World served as a background for several productions, including several movies. 

2013 saw a number of closures and vacancies. The tenant at the Kensington Station building vacated. The SL miniature steam train was noted as “gone” as of 2011 (though I can still see train cars on the tracks in 2019 videos, the green and gold engie is long gone). Several of the buildings by the north entrance of the park were completely closed due to structural instability, being simply unsafe to occupy or use. Public transportation to the park was slowly reduced, requiring visitors to come by private car or taxi. And of course, Canadian World was located where a coal mine had originally been, and is located in the mountains, not near a city. Distance was a factor.

2014 saw the end of a 20-year “Candle Art” event, held annually each August. No more would there be displays of flashlights, candles, laser beams, and fireworks – there simply weren’t enough funds or enough workers. The 2014 release of the Hanako and Anne anime did start to boost tourism, slightly, and Universal Music rereleased the omnibus Anne CD. 

However, it still was not drawing in the crowds. Local committees began to meet to discuss the future for the park. Here, the translation from the Japanese Wiki again makes complete understanding a bit unclear, but it seems as though the city decided to stop having the park be a municipal park. The debts continued to pile up, and something on the order of $19 M USD was estimated to be needed in order to renovate the aging facilities, which had apparently weathered poorly. Most of the tenants had pulled out, leaving only the city-run buildings.

An October 2019 newspaper article quotes and official who blames the theming, saying “the content did not match the climate and temperament of Ashibetsu”. Take that as you will. 

Canadian World (2019 – ?)

A new organization was set up called the “Canadian World Promotion Association” to take over operation of Canadian World, beginning from its 2019 winter closure. This group is an organization of volunteers, comprised of the tenants occupying the park as well as private sector members. The group requested to rent the facilities for free, with 2020 operation only on weekends and holidays (and weekdays during the school summer vacation).

The group also immediately began crowdfunding opportunities online, on readyfor.jp, a crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter. A March 4th newspaper article highlights the project and their crowdfunding efforts to date, bringing additional attention to the cause. This announcement is particularly interesting, detailing some of the buildings and the repairs needed for each of them. Walls are falling down, some doors don’t close, and the general air is one of disarray.

Fundraising has been quite successful, and the group has raised enough money to operate the park in 2020 and to begin basic repairs on the buildings, starting with Anne’s Green Gables house. The hope, based on the text in the crowdfunding updates, is that the operation will be self-funding from this point on through membership dues and fundraising activities elsewhere. Canadian World Promotion Association is quite transparent on their crowdfunding page about the costs involved with the park – reportedly the electric bill is the largest part of the operation, about 1 M yen or just under $10,000 USD for the half year when the park is open.

“Abandoned” Canadian World

Based on this history, you can see that Canadian World has never really been “abandoned” in its history, although some might consider the non-operational year in 1998 to be so. Rather, I think why Canadian World is often considered abandoned is because of its limited operational time period. During its most recent operation as a municipal park, Canadian World operated from the ended of April to the end of October, with limited hours (10 am to 5 pm). Most of the shops and tenants only operated on weekends, leaving the appearance of an abandoned site. Too, maintenance has been an ongoing struggle, and many of the buildings and park features were poorly maintained, giving the appearance of being much older than their actual years. 

Today, Canadian World is unfortunately only popular in the Western world through abandoned and urbex tourism videos. People like “Exploring with Josh” create some incredibly cinematic videos of places like this, but then they use clickbaity titles like “Fake Town of Horrors – What Happened Here?” Obviously that title has no actual bearing on anything related to Anne of Green Gables or Canadian World. Josh’s video is respectful enough, but the title. I don’t like the title.

The park looks abandoned though, in every video I’ve ever seen of the place. The park is so spread out that even if there were many visitors, it would be hard to feel crowded. (A few videos exist online from the mid-90s, and even then, the park wasn’t crowded, though it was more populous than it is today.) The maintenance now is a huge issue – fences at an angle, getting close to falling in the lake. Lampposts tilting over, held up by ropes instead of being repaired properly. Illegible signs, faded and weatherworn. A long-abandoned chain swing, missing its swings, sits in the middle of the central plaza, rusting.

It’s exceedingly surreal to view the footage available of Canadian World. Operational, yet empty, it’s like being a part of a dream. One has the entire park to themselves, it seems like, this huge open-air vista of Western-style buildings right there in Japan. 

Only a character so powerful as Anne of Green Gables, I have to think, would be able to keep pulling this off, dragging along this failing theme park and stil enticing tens of thousands of people to visit each year. What a legendary character. 

Conclusions

Although I began researching this episode solely to talk about the theme park, I have to say that I’m grateful to have learned about Maud and Anne. 

The introduction of Anne of Green Gables to Japan, it’s safe to say, had an outstanding effect on Japanese culture for such a small children’s book. The female Canadian missionaries like Loretta Leonard Shaw, who taught students like Hanako Muraoka, the first Anne translator, helped educate a generation of Japanese girls with increasingly modern ideals. Maud’s writing changed and developed with the times she lived in, a time of rapid growth in technology, wars, the roles of women, and so on. Yet she always knew that Anne would be her ultimate, enduring legacy: hopeful but fierce, in the face of all strife and struggle. Maud built for Anne a found family, sculpted out of her own hopes from the ashes of the nuclear family she herself never had, and this is a theme many still relate to today. 

Beyond her characters and her prose, Maud’s mental health struggles and addiction problems are incredibly resonant today, the better part of a century later. The opioid crisis is a major societal issue today, though at least it’s more socially acceptable to discuss, and doesn’t have to be confined to private journal entries. 

None of this was what I expected to find when I sat down to learn about this strange, not-really-abandoned theme park in Ashibetsu, Hokkaido, Japan. I wasn’t expecting to become fascinated by this strong, brave, brilliant woman, a person who has a gift for words reaching across the decades to talk with me. What a refreshing research topic, focusing on the lived experience of women. Not only that, but it was also refreshing to hear so much about the women Maud knew and the women who have since written about Maud. While I may not yet have the personal affection for the character Anne that so many do, I most certainly now have a deep admiration and respect for her creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Maud’s first piece of writing she ever sought feedback on was a poem, which she considered her masterpiece at the age of 12. I thought it was beautiful, and a fitting end to today’s story.

“”When the evening sun is setting
Quietly in the west,
In a halo of rainbow glory,
  I sit me down to rest.
I forget the present and future,
  I live over the past once more,
As I see before me crowding
  The beautiful days of yore.””

Outro

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of The Abandoned Carousel, where I talked about Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, and Canadian World, in Hokkaido, Japan. There are more Anne and Maud books out there than you could possibly imagine, but I’ll suggest the two that grabbed me: House of Dreams, by Liz Rosenberg, and Looking for Anne of Green Gables, by Irene Gammel. Both are engagingly written and fun to read, and contain far more detail than I could possibly present here. 

My theme music is Aerobatics in Slow Motion by TeknoAXE. As always, you can find a rough transcript, images, and complete list of references at my website. For this episode, visit theabandonedcarousel.com/30. Thank you to Florian from Abandoned Kansai for allowing the inclusion of a photo; check out their great site.

I do have a Patreon, and I’ll shortly be publishing a complete behind-the-scenes podcast episode there, detailing the creation of this episode. You can find that at patreon.com/theabandonedcarousel. If you haven’t done so already, please leave a rating and review in your podcast app, especially on Apple Podcasts – just click the show name, click ratings and reviews, and drop five sparkly stars. It really helps others find the show. Finally, I’m going to be releasing a Q&A episode in the next few months, so now is a great time to send in a question you might like answered on that. For all questions, comments, corrections, and concerns, please visit my Contact page on my website, or simply email [email protected].

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

1. Anne of Green Gables: The Musical. In: Wikipedia. ; 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anne_of_Green_Gables:_The_Musical&oldid=942256989. Accessed March 8, 2020.
2. Anne of Green Gables. In: Wikipedia. ; 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anne_of_Green_Gables&oldid=942998841. Accessed March 4, 2020.
3. Hanako to Anne. In: Wikipedia. ; 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hanako_to_Anne&oldid=936369809. Accessed March 5, 2020.
4. The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Selected_Journals_of_L._M._Montgomery&oldid=899974232. Accessed March 2, 2020.
5. Tousignant M. ‘Anne of Green Gables’ is very much alive in Canada. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/anne-of-green-gables-comes-to-life-in-canada/2018/08/27/9d2eff42-a0a3-11e8-8e87-c869fe70a721_story.html. Published August 27, 2018. Accessed March 4, 2020.
6. L.M. Montgomery Literary Society – Posts. https://www.facebook.com/LMMontgomeryLS/photos/a.10150597670777361/10157018240332361/?type=3&theater. Accessed March 5, 2020.
7. (REVISIT) “Lucy Maud Montgomery And Eva Braun!” NOTORIOUS Women Podcast. https://notoriouswmpod.com/episodes/2019/9/3/revisit-lucy-maud-montgomery-and-eva-braun. Accessed September 11, 2019.
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11. 【楽天市場】篠崎書林 カナディアン・ワールドのアン /篠崎書林/吉川道夫 | 価格比較 – 商品価格ナビ. https://product.rakuten.co.jp/product/-/efd1b79750961a3bbdfc895dfffa1f29/. Accessed February 11, 2020.
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67. “Redhead Ann”, Japan’s most beloved redhead girl-BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/japanese/features-and-analysis-40427524. Accessed February 4, 2020.
68. Results: University of Guelph Library Digital Collections. images.ourontario.ca/uoguelph/results/fsu=Montgomery%2C+Lucy+Maud. Accessed March 2, 2020.
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71. The Alpine Path. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/montgomery/alpine/alpine.html. Accessed March 2, 2020.
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74. Clavé SA. The Global Theme Park Industry. CABI; 2007.
75. Nakayama M. The Meaning of Muraoka Hanako’s Translation. HIKAKU BUNGAKU Journal of Comparative Literature. 2004;46:64-74. doi:10.20613/hikaku.46.0_64
76. Duffy D. The Robber Baron of Canadian Literature. Literary Review of Canada. https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2004/04/the-robber-baron-of-canadian-literature/. Accessed March 5, 2020.
77. THE SHINING SCROLL L.M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables Periodical. The L.M. Montgomery Literary Society. https://lmmontgomeryliterarysociety.weebly.com/the-shining-scroll-periodical.html. Accessed March 5, 2020.
78. Hendry J. The Whole World as Heritage? Foreign Country Theme Parks in Japan. Brill; 2017. doi:10.1163/9789004302877_035
79. O’Sullivan K. There’s an Abandoned “Anne of Green Gables” Theme Park and It’s SO Creepy. Country Living. https://www.countryliving.com/life/news/a42796/abandoned-anne-of-green-gables-theme-park-japan/. Published April 27, 2017. Accessed September 11, 2019.
80. There’s an Abandoned Anne of Green Gables Theme Park in Japan | Real Simple. https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/entertainment/arts-culture/abandoned-anne-of-green-gables-theme-park?xid=soc_socialflow_facebook_realsimple. Accessed September 11, 2019.
81. V.A.-CANADIAN WORLD – AKAGE NO ANNE NO FURUSATO-JAPAN CD E25 4988005836366. eBay. https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/V-A-CANADIAN-WORLD-AKAGE-NO-ANNE-NO-FURUSATO-JAPAN-CD-E25-/392492017389. Accessed February 4, 2020.
82. Welcome to the L. M. Montgomery Institute | L. M. Montgomery Institute. https://www.lmmontgomery.ca/. Accessed March 4, 2020.
83. Lehman E. What Anne of Green Gables Taught Me About Suffering. Verily. https://verilymag.com/2018/11/anne-green-gables-inspiration-quotes. Accessed March 4, 2020.
84. What Happened to Nate Lockhart? | L. M. Montgomery Institute. https://www.lmmontgomery.ca/islandora/object/lmmi:4151/OBJ/PDF. Accessed March 2, 2020.
85. Why ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Little Women’ Still Inspire Us Today. Electric Literature. https://electricliterature.com/why-anne-of-green-gables-and-little-women-still-inspire-us-today/. Published October 19, 2018. Accessed February 4, 2020.
86. Jul 11 CP· CN· P, July 11 2017 6:00 AM ET | Last Updated:, 2017. “You’ll have an awfully good read:” Retired U of G prof publishing journals of L.M. Montgomery | CBC News. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/lucy-maud-montgomery-complete-journals-mary-rubio-1.4198049. Published July 11, 2017. Accessed March 2, 2020.
87. カナディアンワールド | カナディアン | 北海道. カナディアンワールド. https://www.canadian-world.com. Accessed March 9, 2020.
88. カナディアンワールド公園. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E3%82%AB%E3%83%8A%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB%E3%83%89%E5%85%AC%E5%9C%92&oldid=74925656. Accessed February 4, 2020.
89. カナディアンワールド公園 – Home. https://www.facebook.com/canadaane/. Accessed February 13, 2020.
90. カナディアンワールド公園｜芦別市観光総合ガイド「星の降る里あしべつ」. 芦別市観光総合ガイド「星の降る里あしべつ」. http://go-to-ashibetsu.com/. Accessed February 11, 2020.
91. さらばグリーンゲイブルズ。2019年で閉鎖が決まった北海道芦別市のカナディアンワールド公園→2020年以降も存続が決定！. プチノマドになりたい主婦の雑記ブログ. March 2019. https://petitnomado.com/canadianworld/. Accessed February 11, 2020.
92. ブライアン・ペック/カナディアンワールド～赤毛のアンのふるさと – TOWER RECORDS ONLINE. https://tower.jp/item/3603867/カナディアンワールド~赤毛のアンのふるさと. Accessed March 9, 2020.
93. 廃墟寸前！カナディアンワールドを散歩してみた @北海道芦別市 Canadian World at Ashibetsu, Hokkaido. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=159&v=Ia679jzy11Q&feature=emb_title. Accessed February 4, 2020.
94. 検索結果. In: Wikipedia. ; 2020. https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=ashibetsu&title=%E7%89%B9%E5%88%A5%3A%E6%A4%9C%E7%B4%A2&go=display&ns0=1. Accessed March 8, 2020.
95. 炭鉱跡「赤毛のアンの町」30年の歴史に幕　地元「踊らされた」　北海道 – 毎日新聞. https://mainichi.jp/articles/20191019/k00/00m/040/036000c. Accessed January 31, 2020.
96. 珠 on Twitter: “芦別のカナディアンワールド、本当に好きで毎年行かせてもらってます。 建物も素敵だし、自然いっぱいだし、カナディアンワールドの皆さん優しくて大好きです。 #カナディアンワールド https://t.co/axJvHopXcb” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/tama_wrbh/status/1223131564613066752. Accessed January 31, 2020.
97. lenslife. 秋のカナディアンワールド公園 今季最終日 Ⅰ. Lens Life Blog. https://lenslife.exblog.jp/27176784/. Accessed March 9, 2020.
98. 芋畑サリーランチボックス全②巻発売中︎ on Twitter: “@tonosama36 https://t.co/k2eeZZcYQn 市営だったのが今年から民営で運営されるそうです！ 民営では維持がかなり難しい規模の土地ですので、クラウドファンディングでお金を募るみたいですね。 今年も四月からオープンとのことですので、是非遊びに行ってみてほしいです！” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/sarii_imo/status/1223170944803336192. Accessed January 31, 2020.
99. 芋畑サリーランチボックス全②巻発売中︎ on Twitter: “芦別のカナディアンワールド公園、去年初めて行きましたがとても楽しかったです。広すぎて見きれなかったので今年も行きたい！アンの家の中も雰囲気たっぷりでとても素敵でした https://t.co/cQIjZk1Y2H” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/sarii_imo/status/1223076334156435456. Accessed January 31, 2020. 105. 芦別「カナディアンワールド公園」～日帰りドライブのまとめ～ – 札幌のスィーツ大好き おぢさん日記 毎日食べるのだ！. 芦別「カナディアンワールド公園」～日帰りドライブのまとめ～ – 札幌のスィーツ大好き　おぢさん日記  毎日食べるのだ！. https://blog.goo.ne.jp/bstime0213/e/1d2cee5050f3403f70416d162fb0bbc7. Accessed January 31, 2020.
100. 芦別市『カナディアンワールド公園』が閉園？その前に赤毛のアンの世界へ訪れよう. しょうラヂオ。. https://hokkaido-child.com/canadian-world. Published September 20, 2017. Accessed February 11, 2020.
101. 赤毛のアン. In: Wikipedia. ; 2020. https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%B5%A4%E6%AF%9B%E3%81%AE%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3&oldid=76481476. Accessed March 8, 2020.
102. 赤毛のアンの世界を模したカナディアンワールドを存続させたい！ – クラウドファンディング READYFOR (レディーフォー). https://readyfor.jp/projects/canadian-world. Accessed February 11, 2020.

The post Lucy Maud Montgomery / Canadian World / Anne of Green Gables appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

Credits: Podcast cover background photo is by 4045 on freepik.com. Image of Santa billboard from Santa Claus, AZ is public domain. Theme music is from “Aerobatics in Slow Motion” by TeknoAXE. Incidental music includes “Jingle Bells (Calm)”, “Deck the Halls (A)”, “Deck the Halls (B)” by Kevin Macleod / incompetech.com; and “We Three Kings” by Alexander Nakarada (filmmusic.io). Effects all via freesound.org: “Jingle Bells” by JarredGibb (CC0); “Jingle Bells” by nfrae (CC0); “Arizona Walking” by kvgarlic (CC0); “Howling Wind in Chimney” by Maurice JK (CC by SA); “Merry Christmas” by metaepitome (CC0); and “Merry Christmas” by maestroalf (CC0).

The First Theme Park?

When you’re researching anything, an easy question to ask is, what was the first? What was the first fast food restaurant? (White Castle, 1921) What was the first interstate highway in the US? (A complicated answer, but either a portion of what is now I-70 in Missouri, which had the first contract signed in 1956; a portion of I-70 in Kansas for being the first to actually start paving in 1956; or part of I-70 in Pennsylvania, as it was opened as a highway in 1940 and later incorporated into the interstate system.) 

To bring it around to The Abandoned Carousel, what was the first theme park? 

Not the first amusement park, to be clear. Let’s draw some lines with terminology. Amusement parks in the US go back a century and a half, at the least, with trolley parks in the middle of the 19th century considered to be some of the first true amusement parks in the US. Lake Compounce in Connecticut is said to be the oldest continuously operating park in the US, opened in 1846. The earliest amusement park in the world still in operation is called Bakken, located near Copenhagen, Denmark, and said to have opened in 1583. But these are “just” amusement parks – places where visitors are amused, with rides and leisure activities and so on.

A theme park is a horse of a slightly different color – an amusement park, but with a theme or themed area to organize it. Society in general popularly likes to point to Disneyland and the enormous influence Walt Disney’s first park had on the theme park concept, but as I mentioned in the last episode – theme parks existed before Disneyland. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today – the first theme park in the US. Coincidentally, several of the first theme parks had Santa Claus as a theme. So seasons greetings to everyone here in the end of 2019 – let’s talk about the history of Santa Claus and a few of his homes in the US.

Christmas and Santa Claus

What’s the deal with Santa Claus, after all, if we’re going to talk about him a lot today?

Santa as we know him today is an amalgamation of the 4th century saint, Saint Nicholas; the British Father Christmas; the Dutch Sinterklaas; and the Germanic god Woden, associated with Yule. He is associated with the holiday of Christmas.

Christmas as a holiday has meant a lot of different things throughout the years. I’ll only touch on this briefly here. We have the obvious association of December 25, considered the birthday of Jesus Christ in Christian religions. In the Roman calendar, December 25th was also the date of the winter solstice. The medieval calendar was dominated by Christmas-related holidays, early versions of Advent and the Twelve Days of Christmas known today. The Middle Ages saw an association of Christmas with lewdness, debauchery, and parties. The Puritans and the Pilgrims actually banned Christmas in the mid-1600s for being too strongly associated with drunkenness. In response, the churches called for the holiday to be celebrated in a more devout and religious fashion. 

From the 1800s onward, public perception of Christmas began to be re-shaped as a time for family and gift-giving. This was popularized by Charles Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol, which created or combined much of what we now consider a Christmas celebration. It’s been referred to as the “carol philosophy”, promoting goodwill towards all men, values that could be espoused by both religious and secular alike. By 1870, the Puritan attitudes had shifted, and Christmas was declared an official US holiday.

Santa Claus’s Origins

Today, of course, it can be argued that Christmas, and particularly Santa Claus, are largely commercial juggernauts more than anything.

As the North American colonies developed throughout the late 1700s and early 1800s, his familiar accoutrements were established. Rivington’s Gazette was the first American paper to establish the name Santa Claus, back in 1773. Santa was immortalized in print, with poems and story books, and of course, The Night Before Christmas, published in 1823. 

Washington Irving’s 1809 parody of New York culture was the first to take the traditional bishop dress (derived from St. Nicholas) away and give Santa a pipe and a winter coat. 

Thomas Nast and Santa Claus

But it was a political cartoonist during the Civil War that gave us the modern image of Santa Claus, the man we think of today. 

Thomas Nast was a Bavarian-born immigrant who came to America as a child. He did poorly at most school subjects, but showed an early passion for drawing. By the age of 18, with several years of artistic study under his belt, his drawings first appeared in the magazine Harper’s Weekly. 

He had a long history with that magazine, and has come to be known as the “father of the American cartoon”. He advocated for the abolition of slavery and opposed racial segregation. He also created the modern political symbol for the Republican party (the elephant). His cartoons were instrumental in public sentiment for the 1860s elections of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, and are said to be responsible for the election of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat elected after almost thirty years of Republicans. “In the words of the artist’s grandson, Thomas Nast St Hill, “it was generally conceded that Nast’s support won Cleveland the small margin by which he was elected. In this his last national political campaign, Nast had, in fact, ‘made a president’.””

And amongst his list of credentials, he created the modern image of Santa Claus, originally used for political commentary.

The Christmas issue of Harper’s Weekly for the 1862-1863 season was published in January of 1863. It was the middle of the Civil War, the year of the battles of Shiloh, Manassas, and Antietam; it was a year with the Union experiencing both extreme trial and intense hope. The nation was divided by Civil War, and the celebration of Christmas brought conflicting emotions. 

Nast drew several images, including the cover image. It was titled “Santa Claus at Camp”. His drawing depicted a Santa Claus figure, arriving by sleigh in a Union army camp to distribute gifts and good cheer. His Santa is shown in an American flag inspired outfit – stars on top, stripes on the bottom, everything fur trimmed, with a pointy hat. It was originally political commentary or even pro-Union propaganda. Lincoln reportedly once said that NAst’s images, politicizing Santa, were “”the best recruiting sergeant the North ever had””. Despite the political roots, Nast’s images set the seeds for today’s Santa. 

Nast was reportedly also responsible for fixing Santa’s home address as the “North Pole”. This was done after the Civil War, and was reportedly done “so no nation can claim him as their own”, for propaganda, as Nast himself had done.

He continued drawing Santa, publishing at least 33 Santa images for Harper’s Weekly over his time there. His 1881 image “Merry Old Santa Claus” is probably his most famous, showing a twinkly-eyed bearded man, dressed all in red, clutching bundles of toys. But like the Santa Claus at Camp image, this is more political commentary, actually relating to the government’s indecisiveness over raising the wages of the military. It’s odd and fascinating that political cartoons could shape our cultural images so strongly.

20th Century Santa

In the 20th century, literature and promotional images continued to shape and refine our images of the jolly old man. L. Frank Baum, the very same author who penned The Wizard of Oz series, actually wrote a book about Santa in 1902, called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. This book established much of the Santa mythology. And as an interesting sidebar, Santa has a small cameo – he appears in The Road to Oz, one of the sequels to Wizard of Oz.

Even more influential were yet more promotional images. 

As we’ve already discussed, Santa was shaped by political commentary, so it’s not surprising he moved on to the world of commercial promotion through the late 1800s and early 1900s. His image, however, was not consistent from artist to artist. Much relied on the famous poem, the line “a little old driver, so lively and quick”, with many interpretations. Images were tweaked and edited, still not the consistent idea of Santa from our modern times. Sometimes Santa was tall and thin, sometimes he was elven, and so on. 

This time, they were the promotional campaigns of that beverage giant, Coca-Cola.  In the 1930s, they were looking for a new way to increase soda sales during the winter, with the slogan, “Thirst Knows No Season.” Enter stage left: Haddon H. Sundblom. 

Sundblom worked for Coke, and was assigned to draw a new Santa for the Coca-Cola company, then. He came up with a modern image of Santa – friendly, warm, pleasant, plump. He was a cheerful, rotund man with white hair and a red suit, red cheeks, and a jolly affect. Sundblom’s first ads with new Santa debuted in 1931.

They were a hit, to say the least. Coke still sometimes uses Sundblom’s original art in their ads to this day. And not only is it Coke. After the 1931 ads, this was the image of Santa that was codified in cultural imagination. No longer were there interpretations of Santa, tall and thin, elven, etc. No, Sundblom’s characterization of Santa became the ideal image of the legend that still carries on today. 

Charles Howard’s Santa Claus

People, of course, had dressed up as Santa as far back as the legend goes. Early costumed Santas were often used around the holiday season to ring bells and solicit monetary donations for the poor. It’s said that the first department store Santa appeared in 1890, when a man in Brockton, Massachusetts named James Edgar dressed as Thomas Nast’s jolly Santa for the delight of children in the store. 

Said a man who saw Edgar as a child: “You just can’t imagine what it was like. I remember walking down an aisle and, all of a sudden, I saw Santa Claus. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and then Santa came up and started talking to me. It was a dream come true.”

By the turn of the century, the idea had caught on and the department store Santa was a common figure, so much so that some papers of the time issued cries for “only one Santa Claus per town”.

Charles Howard

The big name in the Santa Claus field, as I’ve learned, was a guy named Charles Howard, apparently quite well known in the Albion area, some 60 miles north of Buffalo.

Charles Howard was born in Albion, NY around the turn of the century, in 1896. He was a farmer and a toymaker and a secretary for the county fair association. Some describe him as having a flair for the dramatic. As a child, his mother sewed him a suit, a Santa Claus suit, so that Howard could play the role of Santa as “a short fat boy”. He continued with the role as he got older, making new suits as he grew. 

Somewhere in the early 1930s, he suggested that a local furniture store hire him to play the role of Santa while making toys in the front window during the holiday season. Eventually, he moved to the big city, 35 miles from Albion in Rochester, NY, where the owner reportedly took one look at Howard dressed in his suit and asked him “when can you start?” 

The popular story of Howard realizing the importance of Santa, immortalized by Howard himself, goes as follows. “One morning a little girl came in and watched him work. She stood there for some time before she ventured closer. Then a step at a time she walked up to him and very timidly asked, ‘Santa, will you promise me something?’ Santa looked at the child and said, ‘What is it you want me to promise?’ He had already learned that promises sometimes meant heartaches. He did not want to make any mistakes. However this child seemed so sincere, so earnest, he took her little hand in his. The child drew closer, looked up into his face with all the love and trust that a five year old could and whispered, ‘Will you promise me you will never shave?’”  

This triggered a curiosity for Howard – if Santa meant so much to one, he must mean so much to many. “Who was this old fellow who meant so much to the children? Where did he come from? What did he stand for? Why did he wear that red suit? Why was it trimmed with white fur? Why this? And why that?”

At the same time, in his regular life, Howard was a traveling toy salesman. He saw many Santas throughout his travels, and reportedly “frowned on the unkempt costumes and lack of child psychology displayed by many department store Santas”. So in 1937, Howard established the Santa Claus School.

Santa Claus School

Charles Howard’s first class was a single student, but as he raised tuition, attendance grew at his Santa Claus school. He held classes on his farm, offering lessons on “psychology, costuming, make-up, whisker grooming, voice modulation, the history and legend of St. Nicholas and learning the correct way to “ho-ho-ho.””. It was Howard’s opinion that being Santa was about what was in your heart and head, not about the girth of your belly. 

He also developed a line of Santa Claus suits. They were fancier than the standard costume at the time, but as Howard said, “worthy of the character as we knew him”. Students at his school flocked to the suits, and took in the lessons. The details of being Santa were important, and Howard was reportedly a stickler for them. “How the suit should lay on you. How your beard should be; it had to be the right shape and the right length. And how your glasses should look … everything had to be perfect. He wanted every [Santa] to be as close as possible to each other.”

Santa Claus, Indiana

We’ll get back to Charles Howard and Albion in a little while. 

For now, let’s turn our attention away from New York and look down south some, to a small town in Indiana. We’ve got to turn our clocks back, too.

The year, as it goes, was 1855. 

A small town in Indiana was working on establishing a post office. They were already known as Santa Fe (pronounced ‘fee’, apparently). The trouble was, there was already another town in Indiana by that name. A meeting was held to pick a new name. Legend has many versions of the story after that point. Some say the wind blew the door open and with it a Santa Claus, barging into the meeting. Some say a child heard a passing sound of jingle bells and exclaimed “Santa Claus!”. Some say it was the fact that the meeting was held on Christmas Eve.

Whichever story you believe, all are certain to be fanciful versions of the true story, which we’ll never know. What we can know is that in 1856, the post office granted the town the official name of Santa Claus, Indiana. 

Well, this was the first time that there was a town by this name in the US. So the post office started sending some of the children’s letters there, the ones addressed to Santa Claus. It became this huge barrage of mail in the holiday season. Since at least 1914, various groups of people began answering the children’s letters that were sent to Santa, both nationally and locally. 

The town began to attract national attention in 1929, when the post office in Santa Claus was featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoon strip. And then we enter the 1930s.

1930s: A Big Decade in Santa Claus Operations

The 1930s were a big decade in Santa Claus operations here in the US, away from the North Pole, with a lot of Santa-related things happening simultaneously. On a socio-political front, the recovery from the Great Depression was beginning, with FDR’s First New Deal alphabet soup agencies being put into place. And big changes were happening all over – Route 66 was being built, among many other events not relevant to the show. Perhaps the attitude was one looking for hope and light. 

Santa Claus, IN in the 1930s

The 30s were a big time for the small town of Santa Claus, IN. 

Santa’s Candy Castle

We start with an entrepreneur by the name of Milt Harris. The tale goes that he looked around the town of Santa Claus and saw no Santa. The big guy wasn’t anywhere to be found. So Harris began creating the first true tourist attraction in Santa Claus, apparently in conjunction with the town postmaster James Martin. First, though, he leased nearly all of the land in and around the town – something like 1000 acres. And he began securing sponsorships from various business entities.

His attraction, Santa’s Candy Castle, was dedicated in December of 1935. It was sponsored by Curtiss Candy Company, the inventor of the Butterfinger and the Baby Ruth candy bars. Today,  they’re unsurprisingly a Nestle subsidiary. Sandy’s Candy Castle was the first tourist attraction in the town of Santa Claus, and by some accounts, the first themed attraction in the US, although that seems an unlikely claim, hard to prove.

Santa’s Candy Castle was a red brick building shaped like an actual castle, with a crenellated tower, turret, and rotunda. The next year, new attractions were added, and collectively, they were called Santa Claus Town. The Toy Village was incredibly popular, with multiple fairytale-themed buildings, each sponsored by a national toy manufacturer. This was reportedly quite popular, with children able to play with all of the hot new toys they’d heard about, for free. As the years rolled on, Harris reportedly managed to negotiate a sweet deal. For a period of time, retailers (including Marshall Fields) would arrange for toys purchased in Chicago to be shipped from the Santa Claus post office in Indiana, with that official Santa Claus postmark. 

Santa’s Workshop was also added, where children could watch a Santa Claus making wooden toys. (Though our friend Charles Howard was a Santa who could actually make wooden toys, it doesn’t appear that he performed the role at the Candy Castle, though that parallel would’ve been delightful.)

The Candy Castle was a success, in no small part because it was a free or cheap attraction to provide entertainment for kids during and after the Great Depression. 

Martin and Yellig: Making Dreams Come True

Now, as I mentioned earlier, the town postmaster, James Martin, was pretty heavily involved in all of this, because as town postmaster, he had his finger in the pie, so to speak. He noted the increased volume of letters being sent by children to “Santa Claus” around the holidays, and he took it upon himself to begin answering the letters. (This was a not insignificant amount of mail. In the 1940s, the post office reportedly handled 1.5 million pieces of mail, and in the 1950s, a newspaper article noted that the park handled over 4 million pieces of mail during the Christmas season each year. A 2014 article, though, has revised this number down to half a million pieces per year, and a 2017 article indicates the number is down around 200,000.)

Martin had a friend, a guy named Jim Yellig. Born Raymond Joseph, but known to his friends as Jim, Yellig was another guy with a Santa association from early on. While he was serving in the Navy during the first World War, his ship was docked in Brooklyn, NY, and the crew was throwing a Christmas party for underprivileged children. Yellig was chosen to play Santa Claus. The story goes that he was apparently so touched by the children’s happiness at seeing “Santa” that he prayed “If you get me through this war, Lord, I will forever be Santa Claus.”

Yellig opened a restaurant called The Chateau in Mariah Hill, Indiana, a few miles north of Santa Claus, Indiana. He began driving to Santa Claus to visit his friend Martin, the postmaster, and soon after, Martin enlisted Yellig’s help in responding to the children’s Christmas letters. By 1935, Yellig formed the Santa Claus American Legion Post in order to assist with the letters as Santa’s helpers, and he began dressing up as Santa and making appearances around the town of Santa Claus, including at Santa’s Candy Castle. He actually took a class from Charles Howard’s Santa Claus School. Held at Santa’s Candy Castle in 1938, this was the only time these two incredibly famous Santas were known to have met. (A picture of this meeting can be found here.) From this point, Yellig began being known as “The Real Santa from Santa Claus”.

A Tale of the Santa Claus Statue

At the same time that Yellig was coming onto the scene, Harris’ plans for the Candy Castle caught the attention of another entrepreneur, reportedly Harris’ arch-rival, a guy named Carl Barrett. Now, Barrett decided that he didn’t like Harris’ “materialism”, and so Barrett began planning his own attraction, called “Santa Claus Park”, in direct competition with Harris, just down the road, less than half a mile away.

On Christmas Day 1935, just days after Harris’ Candy Castle opened, Barrett dedicated a 22-ft tall statue of Santa, erected on the highest hill in the town. He claimed it was paid for by the people, that it was built on the spot where a meteor had landed and therefore was divinely inspired, and that the statue was made out of granite. At least one of those claims later was revealed to be false.

Barrett’s plans were just as big as Harris’. Barrett wanted to make his Santa Claus Park a world shrine, a children’s dream paradise with log cabins, a giant doll house, and an ice village. It never moved forward, however, as in January, Harris sued Barrett, essentially derailing both their grand plans. 

Lawsuits went back and forth, mostly regarding land ownership, and even made it as high up as the Indiana Supreme Court. They were battling over the right to Santa. Harris and Martin were able to continue expanding Santa Claus Town due to their sponsor partnerships, but Barrett’s more principled “of the people” stance relied solely on personal donations due to his spectacular Santa.

But the thing was, people began to notice the statue didn’t look so great. In fact, it had started cracking and crumbling. And obviously, granite sculptures don’t do that. As it turns out, the statue was made out of concrete, and Barrett had lied. This obviously didn’t sit well with the townsfolk. Unfortunately, war broke out, World War II, more than just a petty squabble between business rivals. Things grew quiet in Santa Claus, IN, and the attractions there, especially Barrett’s Santa Claus Park, fell into disrepair and neglect.   

Santa Claus, AZ and Santa Claus, GA

Let’s step back in time a bit, and interrogate something I mentioned earlier. 

Now, apparently, by 1928, the US post office supposedly decided that there would be no other post office with the name of “Santa Claus” due to the influx of holiday mail and the staffing problems it caused over in Indiana. This is an unsubstantiated fact from Wikipedia, but it does appear to be technically accurate. There is only one post office in a town named Santa Claus, and that’s Santa Claus, IN. But there are two other towns by this name: one in AZ, and one in GA. 

Santa Claus, GA

I’ll discuss the latter first. Established in 1941, Santa Claus, GA is one of those cute little small American towns. Located a few miles from Vidalia (home of the onion by the same name), the town of Santa Claus, GA is tiny, with only a couple hundred people. It’s quaint, with holiday-themed street names, a Santa Claus mailbox (but not a post office!), and an oversized Santa statue that people can pose for pictures by. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the place for the purposes of our podcast – the town was reportedly named in an effort to drive traffic to local pecan farms. It’s too small for any fancy restaurants or attractions beyond the name, but it’s still there.

Santa Claus, AZ

Now, let’s get to Santa Claus, AZ. Santa Claus, in Arizona? Yup.

I grew up in the Arizona desert myself, and the notion of a Santa Claus town there has tickled my funny bone since I first heard about it. There’s just something so absurd about trying to focus on Santa and icicles and snow when you’re surrounded by creosote and tiny lizards and endless brown desert dirt, and don’t even own a winter coat. 

Santa Claus, AZ was the brainchild of a realtor named Ninon (sometimes spelled Nina) Talbot who was born in 1888. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to focus on a woman for part of this podcast, finally. 

The famous sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein had nothing but praise for Talbot, describing her thusly: “In her own field, she was an artist equal to Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare.” No, this was not the kind of caliber of person I was expecting when I set out to shape a holiday episode of a podcast about abandoned theme parks and attractions.

Talbot promoted herself as the biggest real estate agent in California, a fun play on words since she also was apparently over 300 pounds at the time. “The Biggest in the Business!” was her slogan, and thank goodness, we’ve got a person who has a sense of humor. Talbot and her husband moved from Los Angeles to Kingman (AZ) in the late 1920s or early 1930s, with the goal of selling land or setting up a resort or otherwise making some money. Kingman was a hub of sorts, functioning as the big city to service all the small mining towns that littered the hills. Too, it attracted folks stopping off old Route 66, the Mother Road.

Talbot established herself with a hotel first, called the Kit Carson Guest House, located right in the heart of Kingman at the intersection of what is now I-40 and US 93. Here she honed her skills in charisma and cooking, enticing guests. Said a person who knew her at the time “She knew how to treat people. She could sell you anything you didn’t even want.”

After a few years, Talbot sold the Kit Carson Guest House, with a new profitable venture in mind. She purchased 80 acres of land, some 14 miles north of the town of Kingman. (That’s probably meaningless to non-locals – the town in question is in the northwest section of the state, about an hour and a half south from Las Vegas, three and a half hours north of Phoenix.) 

The town of Santa Claus, with the obvious theming implied by the name, was officially incorporated in 1937.

She called it Santa Claus as a promotion, as a way to attract folks to the town to buy the 1-acre plots of land she was selling surrounding it, called Santa Claus Acres. Spoiler alert: it never really worked, and it’s generally accepted that the only people who actually lived in the town were the workers at the various town attractions.

Hoover Dam (Boulder Dam)

You might be asking yourself, though, why someone would think it was a good or profitable idea to try and sell land up in this remote area of the state, and to have it make sense, I need to tell you about what else was going on in AZ at the time. 

In the early 1900s through the 1920s, it was settled that a dam on the Colorado River would provide flood control, irrigation water, and hydroelectric power generation for a growing number of people occupying these desert towns. Additionally, it would allow US 93 to connect Arizona and Las Vegas, instead of the ferry boat in use prior. President Coolidge authorized the Boulder Canyon Project Act in December of 1928, and construction began in 1931 on one of America’s “Seven Modern Engineering Wonders”. 

Suddenly, tens of thousands of workers were moving into the area to begin building the massive dam, many living in the model city of Boulder City, Nevada. Not only that, but the construction of the dam was on such a huge scale that it became a tourist attraction before it was completed in 1936, and after. Suddenly there was this huge new audience driving past to see the Hoover Dam (originally called the Boulder Dam). 

Talbot was on to something.

Santa Claus AZ as an Attraction

At the time, drivers still expected to be surprised around every bend of the road. They wanted to have a great time, and not make great time, as the saying goes. Or perhaps didn’t have a choice – this was the age before the implementation of the interstate highway system (remember the beginning of the episode? It always ties in somehow!).  Thus, the proliferation and success of roadside attractions, corridors with wild theming and over the top names to entice drivers to stop. (Remember Prehistoric Forest in Irish Hills, MI, back in episode 4 of TAC?) It didn’t matter if the attraction itself was makeshift, a bit garish, and something of a let-down. It was the idea that mattered.

Santa Claus, AZ was one of these, enticing visitors as they drove to and from Vegas, Hoover Dam, Kingman, Phoenix, and so on.

See, while people didn’t actually want to live there, Talbot managed to create a fun roadside attraction nonetheless. Everything had a Santa theme or a North Pole theme, with candy-cane striped buildings and green roofs. It kind of had a Swiss chalet feeling, which was certainly startling in the desert (especially back in the day, it was a lot of adobe and cheap wood, not Swiss chalets with gingerbread trim). 

Talbot called her town “The Pride of the Desert”, and it was said that in its heyday, Santa Claus could rival anything else along old Route 66. (Only back then, it was new: Route 66 began paving in 1931.) Talbot’s charisma and excellent home cooking were perfect bedfellows for the incongruous theming at this otherwise lonely desert gas stop.

As famed writer Robert Heinlein, known for Starship Troopers among others, wrote of the town in his 1950 story “Cliff and the Calories”, as it arose from the “grimmest desert in the world”. “You know what most desert gas stations look like — put together out of odds and ends. Here was a beautiful fairytale cottage with wavy candy stripes in the shingles. It had a broad brick chimney — and Santa Claus was about to climb down the chimney! Between the station and the cottage were two incredible little dolls’ houses. One was marked Cinderella’s House, and Mistress Mary Quite Contrary was making the garden grow. The other one needed no sign: the Three Little Pigs, and the Big Bad Wolf was stuck in its’ chimney.”

The centerpiece building was named the Santa Claus Inn. Though some retellings of the town’s story indicate this was solely a renamed Kit Carson Guest House, this was a brand new building, designed by Talbot’s husband and built by local Kingsman contractor W. J. Zinck. In addition to the holiday decoration and prominent Santa Claus, a Christmas tree too stood outside (the building was later renamed the Christmas Tree Inn). 

Inside, the restaurant was decorated with nursery rhyme paintings from a former Disney animator, Walter Winsett. Breakfast was $0.75, about $13 in today’s money; lunch $1; and dinner $1.50. The restaurant was famed for its Chicken a la North Pole and Rum Pie a la Kris Kringle. Talbot dressed as Mrs. Claus, and brought her vivacious energy to the task at hand. “Any known or asked-for dish or delicacy asked for will be served. The everyday routine provision of ordinary food is not the policy of this cage,” she once said. Year round, she served five course meals every day. A historical postcard shows a sample menu: olives, celery, iceberg; fruit or shrimp cocktail; tomato or chicken soup; chicken, lamb chops, or filet mignon; sherbet; salad; multiple desserts like ice cream, pie, or cake; and coffee and mints. All, of course, with appropriately holiday-themed names. 

Talbot’s cooking brought some modicum of fame to the attraction. Famed food critic Duncan Hines (now best known for the cake mixes bearing his name) made early Zagat-type guides of good restaurants across the country for his friends – an essential at a time prior to GPS, cell phone data, or the internet. One of his recommendations was the Santa Claus Inn, which in addition to good food offered a moderately air-conditioned space through the use of swamp coolers, a relatively new technology at the time. Hines considered the Santa Claus Inn to be one of the best places to eat in Arizona, and even included her rum pie recipe in one of his cookbooks. “Perhaps the best rum pie you ever ate, chicken a la North Pole and lots of other unusual things.”

Other “attractions” included the tram shaped into a train, called “Santa Claus Arizona Express” with the “locomotive” called Old 12-25. A donkey wandered the grounds. Inside the two small cottages, nursery rhyme dioramas amused the children.

And of course, the special postbox. Although there was never an actual post office, a mailbox was available, with a special postmark – “Santa Claus, Arizona, via Kingman”. Talbot responded to every child’s Christmas letter. They also sent postcards to every visitor who stopped, whether for gas or food, reminding them to come back. 

The 30s through 50s in Santa Claus, AZ were a magical time.

Christmas Park, NY

We return to Albion, NY after the war, where our friend, Santa legend Charles Howard, had established his Santa Claus School. It ran for two months, in October and November, of each year. Howard continued to busy himself in the Santa Claus field. He served as Macy’s Santa-in-chief and reported was Santa in the first nationally televised Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He continued this appearance for the next 17 years, and even served as a Santa consultant for 1947’s “Miracle on 34th Street”.

Locally to Albion, Howard decided to expand his Santa Claus School with an attraction for the children, as well. It was called “Christmas Park”, and it was located right on his farm, where the school itself was located. 

In comparison with any true theme park, this is honestly closer to a playground with a theme, as honestly most summer festivals in my town have more rides and attractions today. Nonetheless, it was a draw for people of the time, when America was still recovering from the war and traveling locally. 

“Christmas Park” had a themed playground, a petting farm with goats and real reindeer, a wishing well, something called “Santa’s Gold Mine” (perhaps a pan for gold type attraction), a toy and gift shop, and a diesel-operated miniature train called “The Railmaster” that was memorable for going through a tunnel. Here’s a link to photos of the park in operation. Howard reportedly had a collection of antique sleighs placed throughout the park for theming purposes, as well. There was also a “Christmas Tree” ride, a specially made version of the classic Allan Herschell helicopter ride; instead of helicopters, the ride buggies were themed as Christmas ornaments. Inside the various barns and outbuildings, there were Christmas-themed displays, fake snow, and a constant stream of Christmas music.

The park opened in 1953, with a short 13-week summer season.

In later years, the park was open year round. According to accounts online from people who visited the park as children, there was no trouble believing in Santa Claus, because they lived in the same town and could see him anytime! 

Santa Claus Land: America’s First Theme Park

Back in Santa Claus, IN, the post-war landscape saw a lot of run-down attractions. A local businessman named Louis Koch entered the scene, looking for a retirement project. He and his wife had nine children, and loved the holidays. He thought the town of Santa Claus, with that wonderful name, needed more attractions that appealed to children, especially ones that featured Santa himself. In the early 40s, then, he purchased some lots of land in Santa Claus. The war postponed development on his attraction, and the family was able to break ground in 1945. 

The attraction was christened as “Santa Claus Land”, and it opened in August of 1946. And without much fanfare at all, I present to you the recognized first theme park in the US. That’s right, Koch’s little retirement project,“Santa Claus Land”, is considered America’s first theme park. 

It started out small, a sort of family business that Koch ran with his son Bill. Originally, the park had no entrance cost. It featured toy displays, Santa’s toy shop, a restaurant with a Bavarian village theme, and a few children’s rides, including the “Santa Claus Land Railroad”, a miniature train ride that went through Mother Goose-themed displays. And of course, there was Santa, portrayed by the legendary Jim Yellig who we talked about a little while ago, the so-called Real Santa Claus from Santa Claus.

Not only that, but the Santa Claus post office moved that same year, to a new building on the property of the Santa Claus Land park, when the former building was reported in bad condition. The original building itself was also moved and restored, renamed as House of Dolls, a doll exhibit.

Bill Koch, though initially pessimistic about the park’s chances for success, was buoyed by the first few years of operation, and he took over from his father. He expanded the park, adding a ride area (“Rudolph’s Reindeer Ranch”), the first Jeep-go-round ever manufactured (in 1947), and in 1948, a deer farm with a few of Santa’s reindeer. There were “educated animals” like the Fire Chief Rabbit and the Piano Playing Duck. There was a wax museum, called Hall of Famous Americans. 

The 1946 Christmas Room Restaurant was an incredibly popular “attraction” in the early years, like the Knotts’ serving chicken dinners that attracted long lines. Bill Koch was quoted as saying that their business in the early years was built on those chicken dinners.

In 1952, the Koch family put the park up for sale, with quite a few strings attached. The family was worried about the effect of managing the park on the Sr. Koch’s health. However, at the same time, they did not want to see the park commercialized. Reportedly, many of the townsfolk and park workers were opposed to the sale. Jim Yellig, said to have been Santa to more children than anyone else in the world, was quoted as saying “I hope it’s never sold. I’d be lost without this job. I love it so much.”

After a year on the market, the Koch family decided to retain ownership of the park. There had been several interested buyers, but none were willing to abide with the requirements on non-commercialization, so the decision was made to keep it within the family. 

By 1955, the park began charging admission: $0.50 for adults, kids free. A 1960 video is available on Youtube, showing a delightful scene of the park as it was.

In 1960, Bill Koch married Santa’s daughter, Patricia Yellig, daughter of Jim Yellig, a poetic reminder of the importance of the two families to the city of Santa Claus, IN. 

The Decline of Santa Claus, AZ

Back in Arizona, Talbot’s time at Santa Claus was coming to an end. World War II hadn’t necessarily been kind, closing US 93 road access across Hoover Dam for several years in the 1940s and slowing tourist traffic. Talbot’s husband Ed passed away in 1942, and she remarried two years later, still operating the restaurant and promoting her Santa Claus Acres lots. Several of the lots sold, but none were ever built upon, despite the proximity to the booming tourist attraction of the Hoover Dam and the location along the route to Las Vegas. Why?

Water, as always is the story in the desert. 

Santa Claus, AZ had unexpectedly been built atop land where the water table was very deep, due to a nearby geologic fault. No successful wells were dug, so water had to be hauled by tanker the 14 miles from Kingman, an expensive task. Notes on each dining table reminded guests not to waste water, signed “Mrs. Claus”. 

Talbot also began losing interest in running her tourist attraction due to her increasing gambling habit, reportedly gambling away entire days’ profits at a time. Her second husband died in 1947, and she was getting older, becoming less interested in water conservation and constant food service, especially with the lure of the gambling tables nearby. In 1950, she sold Santa Claus and moved back to Los Angeles near her children. 

The new owners, Doc and Erma Bromaghim, carried on where Ninon Talbot had left off, and for a decade, it was still a holiday at Santa Claus. However, business began to slow, and the Bromaghims began closing the attraction December through February starting in the mid-50s, in order to save money. Water again was a big issue. They were exhausted with trucking water, and reportedly drilled down a staggering 2,000 feet deep, still not finding water. This was the last straw, and they sold Santa Claus in 1965.

And from here, it was nothing but downhill for Santa Claus, with the common end-of-life tale for roadside attractions like this. At least eight different owners spun through the place, which clearly drew in those who didn’t give thought to the practicalities of water and customer service. But of course, no owner lasted long, and no one invested any money in improvements or even upkeep. Maintenance slipped, and things got shabby. The new owners stopped answering the children’s Christmas letters each year.

The holiday aesthetic of the neat and charming Santa village was lost. 

Where once there was Mrs. Santa Claus and her Rum Pie, there now was microwave sandwiches. The gas station closed, becoming a very slow moving antique and curio shop specializing in music boxes. One owner reportedly favored using mannequins in parked cars in an attempt to give the attraction an air of business. 

Author Mark Winegardner described the latter days of Santa Claus in his 1987 book “Elvis Presley Boulevard: From Sea to Shining Sea, Almost”: “Styrofoam silver bells, strands of burned-out Christmas lights and faded plastic likenesses of Old Saint Nick garnished this little village. A lopsided, artificial twenty-foot tree whistled in the wind beside a broken Coke machine and an empty ice freezer. Two of the three buildings were padlocked; through their windows, encrusted with layers of sand and decade-old aerosol snow.”

Drivers in the second half of the century weren’t looking for roadside attractions and surprises like their parents and grandparents had, either. People wanted to get where they were going, be it to the glimmers of Phoenix in one direction or Vegas in the other. 

A variety of new uses for Santa Claus were proposed throughout the years, but nothing went beyond the dreaming stage: a foster home, a trailer park, a cocktail lounge, a shopping center. Ultimately, the town was wiped from the official maps, and officially closed services in 1993 (some sources say 1995).

The entire “town” has been for sale off and on since. As of this recording, you can buy Santa Claus, Arizona for the princely sum of $440,000. The real estate listing (which you can view here) dully lists a brief history of the place, ending with the following in a scream, sans punctuation and with several typographical and grammatical errors: “4 ACRE ON MAJOR HWY BRING BACK THE ORGINAL TOWN OF SANTA CLAUSE ONCE HAD ITS ON POST OFFICE NUMBER THINK OF A GREAT SHOW CAR AND BIKE STOP MAKE A STATEMENT, REBUILD AND DRAW IN THE TOURIST AND LOCALS”. 

Route 93, where Santa Claus is located, is still the sole route between Vegas and the major Arizona cities, yet Santa Claus sits abandoned, covered in graffiti and dilapidated on the side of the road, in the middle of the harsh and unyielding Mojave Desert. 

It’s a cautionary note for the future of many desert cities, as water in the area becomes more scarce. What happens when a place is no longer habitable? Here lies Santa Claus, Arizona. 

Images of the abandoned interiors: http://www.placesthatwere.com/2015/07/christmas-tree-inn-in-abandoned-santa.html

The End of Santa Claus Land and Christmas Park and Santa Claus School? No.

It was reportedly one of Charles Howard’s great dreams, that modest little theme park called “Christmas Park”, sitting next to the school for Santa Clauses in Albion, NY. It was ultimately not a long-lived park, however. Howard became distressed with the direction the park was heading in 1964, quoted in an article at the time as saying, “They put in merry-go-rounds and ferris wheels. I have nothing against these things, but in Christmas Park a ferris wheel should be in the form of a Christmas wreath, and a merry-go-round should have reindeer to ride on.” His complaints came along with reports of financial troubles, and the next year in 1965, Christmas Park filed for bankruptcy, about ¾ of a million dollars in debt in today’s money. 

The entire operation was sold at auction; a man named Vincent Cardone purchased the school and theme park, and a woman named Elizabeth Babcock purchased the Santa suit business she’d been managing for several years. Other items and tracts of land were sold to other buyers. 

Howard died in 1966. Said by a journalist at the time, he “guided his sleigh into the limitless great beyond.”

http://nyhistoric.com/2012/12/santa-claus/ The remnants of Christmas Park were left alone, untouched by all accounts over the last 50 or so years, and still remain to this day, including the old train tunnel and the barns, some still with signs attached and Christmas wreaths decorating the insides. Today, a historical marker stands on the site. It reads: “Santa Claus. Charles W. Howard, 1896-1966. In 1937 he established here a world famous Santa Claus School, the first of its kind, and 1953 Christmas Park. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Santa Claus”. 

What about Santa Claus Land? 

The park continued to add new rides through the 60s, 70s and 80s, delightfully detailed on the park’s official timeline page: https://www.holidayworld.com/holiblog/2019/05/15/timeline-santa-claus-land-holiday-world-splashin-safari/  In the 1970s, the park moved its entrance, signalling a major focus change from kid-focused to whole-family entertainment. They added nine major rides over the next decade. By 1984, the park changed its name to Holiday World, expanding with two new holiday-themed areas, Halloween and 4th of July. Jim Yellig served as Santa at the park from its opening in 1946 until a few months before his death in 1984. There’s also been a couple of community housing developments from the Koch family, called Christmas Lake Village and Holiday Village.

1993 saw the addition of a major waterpark called Splashin’ Safari, and 2006 saw the addition of a Thanksgiving themed area to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the park. The park is of course, still open today, a major, award-winning theme park and waterpark, and at least four generations of the Koch family have owned the park. In 2004, it won the international Applause award, honoring “foresight, originality, and creativity, plus sound business development and profitability,” the smallest theme park at the time to ever win said award. 

Ironically, the park is once again no longer open during the Christmas season, closed mid-November through mid-May. Visitors to Santa Claus, IN can find themselves in the same situation as folks 70 years ago – not a lot of Santa Claus in Santa Claus around the holidays. 

As part of the park’s 70th anniversary celebrations, the “Freedom Train”, the miniature railroad engine that had been the last original ride removed from the park, was brought back as a stationary display, considered by the park’s president as “an important part of our history”.

As for the Santa Claus School, it too is still in operation. It operated in Albion until 1968, at which point Charles Howard’s friends, Nate and Mary Ida Doran, moved the school to Bay City, MI. Tom and Holly Valent took over operation in 1987, and the school moved to Midland, MI, where it still teaches approximately 300 Santas per year today. 

And as of 2010, professional Santa Phillip L. Wenz authored the Santa Claus Oath, a set of guiding principles for those seeking to embody Santa Claus. It was dedicated in the honor of Charles Howard and Jim Yellig, in the rotunda of Santa’s Candy Castle, there in Santa Claus, IN. https://santaclausoath.webs.com/abouttheoath.htm 

Conclusions

Now, to the pedantic out there as we get back to our question about earliest theme parks. You might also award Knott’s Berry Farm the title of the first theme park, as it had a Wild West and Ghost Town area that opened all the way back in 1941. However, it was still primarily a restaurant at the time and didn’t become an enclosed theme park officially until the 50s or 60s. But that’s really neither here nor there. And of course, if you broaden the question to include “amusement” parks and not just theme parks, you’ll have to go back to the 1500s.

Of course, there was another Christmas theme park that was also considered one of the first theme parks in the US. But we’ll have to save that one for another year.

I really liked this quote I found while researching for this episode, in an article about historical preservation and Charles Howard. Orleans County historian Matt Ballard writes in a 2018 article: “Material culture serves a valuable purpose in the process of interpreting the past. Void of any physical representation of past cultures, we would lose all ability to understand the lives of those who lived without a voice.” It’s this quote that shines a light on at least my own fascination with abandoned places and abandoned theme parks. What we leave behind helps us understand what came before, especially if they were a person of less power.

Charles Howard, one of the great Santa Clauses, himself wrote a letter in favor of historical preservation for landmark buildings in Albion in the 1960s. From a young age, too, Howard realized that teaching the role of Santa was a great task and always viewed that task as a privilege. So important was this role, that Howard remarked, “To say there is no Santa Claus is the most erroneous statement in the world. Santa Claus is a thought that is passed from generation to generation. After time this thought takes on a human form. Maybe if all children and adults understand the symbolism of this thought we can actually attain Peace on Earth and good will to men everywhere.”

References

Santa Claus, AZ

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Santa Claus, IN; Charles Howard; Santa Claus Land

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Other Santa Claus References

1. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Life_and_Adventures_of_Santa_Claus&oldid=929426527. Accessed December 5, 2019.
2. Boissoneault L. A Civil War Cartoonist Created the Modern Image of Santa Claus as Union Propaganda. Smithsonian. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/civil-war-cartoonist-created-modern-image-santa-claus-union-propaganda-180971074/. Accessed December 5, 2019.
3. Christmas. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christmas&oldid=928552167. Accessed December 5, 2019.
4. Copyrigit Messages. http://smib.tripod.com/copyrght.htm. Accessed December 5, 2019.
5. How Coca-Cola invented Christmas as we know it. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2017/12/16/how-coca-cola-invented-christmas-as-we-know-it_partner/. Published December 16, 2017. Accessed December 9, 2019.
6. How Santa brought Coca-Cola in from the cold. National Museum of American History. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/santa-coca-cola. Published December 17, 2014. Accessed December 5, 2019.
7. Ought it not be a Merry Christmas? https://www.alexandriava.gov/historic/fortward/default.aspx?id=39996. Accessed December 6, 2019.
8. Santa Claus. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Santa_Claus&oldid=928457109. Accessed December 5, 2019.
9. Santa Claus, Georgia. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Santa_Claus,_Georgia&oldid=926675816. Accessed December 8, 2019.
10. The True History of the Modern Day Santa Claus. The Coca-Cola Company. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/coke-lore-santa-claus. Accessed December 5, 2019.
11. Thomas Nast | Santa Claus in Camp (published in Harper’s Weekly, January 3, 1863) | The Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/427502. Accessed December 5, 2019.
12. Trolley park. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trolley_park&oldid=919839820. Accessed December 4, 2019.
13. Solutions UCC-O. USPS Operation Santa. http://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm. Accessed December 9, 2019.
14. Where Was the First Department Store Santa Claus? New England Today. December 2018. https://newengland.com/today/living/new-england-history/first-department-store-santa-claus/. Accessed December 6, 2019.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

The post A Town Called Santa Claus appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

Audio credits: Podcast cover background photo is by 4045 on freepik.com. Carousel cover photo is by James Loesch, Flickr, CCBY2.0. Theme music is from “Aerobatics in Slow Motion” by TeknoAXE. Incidental music is from “Olde Timey” by Kevin Macleod / incompetech.com. 

Coney Island

Our story today begins almost 200 years ago.

In 1829, Coney Island, a peninsula with sandy beaches, was linked to NYC by road. The first resorts there opened up as a result. Along with the resorts came something that we ironically rarely talk about: a carousel. 

“Balmer’s Carousel” at Coney Island opened in 1875, featuring hand-carved wooden animals and powered by a steam engine. This carousel was designed by a man named Charles Looff. 

Looff was German, with the birth name  Carl Jürgen Detlev Looff .He immigrated to the US at the age of 18, in 1870. At Ellis Island, he Americanized his name from Carl to Charles. 

He moved to Brooklyn. There, he reportedly worked as a furniture carver during the day, but took wood scraps home with him and in his leisure hours began carving animals. After a few years, he had sufficient carousel animals carved that he set them up on a platform. Attached to a motor, the platform went around in a circle: et voila, a carousel. Looff set them up at Vanderveer’s bathing pavilions on Coney Island. It was Coney Island’s first carousel and according to some, its first amusement ride.

History of the Carousel

Now, the carousel as a ride has its origins in many cultures, centuries and centuries back. I won’t go too in-depth into the nitty-gritty details, but we might as well have a bit of history.

In brief, you can find carousel-like concepts in many cultures, as far back as 500 AD. 

The name carousel itself has its roots in the Spanish word “carosella”, meaning little battle. This word has it roots in the Italian word for chariot, which in turn ties back into the proto-Indo-European “carrus”, meaning “to run”. In Europe, between 1500 and 1800, the meaning of a carousel evolved from jousting practice to showy horseman dressage to carved wooden animals on display on the carnival circuit.

In the 1800s, the steam engine was invented, refining the carousel into what we know it today. Carousels in the 1800s and most of the 1900s were incredibly popular rides on the fair circuit. A contemporaneous writer from the mid-1860s described the ride as such: it “whirled around with such impetuousity, that the wonder is the daring riders are not shot off like cannon- ball, and driven half into the middle of next month.”

And in the United States moving into the 1900s, the carousel industry was booming, led by immigrants like Gustav Dentzel and our friend Charles Looff, both from Germany. The turn of the century was the golden age of the carousel. 

In the golden age of carousels, each horse and animal were hand-carved; several different dominant styles arose. Country Fair style was the hallmark of popular amusement names Allan Herschell and Edward Spillman, characterized by simpler horses often without saddles. These Country Fair style carousels were often easy to move.

Philadelphia style was the next major style, the hallmark of names like Gustav Dentzel and the Philedelphia Toboggan Company. These carousels were often menagerie carousels (horses as well as non-horse animals) and had realistic saddles and detailed carvings.

Finally, Coney Island style, characterized by flamboyance, mirrors, lights, elaborate saddles, and jewel-bedecked animals. Looff was the biggest name in this style, and taught many others, such as Illions.

At the height of the carousel’s popularity, over 5,000 carousels are said to have simultaneously operated in the US. 

In general, it seems as though every amusement park, even nowadays, has a carousel – it could be one of the most popular rides at a theme park. 

Looff’s 18th Carousel

As noted, Looff not only built the first carousel and first amusement park attraction for Coney Island, but went on to build many carousels, a theme park, oh, and the Santa Monica Pier (the Newcomb Pier side). 

I already mentioned this, but it is worth emphasizing his renown for being the premiere carver in the Coney Island style, where carousels were decorated flamboyantly and elaborately, from the carousel structure all the way down to the saddles on the horses.

Looff’s 18th carousel was built around 1910, in conjunction with Gustav Dentzel. Different sources place one or the other of the carvers as the true designer. For the purposes of this story right now, I’ll refer to it as Looff’s carousel. 

Around the same time, the Manhasset Realty Company was formed for the purposes of purchasing the Seaside Heights beachfront property in New Jersey. 

The 18th carousel didn’t go directly to the newly-formed Seaside Heights, however. Instead, it went to a small park on an island in the Delaware River, near Philadelphia. It was called Burlington Island.

Burlington Island

The island had originally been named Mantinicunk Island by the original inhabitants, the Lenape people, Mantinicunk meaning Island of Pines. It changed hands many times after the first European settlement there in the 1600s, as well as names: High Island and Verhulsten Island were names prior to the modern Burlington Island.

Eventually, it was granted to the city of Burlington for primarily farming use. The residents reportedly often campaigned for a bridge to be built between the island and the city of Burlington on the mainland, which never did happen. 

In 1900, the first family picnic resort opened on the lower half of the island. (And here, I’ll pause to say that if you remember back to the Rose Island episode (theabandonedcarousel.com/10) you’ll see many parallels to the story of Burlington Island, as they are contemporaries.)

The developer put in picnic tables and a bath house, built a pier, and had sand deposited in order to form a beach. There was also an ice cream stand. All told, this was a huge draw at the turn of the century. Reportedly, 4,000 people visited the island in just a single day at the peak of the 1902 season. An early contemporaneous description of the park was “An ideal temperance picnic resort”.

Around 1907, with things going so well, the park owners reportedly talked to the owner of another park – Rancocas Lake Park, in Mount Laurel, NJ. That park was a trolley park. 

A Brief Sidebar on Trolley Parks

We haven’t really discussed the concept yet here on TAC, but trolley parks are an important park of amusement park history. In the latter part of the 1800s, working hours were reduced, disposable income was on the rise, and rapid industrialization was occuring. Trolley or streetcar lines sat idle on the weekends, much to the dismay of their operating companies. In an effort to increase weekend ridership and therefore profits, the companies began building “trolley parks” at the end of the lines. These were were small amusement and resort areas, often near lakes or beaches, with picnic grounds, carousels, and other small mechanical amusement attractions. 

Trolley parks, then, are the precursors to the modern amusement park, and in some cases some are still operational (you might know about Lakemont Park in Altoona PA or Kennywood in Pittsburgh PA. Most famously, you might know Lake Compounce in Bristol CT, built in 1846 and considered the oldest continuously operating amusement park in the US).

Development and Downfall of Burlington Island Beach Park

Back to Rancocas Lake Park, as we were talking about, was located about 12 miles south of Burlington Island. It was opened by a man named George Potts in the early 1900s. Rancocas Park was a classic trolley park. There were picnic groves, a dance pavilion, a midway, and a carousel and other amusement rides. 

This is an episode about a carousel, so let’s enjoy ourselves, and briefly talk about that carousel, there at Rancocas Lake Park. It was described as a “classic Philadelphia carousel”, housed in its own building to keep off the elements. It reportedly had beautifully carved horses and was quite popular with the visitors to Rancocas Lake Park. 

The owners of Burlington Island came to a deal with Potts around 1907. In a move to generate additional revenue, Potts relocated several of his amusement rides to Burlington Island for several years. These rides joined a set of large swing cages already present on the island.

After an unknown time, Burlington Island management purchased updated versions of the rides they had onsite, and Potts’ rides were moved back to Rancocas Park in Mount Laurel. 

It was somewhere in this timeframe that the 18th Looff carousel was built, between 1908 and 1910, and subsequently delivered to Burlington Island. The carousel featured chariots and animals that were carved by Looff, as well as by other big names in the carousel world: Dentzel, Morris, Carmel, and Illions. This carousel is reportedly considered unique in that it was worked on by so many of the master carvers. There were 35 jumping horses, 18 standing horses, a lion, tiger, mule, two camels, and two chariots. Some of its animals are even reported dated to the 1890s. 

(Click this link to see images of the carousel at Burlington Island.)

The carousel was reportedly quite popular, as was Burlington Island. Visitors came in droves from both sides of the river: from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

New Ownership at Burlington Island

In 1917, the island was sold, and the new owners, George Bassler and Robert Merkel, began up the amusement park, giving it the longer name of Burlington Island Beach Park. The newly updated park was described by one source as “elaborate”. A 1921 Bristol Daily Courier article described the owners’ goals for the park were to become “one of the biggest and most popular pleasure resorts in the East”.

(The same 1921 article devotes more than one paragraph to the food served at the meeting between Burlington Island management and the local communities. Roast pig was served, garnished with an oyster dressing. On the side, roasted sweet and white potatoes, hamburg steak, corn, celery, bread, pickles, coffee, pie, and cheese. Hungry?)

New attractions were set to be opened May 15, 1922, including “a roller-coaster, a merry-go-round, whip, airships and Venetian swings,” according to the newspaper article. Other sources mention a Ferris wheel, a boat swing, an “ocean wave”, a Tunnel of Love, Steeplechase, Tumblebug, Dodge-em cars, bumper scooters, caterpillar, a fun house, a rifle range, and a pony ride.

The centerpiece of the updated park was a delightful wooden coaster called “The Greyhound”, which had already begun construction in fall 1921. This was a lovely out-and-back coaster. From the article, described by a representative of Baker & Miller Company: “It is to have a 4000 feet run, with a height of 55 feet and eight dips. […]   There will be a 400 feet tunnel at the beginning of the ride. This will be dark and suitable for lovesick couples. The coaster will be the very latest thing of its kind.” 

This coaster was designed by John A. Miller, the “Miller” in Baker & Miller Company, and built by Harry C. Baker, the “Baker” in Baker & Miller Company. (Miller and Baker were a dynamic duo, responsible for many popular coasters of the era. Miller is considered by some to be the father of the modern high-speed coaster due to his design for the underfriction wheel, patented in 1919 and used on nearly every coaster in the world today.) 

(a great view of the coaster here and here) 

Of course, there was a miniature train, too, this one called the Reading RR. 

The carousel too got an upgrade. A Wurlington military band organ, model 146A, was shipped to Wissahicken Station in May 1924, to entertain the guests with delightful music as they whirled on their horses.

Reportedly, the Burlington Island Beach Park became the hit of the river under new ownership. 1927 ad copy described the park, saying: “Nature’s beauty and modern amusement devices combine to make Burlington Island one of tho most popular pleasure parks. ” Thousands took river excursions up and down the Delaware, leading to 6 or 7 steamers idling at the pier at a time. Some would come by train and take the ferry. The ferryboat was called the William E. Doron, and shuttled people back and forth from Bristol to the island. There was a promenade and a midway, lighted walking paths, and multiple rides. As the industrial age came into full swing, this was the place to be.

Two Stories of Fire at Burlington Island

Now, there are two semi-conflicting stories about the flaming end of Burlington Island. The common point between both is the method. The end came with fire, the nemesis of many early parks; at quibble is the dates.

The first is the most common, and is repeated almost everywhere, including the Historic American Buildings Survey, number HABS NJ-1141, through the Library of Congress. It tells of two fires, the first and most destructive in 1928. It goes like this:

In 1928, a fire is said to have begun at 2 am. As the park was on an island, the firefighters and firefighting equipment had to be ferried across. As such, nearly all of the rides and amusements had burned to the ground by the time the firefighters were able to begin fighting the fire.

The fire more or less destroyed the amusement park, and a second fire in 1934 sealed the fate of the park. 

The other story is newer but reputable, making it worth describing here, and comes from historian Paul W. Schopp, to the Riverton NJ Historical Society. At the link, you can see the original rectangular carousel building as well as the newer round building. 

Schopp maintains that no fire occurred at Burlington Island in the 1920s, and especially not in 1928. He points out the timing (the Great Depression) and the closure of Delaware River steamboat traffic as factors that lead to the closure of the rides and concessions at the amusement park by the end of the 1920s. 

Schopp describes the conflagration similarly to the previous story, and references the date April 24, 1932. 

There is a freely-accessible OCR text available for the Daily News in New York for this day, describing multiple fires that broke out in the area the night previous; however, this describes only a small fire on Burlington Island (“Two small houses and several barns were -destroyed in a blaze that covered a wide area on Burlington Island in the Delaware River.”) and otherwise describes a fire destroying the scenic railway and concessions at Bayonne Pleasure Park, a different lost NJ theme park.

However, an alternate article from the Asbury Press from the same day provides a clearer view. The paper describes how the fire swept through the entire island, causing a loss of over $100,000, including summer homes and most of the amusement park buildings. 

Schopp then gives the dates of January 28, 1934 for the second fire, which can be backed up by an article from the Bristol Daily Courier. The paper describes how the firefighters from Bristol and Burlington were ferried to the island to put out the blaze, reportedly accidentally caused by two young boys. “One of the amusement concessions, the scenic railway, partially wrecked by the flames, can be seen on the right. In the foreground are firemen battling the blaze with buckets of water and chemicals.” The image being referenced does show the half-burnt scenic railway coaster Greyhound, visible even in the free public-access view. Another article from “The Mercury” charmingly describes the firefighters rowing themselves across the Delaware in rowboats with buckets to attempt to fight the fire.

Mystery of the 1928 Fire

So based on newspaper reports – primary sources – we know there was a fire in 1932, and another fire that sealed the deal in 1934. What about 1928? Well, a 1972 retrospective in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the history of the island gives the date of 1928 for a first, damaging fire. And as mentioned earlier, nearly every single secondary source discussing the carousel’s history mentions a 1928 fire. However, I’ve been unable to find any newspaper reference to a 1928 fire at Burlington Island.

Whenever exactly the first fire occurred, the hero of today’s story, Looff’s 18th carousel, miraculously escaped the blaze nearly unscathed, and was only partially damaged by fire. 

Burlington Island, however, was done for. Merkel, without the interest or funds to rebuild, sold the land (this to the VanSciver Sand Company) and began selling off any salvageable amusement rides. In the 50s, the sand company began mining sand and gravel from their half of the island, where the former amusement park used to be. This created the large lake that can now be seen in aerial views of the island. Currently, the city of Burlington now owns this half of the island. The other half is owned by a Board of Island Managers, a trust that actually predates the formation of the US, back to 1682. Their charter states that any development on their portion of the land must be “educational, conservational, historical, or recreational ”.

Currently in 2019, Burlington Island is undeveloped.

Seaside Heights: the early years

Now, let’s pause for a moment and head 60 miles due east from Burlington Island, to Seaside Heights, NJ, going back in time. When I last mentioned Seaside Heights a few minutes ago, it was the early 1900s, and a development company had just purchased the property with the intent to build. This was exciting, because the land is and was a barrier island, not useful for farming or producing any food). The general opinion at the time was reportedly that oceanfront property was unattractive, though developers were trying to change this. Excursion trains (trolleys) began running to the area on the weekends to the newly built resorts. By 1915, the land was changing hands at a public auction. At the same time, the first carousel opened at Seaside Heights – a steam-driven Dentzel carousel located on pilings only a few hundred feet from the shoreline.

The land took its first steps towards becoming a tourism and amusement mecca. A man named Joseph Vanderslice and the Senate Amusement Company built a gasoline-powered carousel, among other amusements. This failed within a year, lasting from 1915 through 1916.

The next summer, 1917, local builder Frank Freeman installed an electric Dentzel carousel in a building right on the water’s edge, reportedly with figures carved by Daniel Muller. The National Carousel Association describes Muller, saying that he “is generally recognized as the greatest carver of carousel animals, carving very realistic and artistic animals.” Reportedly, his only remaining carousels are at Forest Park (in Queens, NY) and at Cedar Point (in Ohio).

Freeman not only added a carousel, but other amusements as well: an indoor dance hall, an arcade, a skating rink, and a pier for fishing. It was named the Freeman Amusement Center, and became a successful trolley park.

The Carousel at the Heart of Casino Pier

This brings us back to the timeframe of Burlington Island and its 1928 fire, which had more or less destroyed the park. 

There was a man. A man named Robert Merkel. He had gotten involved with the development of Seaside Heights. The name might sound familiar, as he’d been the previous owner of Burlington Island. 

Merkel facilitated the sale of the Looff carousel to a Princeton contractor, Linus Gilbert. Gilbert wanted to bring some competition to the popular Freeman’s Amusement Center in Seaside Heights.

Some of the horses on the Looff carousel from Burlington Island were missing or damaged, but overall the carousel was in reasonable condition. Gilbert, of the L. R. Gilbert Construction Company, purchased the carousel and moved it to Seaside Heights. The carousel was restored, and the missing and overly damaged horses replaced with horses from other carousels.

The Wurlitzer band organ moved with the carousel, as well. With serial number 3673, the band organ is a style 146A.

In 1932, the carousel was officially opened at Seaside Heights. Gilbert had brought the original cupola building from Burlington Island, as well. The 10-sided unenclosed building did little to keep the weather off, and made the neighbors complain due to the noise of the Wurlitzer organ. Additionally, the Looff carousel was smaller and less elaborate than the neighboring Freeman carousel at the other end of the boardwalk. It was also completely detached from the other established amusements in the area. At the north end of the boardwalk, there was only the Looff carousel and a fishing pier, nothing else. The first few years were tight.

Not only locally, but nationally. It was the Great Depression. The economy of hand-carved carousels was collapsing – it was too expensive. Starting from the 1930s onward, fiberglass, aluminium, and plastic molds were the regular order of the day.  

Within five years, however, Gilbert built a larger surrounding complex around the carousel, including an Olympic-sized chlorine swimming pool. This was called the Seaside Heights Pool, and was reportedly a really “big deal” in the community, according to a later owner of Casino Pier. This drew thousand of people and gave reason to build more attractions along the pier. A fishing pier was built oceanwards with a few more modest attractions.

The Early Days of Casino Pier

In 1948, a man named John Fitzgerald and his business partner John Christopher purchased Casino Pier from Linus Gilbert. Carousels were beginning to fall out of favor. The younger generation was seeking thrills, and the older generation couldn’t make up the gap. The audience for slow-moving carousels began to dwindle. Oftentimes, the most efficient way to dispose of a carousel at a theme park looking for space was to literally set it on fire. Can you even imagine.

The town of Seaside Heights began to expand after the war, with veterans coming back for the good jobs and pleasant inexpensive oceanside housing, and this meant expansion for Seaside Heights amusements, as well. Kenneth Wynne Jr had married Fitzgerald’s daughter. Wynne was a lawyer and a lobbyist, and later worked for a TV station. 

Meanwhile, down the beach, catastrophe visited the Freeman’s carousel, that glorious Muller carousel with its beautiful details. Yes, another fire. The wooden carousel burned to the ground, completely destroyed. Floyd Moreland references a “phantom carousel” in a letter to the site Carousel Corner, saying it “operated only half of the summer of 1955 with the Carmel and Borelli animals on it”. An Illions carousel, formerly the Chafatino Carrousel from Coney Island, replaced it in 1957. This was a truly spectacular carousel – check out this image for some details. With the new carousel came a new pier and name – Funtown Pier.

In the late 50s, Fitzgerald came to Wynne to take over some of the park management and operations. Christopher had passed away in 1959, and Fitzgerald inherited full ownership rights. Wynne, Fitzgerald’s son-in-law, accepted the offer to manage the park, somewhere between 1958 and 1960. ”I liked the idea of coming to the Casino Pier here because it was show biz, something with a flair to it,’ he said in a newspaper interview.

Expansions and Firsts at Casino Pier

Wynne quickly expanded the pier eastward, and began adding amusements and rides. Our hero, the Dentzel/Looff carousel, got an upgrade to its Wurlitzer organ, with the conversion from a single-roll to a double roll. A fascinating 2001 article from Carousel Organ details exactly how Wurlitzer rolls are made, including photos. Well worth reading!

Wynne met up with Zurich-born Eddy Meir, who sold amusement rides on the behalf of the manufacturers. Meir and Wynne built up a good and regular relationship. “each year he would bring another spectacular ride”, Wynne is quoted as saying.  The first true rollercoaster at the pier was a Schiff wooden Wild Mouse coaster, opened in 1958, though, a kiddie coaster is said to have been at the pier in both 1952 and 1964.

In 1963, the first Himalaya ride in the US opened, right here at Casino Pier. You might remember the Himalaya from a different episode on this podcast, the Elektrenai episode, where I went a bit more in-depth into the Caterpillar and Music Express rides (Himalaya is another name for Music Express). 

1964 saw the installation of the Skyride, taking visitors from the pool area all the way to the east end of the pier at the time. This was essentially a Skyway-type ride, offering excellent views and a mild thrill. The Skyway had been a novelty and a marvel stateside when it opened at Disneyland in 1956, if you recall back to the early episodes of TAC. Parks around the country jumped to follow in Walt’s footsteps, and the Disneyland’s imported European Skyway began a US boom within the next decade.

1965 Fire at Casino Pier

1965 saw the expansion of the pier, 320 further feet out into the ocean. Additional things were to happen, though. On June 10, 1965, a major fire whipped up by the wind on the pier destroyed many of the rides. In particular, the Wild Mouse was absolutely burnt to a crisp. Interestingly, this was all caught on film and is available on YouTube. In the video, you can see the fire burning on and around the ferris wheel, wild mouse, that two-year-old Himalaya, and a scrambler. The video continues as firefighters put out the blaze with patrons looking on. A later article describes how the fishermen were so intent on having their fishing pier back that they reportedly chipped in free labor with Casino Pier-provided materials to begin the rebuilding effort.

A second wild mouse was brought in for the remainder of the 1965 season, running at a different place on the pier. By 1966, a third wild mouse was brought in and placed on the site of the original Schiff Wild Mouse. An image of the coaster during this time can be seen here. However, this wild mouse also only lasted the year, and it wouldn’t be for another 30+ years that another wild mouse would be installed at Casino Pier.

1970s at Casino Pier: “Firsts”

A small metal Zyklon coaster operated for a few years, between 1967 and 1969. 

In 1970, a Schwarzkopf Jet Star was purchased new and installed on the pier. You might remember a sibling of the Jet Star we’ve already discussed on the podcast: the Jet Star 2, SBNO at Children’s World in Elektrenai. (Though it may not be SBNO for long; internet hearsay is that some of the rides at Elektrenai have already been demolished between the time of that recording and the time of this recording. How about THAT for a live update?) 

In 1975, the first Enterprise ride in the United States was installed, right here at Casino Pier. Remember, Wynne was notably interested in the European ride circuit. You might remember the Enterprise ride from the Abandoned Yangon Amusement Park episode here on TAC. 

In 1976, the Wurlitzer organ on the carousel received a major rebuild from the BAB Organ Company. At the same time, mirrors featuring sculpted horseheads were added to the center pole of the carousel. Originally, there had been paintings in this position; however, these were destroyed in the 1950s (cause of the destruction unclear) and cartoon prints had been in place there between the 1950s through 976. The mirrors + horseheads are still in place today.

In 1979, the “Love Bugs” indoor/outdoor coaster was added – this was a ride built in 1959 for a travelling German carnival, known then as the Broadway Trip. This coaster operated at a number of different parks before arriving at Casino Pier, including Fun Forest in Seattle, Cedar Point in Ohio, and Palisades in New Jersey. This coaster was renamed to Wizard’s Cavern in 1988, and finally demolished in 2003 – a good long run for a once-travelling coaster.

1984: Floyd Moreland Saves the Carousel

In 1984, Wynne nearly sold the Loof/Dentzel carousel. By this time, the carousel was in need of repair, and a sale had reportedly been arranged to the tune of $275,000. Individual horses were selling for up to $100,000 at that time, as private collectors saw value in carousel horses in their living rooms and not at theme parks. Down the beach, the Illions Chafatino carrousel had been broken up and sold at auction, to be replaced by a Chance Rides fiberglass carousel.

Ultimately, Wynne decided not to sell the Looff carousel.

Why?

Enter Dean of the City University of New York, also a classics professor, Dr. Floyd Moreland. He’d ridden the carousel as a young child every summer. In his later adolescence and college years, he worked at the Casino Pier, operating the same carousel, coming back from school in California to operate the ride. “It paid my way through college. It paid my way through graduate school,” he is quoted as saying to the paper. He began campaigning to save the carousel when rumors began to spread about its demise.

Ultimately, he succeeded, and with a group of dedicated volunteers and private donors, began to refurbish the carousel in the unheated building during the pier’s off-season. Members of the community were able to donate to support the restoration, and many of the animals are inscribed with the names of particular donors.

One of the prominent people involved in the restoration was veterinarian Dr. Norma Menghetti. She assisted Dr. Moreland in patching and painting: the animals, the chariots, even the original paintings on the center pole. Menghetti operated the ride on weekends for many years. Moreland later described her as having “put her heart and soul into the renovation, upkeep, and operation of the carousel at Casino Pier”. Moreland’s partner, Elaine Egues, also was heavily involved, and Moreland and Egues ran the carousel-themed shop on the boardwalk together, as well, called the Magical Carousel Shoppe. 

1980s and 1990s at Seaside Heights

After the successful preservation of the carousel, things seemed to be going well, both for the carousel and for Seaside Heights.

Glockenspiel bells were added to the carousel’s Wurlitzer organ in 1986, a cheerful upgrade to the sound of the now 62 year old organ.

In the late 1980s, Wynne and Bennett remodeled the original Arcade building and pool area. The original structures had caused a traffic obstruction, requiring motorists to detour around the Casino Pier structures. By tearing down the arcade and remodeling it, Wynne and Bennett granted the municipality the ability to continue their road. This wasn’t just kind-heartedness. This made it easier for people to get to Casino Pier and park, creating more business. ”It is the smartest move we ever made,” Mr. Wynne said, ”because it opened up the town, made everything more accessible, and also made us the middle of the boardwalk, rather than the end.”

The “Water Works” opened on the site of the former swimming pool, with water slides and a lazy river, and the new arcade building was renamed the Palace Amusements building. The centerpiece of the Palace Amusements building remained the original Looff/Dentzel carousel. By 1988, it was said to attract 150,000 visitors per year, and was valued at $750,000. 

In 1988, Wynne sold his family’s share of the business to Robert Bennett, already a partner in the park since the early 80s. Wynne cited excessive governmental regulations and difficulty finding college-age employees as reasons for choosing to sell. It wasn’t as fun in the late 80s as it had been in the mid 60s, was his general opinion at the time as described to the papers.

An E. F. Miler mouse coaster was installed in 1999, some 30+ years after the last time a mouse coaster operated on the pier. It was demolished in 2012, but we’ll get to that in a minute. 

The other big coaster, the Jet Star closed in 2000 and was removed. The only currently operational Jet Star coaster is at Luna Park La Palmyre in France.

Restoration (Again) of the Carousel

Our good carousel friend, the Floyd Moreland Dentzel/Looff carousel, was round about 90 years old at this point, and the Wurlitzer organ was 76 years old. Unfortunately, it was showing its age. In the fall of 2000, the organ was described as “like a poor soul on life support”. That winter, then, the organ was shipped off to Carlisle PA, to the Mechanical Musical Instrument Restoration shop. There, the organ underwent a complete restoration, involving multiple skilled artisans and almost every part re-created, re-machined, or re-built. The restoration is detailed at this link. I strongly recommend reading this article, even if you don’t give a fig about the technical details of Wurlitzer organ restoration. The eight month saga of the restoration involves a sudden death, the mourning of a friendship, and the rebuilding of lives along with the rebuilding of the instrument. When the Wurlitzer organ returned to the carousel in 2001, a new plaque was also added to the carousel, memorializing the artist gone too soon.

More Changes to Casino Pier in the 2000s

In 2002, Bennett sold his portion of Casino Pier to the Storino family. 

You might remember I told you that a ride called the Jet Star closed in 2000. Confusingly, the Star Jet was added in 2002. This isn’t a typo or a misspeak, it’s a different coaster, coming from E & F Miler. Only two of these 52ft tall coasters were made. The other has been at three different parks, currently sitting disassembled at Fun Spot America Atlanta, waiting to be rebuilt. This one was called the Star Jet, and entertained riders for a solid decade with roller coaster thrills right at the end of Casino Pier. 

We’ll get back to the Star Jet in a moment.

In 2004, Water Works, the Casino Pier-associated waterpark, was remodeled, and renamed to its current branding, Breakwater Beach.

2010 saw the 100th anniversary of the Floyd J. Moreland Dentzel/Looff carousel. TV’s “The Cake Boss” (Carlo’s Bakery) was reportedly on hand with a cake depicting the carousel. The carousel continued to do solid business with carousel enthusiasts, though videos and photos show half-empty rides more often than not.

And then we reach 2012.

A Hurricane: 2012’s Hurricane Sandy

Here in 2012 is where I’d originally intended this story to start. Remember how I was telling you this would be a quick story? Yeah, I’m funny.

So if you do searches for abandoned amusement parks (https://www.google.com/search?q=abandoned+amusement+parks), you’ll see a few really popular images – the creepy decayed caterpillar train, the ghostly spiral of the coast at Nara Dreamland, the radioactive rides at Chernobyl’s Pripyat and this. The image of a roller coaster, sitting in the middle of the ocean. 

Remember the Star Jet?

The deadliest, most destructive hurricane of the 2012 season was Hurricane Sandy. Superstorm Sandy. Between October 22 and October 29, Sandy battered the Bahamas, Cuba, the eastern US, and specifically, the Jersey shoreline. She currently stands as the forth-costliest hurricane in US history, estimated at around $65 billion. 

The Jersey Shore and Seaside Heights in particular were among the worst-hit areas. “You can’t even imagine,” was said of the damage. 

The flooding and massive waves caused collapses and damage to both Funtown Pier and Casino Pier. This iconic image, the Star Jet “floating” in the ocean, all by itself from some perspectives. Day after Sandy video shows the immediate aftermath for the coaster and pier: https://youtu.be/y6Xsdx0KGfI?t=117 

All told, eighteen rides, including the Star Jet coaster, were destroyed by Sandy. 

Cleanup took quite some time, not surprisingly. The Star Jet sat in the ocean for almost 7 months before it was finally demolished in May 2013. This has led to incredible images and video of the “abandoned” coaster – search Flickr, Youtube, or Google, and you’ll find them, from incredible photographers and videographers.

This, then, is the source of that mysterious, strange image of a rollercoaster in the ocean, seemingly perfectly intact. Not so mysterious after all, but certainly sad, and iconic.

2013 Seaside Heights Fire

After the hurricane, business along the Jersey shore slowly began to recover. Casino Pier and Funtown Pier began cleaning up in the off-season. 

The century-old carousel was still standing, structure untouched by the ferocious winds of the hurricane.  The pier’s basement had flooded, however, leaving the ride’s mechanics in standing water for some time. There was no way to determine whether the ride had been damaged.

But when electricity to the pier was finally turned on again before Memorial Day, almost seven months after the hurricane? The carousel came to life. It was open for Memorial Day weekend that year, 2013. 

Down the beach, despite surviving the hurricane, in 2013, the fiberglass Chance Rides carousel burned down, along with more than 50 businesses nearby, in a six-alarm fire. The fire was due to a spark from compromised electrical wiring, corroded by Hurricane Sandy’s floodwaters. The Freeman’s Carousel and the Futown Pier end of the boardwalk didn’t reopen. As of a 2018 article, several attractions were in the planning process but had not yet come to fruition. As of the time of this recording, based on my understanding, owners have decided not to rebuild the pier. The borough has limited the max height of rides on the pier to 100ft, plus case by case exemptions, and the owners were seeking to build 200-300 ft tall rides; they could not guarantee profits without guaranteeing their ability to build the rides they wanted, so they chose to walk away.

Recent Years at Seaside Heights

In 2014, the Moreland carousel was nearly sold, again.

As of 2014, an article described the carousel as “quietly for sale” the prior few years, and openly for sale in the last few years, meaning the late 2010s. The carousel was described as in poor shape, needing major repairs, and ridership was decreasing. At the time, the owners blamed the economy, declining ridership, and maintenance expenses for the historic carousel.

Locals and carousel enthusiasts were worried. They feared a terrible carousel fate, last seen at the Whalom Park carousel in 2000: being split up, horses and animals and machinery sold away in pieces, boxed and split up. Support groups were started to “Save The Carousel”.

A deal was proposed by the mayor at the time and ultimately went forward, where the borough would take control of the carousel as well as a Casino Pier-owned parking lot, swapping oceanfront public property north of the pier with Casino Pier in return. The deal generated controversy and legal challenges, although the general public opinion of the deal was positive. 

Rebuilding of Casino Pier

The land swap actually enabled Casino Pier to rebuild and expand after their losses during Hurricane Sandy.

2016 saw a mini-golf course with 36-holes, as well as a wave pool at Breakwater Beach, the “water park” side of the park. Construction also began on the new expansion to the pier on the land traded in the carousel-land swap. By January of 2017, a new Ferris wheel and the new extreme Hydrus coaster began to be constructed on the newly-built newly-expanded pier. 

Hydrus is a so-called Euro-Fighter coaster. It features a 70+ foot vertical lift and a quote “beyond-vertical” drop, where the coaster goes past 90 degrees after the hill. The Hydrus coaster opened in May 2017, and the Ferris wheel in June of 2017.

2019: Temporary Closure of the Moreland Carousel

In April of 2019, the carousel took its last ride there at Seaside Heights, after 87 years of operation. 

I’m recording this episode on the first of October, 2019. Later this month, the Floyd Moreland carousel is slated to be disassembled by the Ohio restoration group Carousels and Carvings, with parts to be stored in a pole barn workshop owned by the city nearby. 

The borough estimated a cost of approximately $4.5 M to construct a new building for the carousel, according to the local paper. Earlier in the year, the group applied for several grants, including one specifically for historical preservation and repair of the physical structure of the carousel, including machinery, decking, and horses. 

This is obviously a lot of money for a local government to cover. In November, voters will actually help decide how easy the carousel’s restoration can be. The “Natural Lands Trust Fund Program” is on the ballot. Currently, the county’s open space tax provides a small dedicated revenue stream for the local governments to step in and acquire lands for “general conservation or farmland preservation”, but this money currently can’t be used for historical landmarks, either to save them from destruction or preserve them. The ballot issue would change that, and allow Ocean County to use taxes to do things not currently financially feasible, such as preserve things like the carousel. 

The Seaside Heights Historical Society was planned to be created years ago, after Sandy, but was delayed until its formation earlier in 2019, a non-profit, volunteer-run group that is the official fundraising group for the Moreland carousel restoration. Their website contains some information about the project, and includes a set of detail shots from the carousel, as well as blueprints for the future new building.

A few weeks ago, a new sign was put up at the location of the carousel’s future home.

The mayor of Seaside Heights is quoted as saying that he hopes the carousel will be up and running by summer 2021. 

Conclusions

For many years, the carousel was the symbol of Seaside Heights, decorating official insignia, flags, and police cars. The carousel, as Moreland himself once wrote, was the soul that shaped the development of this once-barren mile-long stretch of Jersey shoreline. 

Today, the carousel is a declining breed. The majority of the masterfully hand-carved wooden animals from a century ago were burned or destroyed following the Depression, and many still extant fell into disrepair. But even a modern aluminum or fiberglass carousel can be an excellent connection to the golden days. Riding one, you might close your eyes and sit back, picturing a different time, when the simple pleasure of a carousel, going round and round, was the pinnacle of the amusement scene. And maybe if you’re lucky, you are close enough to a beautifully restored wooden classic to ride one of those, too.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of The Abandoned Carousel, where I told you about Burlington Island and Casino Pier, and about the historic century-old Floyd Moreland Dentzel/Looff Carousel. Please check out the official historical society page: seasideheightshistory.org, or find them on Facebook: Facebook.com/seasideheightshistoricalsociety. 

I’m always interested in hearing about your experiences with the places I talk about. I also love suggestions for future episodes, and corrections for this or past episodes. Contact me through my website or across social media as The Abandoned Carousel. 

I’ll be back soon with another great episode. It’s October, so maybe the episodes will take a bit of a spookier tilt? You’ll have to come back to find out. Remember what Lucy Maud Montgomery once said: nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

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The post Floyd Moreland Dentzel/Looff Carousel appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

When one is trying to visit Little Amerricka, the first impression is always along the lines of “Are you sure you typed the right address into the map?”

To get to Little Amerricka, one heads west from Milwaukee or east from Madison, there in the heart of Wisconsin. Exit number 250 off I-94. And then you drive another five miles along WI-73, past farmhouses in groves of shady trees, big fields of corn starting to grow tall in the summer sun. A nice little two lane road. It’s just rural enough and just far enough off the beaten path that you invariably ask your fellow car-riders: “Are you sure this is the right way?”

But eventually you hit the small town of Marshall and take a right at the Ace Hardware, and then there it is, just down Main Street. The first thing you see is a bizarre tree – no, is that a roller coaster? And that, no, THAT is definitely a giant inflatable tiger butt.

And that, my friends, is how I met the Little Amerricka theme park.

Lee Merrick and Darryl Klompmaker

The park is spelled A-merrick-a, a somewhat troubling yet ultimately harmless spelling, named after its founder, Lee Merrick.

Lee Merrick was born in Illinois. He was a farm boy. Eventually, he found his success in the necessary but unpleasant field of livestock rendering. (His son, Garth, currently runs the Merrick’s brand of pet food, seen in stores all over.) 

In his spare time, Lee Merrick found a hobby in large-scale miniature trains. Not train sets like in someone’s basement, but “grand scale” or rideable miniature trains. Such as those we might talk about here on The Abandoned Carousel, for instance. Yes, my friends, we are talking about trains again, so hang on to your hats.

Merrick had been involved in the grand scale miniature train scene since the mid-60s, but it took until 1987 for Merrick to meet up with the other main figure in our story: Darryl Klompmaker. That year, 1987, Merrick purchased the land in Marshall, WI that is now Little Amerricka, and set up himself a nice miniature train loop. According to Klompmaker in an interview with Parkworld Online, the train was the genesis for Little Amerricka. You see, they set it up so that the train took guests out to pick Christmas trees and then took them back to their cars – can you imagine how fun that would be, a steam engine on a snowy Wisconsin winter day, maybe some hot chocolate?

The train ride was incredibly popular, and they soon added a second building near the train loop. This building can still be seen today: it’s right at the entrance to the park, and is now the main concessions and offices. 

Even back at this time in the late 1980s, Klompmaker said that Merrick already had four rides in storage. These were reportedly the Ferris wheel, the tilt-a-whirl, the fire truck ride, and the bumper cars. Reportedly, Merrick offered Klompmaker a job, and in 1989 plans for the park began in earnest. 

Klompmaker is quoted as saying: ““I kind of fell into the amusement industry. Lee didn’t really have a plan, he just had the railroad. He thought that if we added a miniature golf course and a couple of rides alongside the train, it might draw people in and keep them longer. ””

In 1991, Little Amerricka opened, with those original four rides, the mini golf course, and the extended train loop. By the time of this episode in 2019, the park has 26 operating rides, catering to the young family crowd in southern Wisconsin. 

The park, unlike some, wasn’t planned. There were no blueprints, and some of the rides have moved a few times during the park’s lifetime. “It just kinda grew, almost like a mushroom”, said Merrick in a video interview from years ago. “Wasn’t planned, it was just spontaneous”.

What I personally love about Little Amerricka is how it has taken all of these seeds of older parks and planted them to grow anew. Little Amerricka has only been open for 28 years, but it feels like a place from out of time, like it’s been there in the cornfields longer than forever.

Ambience 

Like I said, the park is situated about five miles from the nearest “big road”. Location is key, yes, but this is still close enough and easy enough to access that the park hasn’t suffered as a result. 

You park your car adjacent to the theme park, either in a grassy field or a muddy field, depending on how recently it’s rained. There are two entrances, one from the parking lot and one right off Main Street, for any pedestrians. Of course, entrance to the park itself is free. Little Amerricka has a wristband/ticket system and allows guests to bring in their own food and drink. This obviously makes the park a cost-effective place for families to visit. 

Rides at Little Amerricka

The atmosphere is charming and freewheeling, like something out of a history film. Each of the park’s 26 rides tell a story. Today, I’ll be telling you a little bit about a lot of different defunct theme parks, because that’s the thread that weaves through Little Amerricka.

Wild & Wooly Toboggan at Little Amerricka

Take the connective tissue between this episode and the last. Perhaps you’re not listening in release order. That’s fine, this isn’t a serialized podcast. In last week’s episode, I talked about Dogpatch USA, that theme park down in Arkansas based on Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip. Well, Dogpatch USA closed at the end of the 1993 season and began selling off its assets. One of the rides being sold was that original prototype Chance Toboggan, called Earthquake McGoon’s Brain Rattler. This was different than later Chance Toboggans, in that it was not on a trailer but a permanent installation, built in 1969. 

I misspoke slightly last week, though, so let’s correct the record. Before Dogpatch was closed, the Toboggan was sold in an effort to cut costs, reportedly around 1988. A little park called Enchanted Forest in Chesterton, Indiana purchased the ride in a last-ditch effort to stay operational itself. We’ll talk more about Enchanted Forest in a minute, but know that that effort was in vain. Enchanted Forest operated through the 1990 season and did not reopen in 1991. In the fall of 1991, all their assets went up for auction, and we’ve got a delightful treasure online – the original 1991 auction flyer. In the link for the auction flyer, you can see pictures of the rides on offer, including Toboggan, painted its distinctive tan on brown, and see the serial number: 69-4101. 

Well, Merrick and Klompmaker purchased the Toboggan at the auction for a cool $30,000, and installed it at Little Amerricka soon after. Klompmaker is quoted in the Little Amerricka mini-documentary as saying that the color scheme (brown and tan) appealed greatly to Merrick, and though they hadn’t planned on purchasing the ride, they knew they had to have it. 

Interestingly, the Indiana state inspection sticker on the ride could be seen in 2001, years after it had been operating in WI.

Today, the Toboggan at Little Amerricka is the last currently operating Toboggan at the time of this recording, according to the Roller Coaster Database, although there are a few nominally in storage. One such “in storage” is the Toboggan at Connaut Lake Park in Pennsylvania, which can be seen folded in pieces in a summer 2019 photo, overgrown with vines and other flora, rusting apart https://rcdb.com/1671.htm#p=102417.

Funnily enough, this coaster is often one of the major draws to Little Amerricka, at least for out-of-towners, due to the novelty of the coaster. See, apparently “coaster counts” or “coaster credits” are a thing, where coaster enthusiasts travel the world and log as many coasters as they can ride. The current leader on the website Coaster Count, George, has ridden 2,872 coasters as of the time of this recording.

Back at Little Amerricka, some in trip reports describe the Toboggan as the worst coaster ever devised. One trip report says: “Ironically, after 500 roller coasters, the scariest rides are no longer ultra-intimidating stratacoasters but things like this.” There’s about 450 ft of track, crammed into about 45 ft of length. The coaster cars are tiny, small claustrophobic enclosed cages for two. This is not the ride for a tall person. 

How does the ride work? The chain winches you vertically up the central tube, staring at the sky like an astronaut about to launch. Then, a dizzying downward spiral, five and a half times around the outside of the lift tube. Since visibility is compromised in the cage-like car, the violent little bunny hills at the end are a jarring surprise. Your knees, head, and back take a beating on this ride, despite the car’s padding, despite the apparent simplicity of the ride, as you slam back into the station. 

It’s either a blessing or a curse for the rollercoaster enthusiast.

Every ride at Little Amerricka has a history, though of course we don’t know about all of them in as much detail. The rides are almost entirely secondhand, allowing the visitor in the know to trace the connections to parks past, parks still operational or parks defunct.

Mad Mouse at Little Amerricka

Let’s go back to Enchanted Forest. Klompmaker and Merrick had gone to the auction at Enchanted Forest in Chesterton, Indiana, intent on purchasing a Scrambler ride. They ended up with a lot of stuff: the Scrambler, the Toboggan. 

Something else that was there caught their eye though, at that auction, and like the best of the impulse purchasers among us, they bought it: the Mad Mouse coaster, to the tune of $6,000. The coaster can be seen in operation there in this vintage TV commercial on YouTube and in a still photo from the 50s or 60s here.

(Enchanted Forest sat in a state of flux for a few years, as I’ve alluded to a few times – it’s a park worthy of its own episode. But briefly, for now, the park operated between 1994-2009 as Splash Down Dunes. It then operated from 2013-2017 as Seven Peaks Water Park Duneland, and is currently abandoned. Like I said, it’s worthy of its own episode.)

Here’s a great aerial shot of Mad Mouse: http://www.coastergallery.com/2001/LA05.html. As noted in the Dogpatch USA episode, this coaster is not the mouse coaster from Dogpatch – that was a Monster Mouse model, with an extra loop of track to the left of the lift hill. Demonstrated in this image, Little Amerricka has a Wild Mouse model, which doesn’t have that extra track. The Allan Herschell Mad Mouse is an endangered species. This specific coaster, a “Wild Mouse” model, was manufactured in 1960 (serial number 432760), and has been at Little Amerricka since 1993. It was the only Herschell Mad Mouse in operation until just a few months ago, when another Wild Mouse opened at the small Arnolds Park in Iowa, its third location.

I’m not sure that we’ve talked about a Mad Mouse coaster in any depth yet here on The Abandoned Carousel. If you’re unfamiliar, mouse coasters run with single wide cars instead of trains of cars; the wide cars overhang the edges of the tracks and contribute to the psychology of the ride. The track itself is characterized by many tight, unbanked turns, as well as short bunny hills. Despite their name and descriptions, mouse coasters are often quite thrilling, with abrupt negative G forces and quite good airtime (the cars often are without seatbelts, particularly on vintage models). The original ride operator instructions were apparently “”Sit down, shut up, and hold on!”” an exact quote, apparently.

Some chide the appearance of the Mad Mouse. One review describes it as “it’s basically a giant plug-and-play erector set roller coaster”. Another commenter online describes it thusly: “Mad Mouse twists and turns on a naked track that weebles and wobbles”. And still others call it rickety, rusty, horrifying, “deathtrap” and “never quite seen one like it”. BUT they also usually love it. The Mad Mouse at Little Amerricka is generally considered its most popular coaster.

In a final fun fact, the cars all have padded bumpers on the front, because originally at Enchanted Forest, seven cars were run at a time, and if they bumped into each other, well, how about a little padding from a pool noodle? Now at Little Amerricka, they usually only run 3 or 4 at a time. 

Monorail and Other Rides at Little Amerricka

Merrick and Klompmaker have found impulse purchases at other places, too. The auction for the former Peony Park, in Omaha, NE, occurred in 1994. They went down to purchase the kiddie boat ride, where a handful of boats spin in endless circles over a pool of water. (Spoiler alert, this is one of my kids’ least favorite rides.) In addition, though, they picked up an incredibly unique ride on a whim: the monorail, formerly called “Sky Rail”. Apparently it took about six trips with one truck back and forth between Marshall WI and Omaha NE to move the pieces of the Sky Rail.

This is technically not a monorail since there are three rails, but let’s not be pedantic about things. The ride is actually Mad Mouse-esque, with wide cars that overhang the tracks. However, it’s ultimately just one big loop that circles most of the park, allowing for lovely views. One report claims without source that only two of these rides were ever made, and that this is the only one in operation. I do believe it, because despite my research I have been unable to find another other rides like this.

Other rides we have less details on. 

Take that Ferris wheel, stored away and opened with the park. “12-Car Eli Ferris Wheel came from Wonderland Park in Amarillo, Texas, when Wonderland upgraded” their wheel. It can be seen operating at Wonderland here: https://www.wonderlandpark.com/our-history?lightbox=dataItem-ixxq564f3 Otherwise, not much is known about it. 

The carousel reportedly came from somewhere in Boston. The Tilt-a-whirl “possibly” came from Ohio, and has been moved twice on the Little Amerricka grounds. One report pings this as the oldest permanent currently operational Til-a-whirl in the world, with serial number 614 from 1939, though Wikipedia cites without sources a claim that a Midwest traveling carnival called “Evans United Shows” still operates a 1927 model. Little Amerricka’s Tilt-a-whirl has a licensed Mario sculpture in the center.

Little Dipper, the Allan Herschell classic kiddie coaster, came from a private owner who’d been running the ride in his backyard. It came to Little Amerricka when the Missouri town he lived in decided to institute a “no coasters in the backyard” policy. The Little Dipper was manufactured in 1953 and still has the original flat iron wheels. It makes a small circuit around the kiddie ride area at Little Amerricka, with an 11-ft lift hill and a few bunny hills before the station. Apparently in most parks, this ride has a MAXIMUM height limit; here at Little Amerricka, anyone can ride. 

I don’t need to go through the entire list of the park’s ride, but suffice to say there are plenty: bumper boats, a haunted house, mini-golf, an inflatable slide, a carousel, bounce house, etc. The only ride the park purchased brand new was the Red Baron kiddie airplane ride. 

Roll-o-plane at Little Amerricka

The Roll-o-plane at Little Amerricka (“Test Pilot”) is a gem in the crown of the park. If you’re not familiar with the ride, this was a 1934 improvement on the 1931 Eyerly Loop-o-Plane. Not familiar with that? The rides were built by the Eyerly Aircraft Company. Another Lee, Lee Eyerly, had always been a mechanically inclined person. He built and raced his own cars and airplanes in the early 1900s, and actually began his own flying school, there in Oregon. He built a custom flight trainer for his students, called simply “Aeroplane” (originally the Orientator). The students did well, but Eyerley began being approached by a salesman who saw the flight trainer while passing by the school’s parking lot. (Video of this early trainer can be seen here.)

The salesman proposed selling the Aeroplane to theme parks and carnivals, and Eyerley reluctantly agreed. Upon seeing the profit totals that next year, though, he was happily surprised, and the Loop-o-plane came out soon after. A 1951 Billboard article notes that over 500 of these had been produced at that point, saying “there is scarcely a show or a park that doesn’t have one.”

The Rolloplane, then, came in 1934. This ride executes an “Immelmann turn”, named after the WWI ace Max Immelmann. An Immelmann goes as follows: the plane accelerates at level flight, then climbs vertically (a half loop). The plane then completes a half-roll, coming back to level flight at an altitude above the original flight path. Reportedly, this is a difficult maneuver. 

Anyhow, despite once being such an incredibly popular ride, this is now 2019, and very few Loop-o-planes or Roll-o-planes are operational anymore. Merrick and Klompmaker picked up their Roll-o-plane from “a very small park in northern Indiana” for $75,000. Klompmaker is quoted describing his pride in their restoration of the ride. Apparently, the same ride inspector who’d once inspected the ride in Indiana came and did the inspection on the ride in Wisconsin, and didn’t believe it was the same ride until he’d checked the serial number.

The ride is pristine, shiny and gorgeous, and the operators are generous with ride time. It’s probably the most thrilling ride at Little Amerricka.

Meteor at Little Amerricka

The Meteor is the shining star of the Little Amerricka ride pantheon. It’s reportedly the only wooden coaster that’s been successfully moved twice. The Meteor, you see, was originally called the Little Dipper. It was manufactured by PTC, Philadelphia Toboggan Company, for the Kiddietown park in the Chicago area (Norridge, IL), beginning in 1953. 

It was a nice little junior coaster, and reportedly was one of six manufactured; today only one nearly-identical sister coaster survives, at Kiddieland in Melrose Park, IL.

Little Dipper, as it was known then, operated there until Kiddietown was shuttered. The coaster has serial number 120 from PTC, and was designed by Herbert Paul Schmeck. Do you remember another coaster I’ve already talked about here on TAC that was also designed by him?  I’ll post the answer in the website shownotes.

Hillcrest Park, another Chicagoland location (Lemont, IL) purchased the classic wooden coaster in 1966 for $6,000, and spent another $66,000 to move the coaster 30 miles from one side of Chicago to the other. Images of its disassembly at Kiddietown can be seen here: https://rcdb.com/2571.htm#p=8287. The former site of Kiddietown is now a bank. 

Hillcrest is not a very well-known place. It was a private “picnic park”, used for corporate outings, weddings, etc. The park handled between 200-2000 guests, depending on the day. Little Dipper operated there from 1967 until 2003. Images can be seen here: https://rcdb.com/327.htm In addition to the coast, Hillcrest operated a helicopter ride, bumper cars, a merry go round, and had a C. P. Huntington miniature train: number 41. 

In 2003, Hillcrest Park simultaneously saw a decline in the number of corporate outings and an increase in the value of the land. It became not profitable to operate the park, so it was closed in 2003. Today, the land is warehouses, storage, and parking lots.

The auction for Hillcrest Park was held in October of 2003, and of course, Klompmaker was in attendance. He purchased the little woody coaster for between $9-10k. Lest these numbers start making you think you might open your own park in your spare time, it then took Klompmaker another three years and over $100,000 to restore the ride and install it at Little Amerricka. 

Little Amerricka had to replace about 75% of the lumber in the wooden coaster, but “it was still cheaper than buying new”. (You can find 2005 pictures of the disassembled coaster sitting in a field at Little Amerricka here) Today, the coaster sits in the center of the park, looking as though the rest of Little Amerricka had been planned around it, despite being one of the newest additions to the park. It has a unique curved loading station and still uses the classic large person-sized wooden handles for braking the coaster.

The sister coaster I’d mentioned earlier was purchased from Kiddieland Melrose Park by Six Flags Great America in 2009 and currently operates there at the time of this recording.

One of the best parts of Little Amerricka is the ride operators, who give you plenty of bang for your buck. For your two tickets ($3), you get at least three complete circuits on the coaster. More, depending on how the operator is feeling that day. 

A Comet Coaster at Little Amerricka?

Interestingly, the Meteor is, according to some, only practice for a larger event. 

Merrick and Klompmaker took a trip to New England in the early 2000s, inspecting some defunct coasters: at Whalom Park and Lincoln Park, both Massachusetts theme parks. 

Whalom Park’s Flyer Comet

At Whalom Park, they were looking into the Flyer Comet coaster (vintage on-ride video). Opened in 1940 and closed around 2000, the Flyer Comet was a classic old figure-eight style woodie designed by Vernon Keenan (image). Whalom Park shuttered, as seems to be the common refrain, due to financial struggles and competition for audiences from mega-parks like Six Flags. However, the park sat abandoned for half a decade after its closure, as assets were sold off piece by piece, or left to rot. The Flyer Comet fit both these categories. Unfortunately, weather and time had not been kind to the ride, some 70 years old at the time it enters our story. 

Klompmaker and Merrick inspected the ride, and found the wood of the Flyer Comet coaster in very poor shape. (Unsurprising, as trip reports and memories of the park from its active years in the late 90s described the coaster as dangerous and wobbly. Some even remember seeing actual pieces of wood fall off during coaster rides.) 

Despite the quality of the wood, Klompmaker and Merrick were able to salvage the lift motors, lift chain, and other station parts. This required the track of the coaster to be cut apart, reportedly the final death knell for the original Flyer Comet. The coaster sat, cut up and overtaken with greenery, for several more years, prior to its demolition. 

Lincoln Park’s Comet

Their next stop was Lincoln Park, in North Dartmouth (an unrelated, unlisted, hilarious video: “link in park”). This park had been around since 1894, operating first as a picnic park, traditional to that time period, and then later becoming an amusement park. There, they were looking at another vintage wooden coaster: the Comet, opened in 1947. This one was designed by Vernon Keenan (wait – screeching noise – yes, the same Vernon Keenan who designed the Flyer Comet we just talked about! Funny world, that). Keenan designed the Comet (with Edward Leis) and it was built by Harry Baker. Keenan and Baker also built the 1927 Coney Island Cyclone coaster. Ironically, the oldest of this family of coasters is the only one still operational. 

(As a sidebar to a sidebar, the Coney Island Cyclone was saved from demolition by a massive refurbishment effort in the mid-1970s and millions of dollars have been invested since in order to keep the ride running, along with another major refurbishment in 2011. Apparently the structure is considered “irreplaceable”, since wooden coasters can no longer be built under NYC building codes. A single ride today on this 92-year-old coaster costs $10.)

There’s a great video from opening day of the Comet (1947) available on YouTube.

Again, we’ll only go into it briefly since this is a Little Amerricka episode and not a Lincoln Park episode, but the downfall of /this/ park, for once, was not solely finances. In fact, it revolves around the coaster we’re talking about. This time the story is a bit more grim. In 1986, there was a fatal accident on the Comet coaster. The owner reportedly invested $75,000 in upgrades and park safety, but it wasn’t enough. Only four months after the owner was quoted in the papers talking about the ride’s safety, the coaster’s brakes failed (or were applied too early, according to others). This caused a coaster car to actually jackknife on the track and derail, leaving passengers dangling over the edge and reportedly injuring four (image of the incident). The coaster’s cars are quite arresting-looking, even moreso when they’re not on the tracks correctly. This 1987 ride was the coaster’s last, and ultimately the park closed as a result a few months later. 

The park changed hands several times before its current development company owner purchased it. This didn’t do the park any favors, as it suffered heavy damages from arson and vandalism. Many of Lincoln Park’s assets were auctioned off, but the coaster was left, standing but not operating. It was already 40 years old at the time of the park’s closure. And there it sat. Reportedly, the jackknifed coaster car stayed in place on the track well into the 90s.

Well, come the mid-2000s, Merrick and Klompmaker investigated the coaster and its components, now up for sale after the lift hill collapsed in 2005. The wood from the track was obviously in poor shape, unsurprising considering it had been unmaintained in the elements for almost another two decades since the park’s closure. Despite the coaster’s somewhat grim ending, they ended up purchasing the trains from the Comet, as well as the blueprints for the ride. Reportedly, one train is in decent shape while the other (probably our jackknifed friend) needs significant work.

Ultimately, the plan is to refurbish the original trains, and then to use new lumber to build a copy of the Comet at Little Amerricka. (For the interested, here is an archived page detailing the structural components of the Comet.) This is obviously a huge plan for a little park, and there is no expected timetable for this to occur at this time. But what an eventual tribute to two longstanding wooden coasters this will be when it’s completed!

The Comet’s remaining wooden structure was demolished in 2012. The land is now condominiums. A company named Marion Millworks reportedly was given salvage rights for the former coaster’s lumber, and is said to have created unique outdoor furniture and other items with the wood.

Log Flume at Little Amerricka?

Not only are they planning on a larger coaster. They also have plans for a water ride, too.

Klompmaker and Merrick had been on the trail of a log flume for the park for years. They passed on a poor-quality flume at the auction for the Old Indiana theme park; they never heard back about their offer on the log flume from Miracle Strip Amusement Park in FL. Ultimately, they purchased a log flume called the “Log Jammer” from Kiddieland in Melrose Park, IL, which opened in 1995 and closed in 2009. (You might remember me mentioning Kiddieland in Melrose Park a few minutes ago – it was the original home of the sister to the Meteor coaster.) The pieces to the log flume have sat in a field at Little Amerricka for years, maintained but not yet assembled, visible from the monorail. Eventually, the log flume will be installed at Little Amerricka. One blog reports that the estimated concrete costs alone are up around $1M, so it is not expected that this flume will open anytime soon.

Whiskey River Railway at Little Amerricka

We talked about the train at the beginning of the episode, but I haven’t really made it clear that this park has a fairly legit railroad. Little Amerricka operates three different steam trains. Their first was the Atlantic, nicknamed The Little Engine That Could, was built in 1969 and came from the Sanford Zoo in FL. This engine was a 16” gauge, which is why the Whiskey River Railway is made to 16” and not the more common 15”.

The next train to come was the Oakland Acorn, built in 1949 by George Reddington and Robert Blecha in Oakland Park in California. It has a sister, the Gene Autry Melody Ranch Special, “Daylight”. These two trains are actually identical, just “dressed” differently. 

Here’s a great video showcasing the WRR; it includes a video interview with Lee Merrick before he passed.

The track itself covers a great distance, about 2.5 miles, and takes about 20 minutes to traverse. There are grade crossings, a tunnel, and a roundhouse. Trains can reportedly hold around 150 people at a time, and the train is actually the park’s most expensive ride. 

The train starts out by looping through most of the park; it then meanders through outbuildings before moving into farmland and fields. There are farm animals, including sheep and llamas. A fairly recent addition is a second stop at the Whistle Stop Campground, the new accomodations adjacent to the park. 

Ups and Downs for Little Amerricka

Things haven’t been perfect for Little Amerricka over the years..

A fire in 2000 caused over $200k in damages, and ruined a train machine shop. Said Merrick to the paper: “I don’t believe in insurance.” And in 2018, a ride operator was fired for seemingly nodding off while operating a kiddie ride.

Reportedly, Merrick “never made a nickel” on the park, at least during his lifetime. He died in 2011. Klompmaker continues to run the park, per Merrick’s wishes. 

In an interview online, Klompmaker describes the park as filling a void. This is a small, quaint, classic kiddie park, a dying breed, a working collector’s museum. The park allows parents and grandparents an inexpensive place to take kids and grandkids, standing out in the area, in a sea of over-the-top thrills at other massive parks. 

Little Amerricka is rough and tumble. There’s essentially no theming, the rides’ mechanisms are laid bare for all to see, fences are a suggestion at best. A ride operator was fired for seemingly falling asleep while operating a kiddie carousel. The whole place does seem like it’s waiting for a massive public outcry. 

At the same time, it’s a hobby park, like a real-life museum. It “personifies old-fashioned amusement traditions.” The rides are meticulously maintained and painted. History is an important part of Little Amerricka. Klompmaker is quoted as saying “we try to keep the nostalgia alive.”

Did I mention all of Little Amerricka’s borders? Main street, on one side. The parking lot, on another. The railroad tracks, on another.

And the town cemetery, on the other. 

Yes, as your children spin in endless circles on the vintage car carousel or the Pinto Brothers 1940s fire truck ride, you the adult get to stare out at Marshall’s town cemetery and contemplate the similarly endless cycle of life and death. 

“Buy the ticket, take the ride,” said Hunter S. Thompson, and the contrast between the flower-bedecked headstones and the regular whoosh of the Little Dipper invites you and your children to do just that.

Little Amerricka is real, authentic, fun. It’s a great place to visit.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

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Arthur Gillette: Beginnings

Arthur Gillette was a man with a mechanical mind.

As a child, Gillette visited the Savin Rock Amusement Park. In his early adulthood, he did handyman jobs, operated small small roadside stands, and fixed equipment and machinery. All the while, he dreamed of opening up an amusement park like the one of his childhood.

Gillette’s Pontoosuc Lake Beach Carnival

In 1946, Gillette assembled a crude carousel completely out of spare parts. It allowed for three riders. He operated the carousel at North St / Maplewood Ave in Pittsfield, just down from Pontoosuc Lake.

The ride was popular, so that winter, he rebuilt a vintage wooden carousel with his brother. They decided to take a chance at the amusement park business for good. In 1947, they operated the carousel at Pontoosuc Lake Beach. Within the next several years, he added a pony ride and a boat ride to the annual summer carnival setup.

As the carnival continued to prosper, Arthur and his brother opened the Gillette Brother Shows, a traveling amusement company, which is still in operation today. They traveled with their company throughout the East coast in the late 40s and early 50s, and continued to do well.

Lake George Amusement Park and Carson City

Arthur was getting tired of the traveling, though. He decided to set up the Lake George Amusement Park back in Lake George, NY. This small park opened up in 1956. There is little available information about it. We know that the park was only open for one season. In 1957, the land prices rose too high, and Gillette had to sell the park. A hotel developer ultimately purchased the land.

Not one to stay idle, Gillette quickly latched on to a new idea. This time, it was Carson City, a western theme park which he opened in 1958. This was one of the largest replica western villages at the time.

But Arthur Gillette really liked Lake George, and he kept thinking about the pre-Christmas Santa’s villages he’d set up in small towns around Massachusetts. The children had always loved seeing Santa, and were always sad to see him go. So why not, he thought, why not have Santa around for longer?

Christmas City, USA

Christmas City opened up in 1963. Arthur Gillette had found an old car junkyard in Lake George, the prime spot for an amusement park. He cleared away hundreds of cars to create his theme park. He even had to fill in a giant hole in order to create the flat lot where cars now park for the day.

In particular, Christmas City had its roots in a promotion Gillette did in Albany several years earlier. Santa was a huge draw during the Christmas season. Gillette knew he had something special, and set up Santa’s home that children could visit during the rest of the year.

Christmas City was located on Route 9, and drew crowds from both Albany and New York City. Its motto was “Christmas City…a village of warmth and love…where on the warmest day you will find a cool breeze blowing pine needles to the ground.”

Opening Day at the Park

On opening day, the park had log cabins, a museum, a “tilted house” challenging guests to walk on its uneven floors, a gift shop, and a chapel. This chapel was a real chapel, marking the first (but not last) time that Gillette would rehome an item or attraction.

The chapel had previously been located in Renssalaer, where the state department was taking it down for highway construction. Some sources name the chapel as “Chapel in the Pines” and others as “Sacred Heart”. Gillette moved the chapel to the Magic Forest piece by piece, where it still stands. Every item in the chapel is original, including the pews, altar, pulpit, and stained glass windows.

Christmas Theming at Christmas City

Christmas City, of course, wouldn’t be complete without Santa, Santa’s house, and Santa’s reindeer. Animals wandered freely throughout the park in the early years. There were sheep, goats, llamas, and of course reindeer. Visitors could pet and feed the animals, as well.

The park was themed and overlaid in a Christmas-y style, with gingerbread and fanciful lights. Beyond the buildings, there was little theming or landscaping. Gillette saw the natural forest environment, with its many large trees, as one of the most important things about the park.

Even in the first months the park was open, Gillette knew he was missing something. Visitors kept asking where the kids rides were. In the middle of the 1963 summer, the first year in operation, he added a few rides, including a small merry-go-round and a “chair-o-plane” (where riders swing in a circle on a merry-go-round type structure).

Officially Magic Forest

By 1965, Gillette loosened the reins on the Christmas theme, officially changing the name to Magic Forest and Indian Village.

Magic Forest and Indian Village

As the name implies, he added an Indian Village in the same year. This was a “standard” park feature at the time, and was seen as “okay” back then (even if it wasn’t). Obviously today, this is problematic at best.

Yes. Local Native people staffed this part of the park.

Yes. They genuinely informed visitors about some aspects of Native culture.

Yes, it was still problematic.

Interest in the village waned over time, and that part of the park was later closed.

Magic Forest: Island of Misfit Rides

For a couple of decades, Gillette’s Magic Forest truly was a place of constant change and delight. Arthur’s son Jack joined the park management team, fully taking over the park in 1979. Both Gillettes quickly realized how popular the kiddie rides were with park visitors. Additionally, they realized that with their solid mechanical skills, rides could be acquired much more cheaply from defunct theme parks and just fixed up. So over the years, the Magic Forest went from two rides to twenty five.

Acquisitions from Other Parks

In 1964, the Gillettes purchased several rides from a shuttered amusement park in Burlington, Vermont. (I’ve been unable to determine which park this was.) These rides include the Skyfighter, the Whip, and a heavier-duty aluminium merry-go-round.

The first Ferris wheel arrived in 1978. In 1979, Arthur sold his part of the Carson City park further up in the Catskills, choosing to focus instead on Magic Forest. (Carson City stayed in business through the mid-90s.)

In 1987, Kaydeross Park in Saratoga, NY closed in order to make way for luxury apartments. Seen in this 1985 promotional footage are a few of the rides that came from Kaydeross to the Magic Forest: the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Paratrooper, kiddie cars, and a replacement Ferris wheel.

A ride called “Chaser” came from an auction at the defunct Lincoln Park in North Dartmouth in 1988, after that park’s 1987 closure.

In 1990, the Scrambler and a mini merry-go-round arrived from Nay Aug Park in Scranton, PA, where the amusement park shuttered its rides to become a standard city park.

In 1991, the giant spiral slide arrived from Angela Park in Pennsylvania, which had closed two years prior.

The kiddie turtle ride, a smaller version of the classic Tumble Bug ride, came from Maple Leaf Village in Niagra Falls after that park closed in 1992. The asking price? $5,000.

Gillette never met an old amusement ride that he couldn’t find a home for, bringing rides in from at least seven or eight other theme parks. This scavenger philosophy extended not only to rides, but to what the park is perhaps best known for: fiberglass figurines.

Magic Forest and the Fiberglass Figures

In 1960, Bob Prewitt stumbled upon a treasure trove. He was a cowboy, an entrepreneur, and he wanted to make fiberglass horse trailers. Prewitt wanted to create a lighter horse trailer, as the trailers at the time were very heavy. He made a fiberglass horse to help sell the trailers. Well, it turned out that people wanted to buy the horse more than the trailers. Bob quickly cottoned on to what the customers wanted, and began making a wide range of realistic fiberglass animals: cows, horses, etc.

These animals were particularly popular with places like restaurants, meat markets, dairies, and rodeos. Prewitt’s animals continued to sell well, and he began expanding the types of figures he produced.

International Fiberglass

Prewitt sold his molds to International Fiberglass around 1963. The company was incredibly successful over the next decade, likely because of their ability to create almost anything a customer desired. International Fiberglass employed talented sculptors and painters, who could alter any sculpture to the customer’s unique specifications. People call their most famous productions “Muffler Men”, which we’ll likely do a full episode on later. For now, simply know that the Muffler Men were twenty feet tall sculptures of human figures, usually holding objects, and originally were used for roadside advertising.

International Fiberglass destroyed most of the molds when they folded in the early 70s. The interest in the figures waned, and the original fiberglass figures fell by the wayside – shoved in garages, barns, the woods, the back 40.  

Fiberglass Figures Come to the Magic Forest

So the story goes that on a trip to a junkyard in Knoxville, TN for car parts for their Corvette restoration hobby, the Gillettes found some intriguing fiberglass figures, which they hauled back to Magic Forest.

And thus began a new collection. “It was just fun going across the country buying stuff,” Jack Gillette said. “I’ve counted over 600.” Gillette was able to repair these figures just like he repaired rides, so he brought them all home, wherever he could find them.

Danbury Fair

In 1981, the Great Danbury Fair closed. This was a long-running agricultural fair in Danbury CT, dating back to at least 1821. By 1869, the fair had a regular schedule, large fairgrounds, and was open for ten days every October. The fair satisfied guests reliably every year until around 1974, when the owner John Leahy died. The organization fell into disarray, and it wasn’t long before the entire fair closed. Leahy hadn’t made provisions for the fair in his will, and the only way to pay the estate taxes for the venue was to sell the property. Three years later, the Danbury Fair Mall was built on the site.

On a snowy and rainy week in April of 1982, hundreds of buyers came to an auction for the various rides and attractions from the fair. Of course, Jack Gillette was there. He actually spent several days in Danbury, prior to the auction, negotiating for a large number of the fair’s original Prewitt and International Fiberglass figures. It isn’t surprising that he scored big time. “It took more than 20 truckloads to bring everything up that we purchased from the fair,” Gillette said. “We actually had to clear-cut five acres of land to make room for all the exhibits.”

The most famous of these stood in the Magic Forest parking lot, not far from the original Santa Claus and the pink building that has always served as the park’s entrance. It was the 38-foot tall Uncle Sam, supposedly the largest in the world.

Uncle Sam became a symbol for the Magic Forest park, drawing in guests from the road, just like the Muffler Men of yore.

Expansion and Collection at Magic Forest

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the Gillettes continued to expand the Magic Forest amusement park. Brad H on Yelp said of Magic Forest “Everything is very old and super-cheesy, but that’s what is so cool about it! It has character and old-fashioned charm.”

Cinderella Walkthrough

The Fantasyland park in Gettysburg, PA, a popular local theme park, closed. The Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center took its place. Gillette purchased a walkthrough attraction from there which told the story of Cinderella.

England Brothers’ Windows

In a log cabin near the chapel, a collection of animated bears and squirrels frolicked, moving on and around houses and tree stumps. These came from Pittsfields’ “England Brothers” store, which was like the region’s Macy’s store (at least in terms of holiday windows). The delightful animals that once cavorted in windows displays at England Brothers were rescued by Gillette and put on display at Magic Forest.

Disney’s Snow White

Inside a castle-shaped building sits a vintage piece of Disney’s early years. Yep, tucked away in this creaking, retro ‘60s era park in upstate New York is a piece of Walt Disney history. Several displays are inside that castle building, each depicting animatronic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves characters. The room also features a giant fiberglass tree (purchased for $10 as part of the Danbury Fair auction, of course).

The sign nearby reads: “Snow White. This exhibit was made by Disney for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The animation is one of a kind. Replacement parts and figures are unattainable, and must be custom made.”

Despite the sign, these figures are not made by Disney and are not from the 1939 World’s Fair. Remarkably, they’re even older.

The Old King Cole Papier Mache Company

In 1935, Disney had licensed its characters to the Old King Cole Papier Mache Company of Canton, Ohio, for the purposes of interior advertising displays, like those in windows. In 1937, this company made a series of displays featuring Snow White and the Seven Dwarves for Mandel Brothers department stores in Chicago. These vintage window displays are what now sit at Magic Forest, some 80 years later, the only such surviving examples.

How’d they get to Magic Forest? Arthur Gillette collected them, of course. Somehow the displays came into the hands of the Coleman Brothers carnival in the early 1960s. When they shuttered their carnival business in the mid-1960s, Arthur purchased the Snow White displays for his park.

Snow White at the Magic Forest

In the early years of the park, the displays were moved to and from a storage barn at the beginning and end of each season. This movement deteriorated the displays, and actually completely destroyed one of the original ten scenes as a result. The rest, however, remain in excellent shape. Artisans at the park refurbished most of the characters and backgrounds, adding new clothing and paint. The figures themselves are all still the original papier mache. To describe the scale of these displays, each of the dwarves fits into clothing sized for six-month-old children. They’re pretty impressive!

The animatronic figures move from the action of custom wooden cams and bolts: 1930s high tech! Magic Forest staff have rebuilt some of the original parts from scratch. Best Buy doesn’t sell these pieces! Overall, these animatronics still run primarily on their original mechanics. This section of the park is well-maintained and quite unique.

Expansion

In 1995, Gillette expanded the park’s boundaries, even relocating rides. He purchased a new ride, the blue goose, from a carnival auction in 1998. The safari train went past many of Gillette’s figures, arrayed in the forest amongst the pines. On “Fairy Tale Trail”, visitors walked past a number of different fairy-tale dioramas, each illustrated with large, fairly horrifying fiberglass figures.

The park had over 1000 of these figures at its prime, so it’s hard to do the topic justice. Suffice to say there were many, many figures at the Magic Forest, some in disrepair, and all a little bit off-putting. A visitor (Keleia76 on Reddit) said: “The figures are absolutely scary. I’m not being hyperbolic. They actually chilled me. Spiderwebs in the eyes, missing face chunks, missing hands or fingers, and honestly, even if they were intact, their actual design looked as though it may have been conjured in the mind of a demon.”

Many of the figures have glassy eyes and feature push-buttons, where visitors could hear some of the darker children’s fairy-tales.That was, of course, if the buttons were working.

Magic Forest’s Train

It wouldn’t be a theme park without the train ride, of course. Is that our new rule here at The Abandoned Carousel? Maybe. This time, it’s an Arrow “Old No. 9” train – Magic Forest’s train was only one of seven such trains in existence. Another is just down the road at Storytown USA, which we’ll cover at a later date. At the Magic Forest, the train chugged down a bridge over a ravine, past many fiberglass figures in the forest, and finished with a ride through a rickety mine tunnel. For many visitors, the somewhat shaky structural quality of the bridge and mine tunnel marked the largest thrills at the park.

Magic Forest’s Live Acts

In addition to the rides and ever present fiberglass figures, there have always been performances at the Magic Forest, as well. Santa Claus was popular in the early years, due to the Christmas theming of the park.

In 1972, Gillette installed a dolphin show at the park. This was a short-lived attraction, running only until 1975. Other acts followed, including dog acts, circus acts, aerial shows, and magic shows. Eventually, park management filled in the ravine at the park, next to the stage, in order to allow for more seats in front of the performance area.

The Diving Horse

One of the things that Magic Forest is known for, aside from the plethora of slightly bug-eyed, off-kilter fiberglass figures, is the Diving Horse. The last diving horse in the country, they say.

What is a diving horse, you might ask, as I did when I started researching this place. Well, settle in. Back in 1881, a man named Doc Carver was crossing a bridge on his horse. The bridge partially collapsed and the horse fell into the water, which apparently inspired the idea. He came up with the diving horse concept, and set up at Steel Pier in Atlantic City. The acts had a circus-like quality, as “diving girls” would leap atop the galloping horse as it reached the top of a 40-60 foot tower, and then sail down into the water on the horse’s back.

This is obviously a polarizing topic. Animal rights activists protested the diving shows in the 20s and 30s. Arnette Webster French, a horse diver from the Steel Pier attraction, said “Wherever we went, the S.P.C.A. was always snooping around, trying to find if we were doing anything that was cruel to animals. They never found anything because those horses lived the life of Riley. In all the years of the act, there was never a horse that was injured.”

The Steel Pier act was nonetheless permanently shuttered sometime in the 1970s. A brief revival in 2012 didn’t get very far after strenuous animal rights protests. “The president of the Humane Society of the United States stated: “This is a merciful end to a colossally stupid idea.”

The Diving Horse at Magic Forest

All the same, a horse diving exhibit opened at Magic Forest in 1977. First starring Rex the Diving Horse (for over 18 years), and later Thunder, then Lightning, the diving horses would walk up a ramp, 9 feet off the ground, and jump into a pool of water. Their trainers reward them with a large bucket of oats. The diving horse jumps twice daily, two months out of the year, and only during dry weather.

Animal rights activists regularly protest the show; veterinarians inspect the horses and the show even more regularly, to ensure the humane treatment of the animals. Reportedly they do it of their own free will, motivated solely by the oats at the other end.

The last of an era for the diving horses has come, however you feel about the act. Lightning the Diving Horse performed at Magic Forest for 24 years. In the summer of 2018, Lightning, now with a white face, refused to jump. And that was that. He still resides at Magic Forest to pet and feed, but the diving show is no more.

Magic Forest: Less than Magical?

As visitors post about Magic Forest online, people either love the place or hate it. The park caters to the smallest of visitors for whom standard theme parks are overwhelming and somewhat inappropriate for. The outdated visuals and somewhat run-down aesthetics can be a small price to pay for a park where your three-year-old can ride almost every single ride at the park.

However, others have certainly recounted less than positive stories about the park. It’s definitely true. The park is outdated and problematic in areas. People find the sculpted figures frightening, are put off by the ride operators operating multiple rides simultaneously, and so on.

Visitors in recent years have described broken figures, covered in spiderwebs. There are tales of broken audio recordings in the Fairy Tale Trail, stories about how the train engine was so poorly maintained that it spewed clouds of toxic fumes back at the first several rows of riders. Visitors complained about the short opening times of the gift shop, and of course, complained about the diving horse.

Stories from Park Workers

Former park workers have posted on Reddit, alleging that some of the park workers were constantly high, since they knew they’d get paid no matter what. A quote about the condition of the Ferris wheel: “If it was too hot, the tar on the cable will slip, and the chairs would slip off the landing while unloading, resulting in people being slammed face first into the platform.” However, there have been no major incidents at the park, which is certainly an exceptional track record given how long Magic Forest has been in operation.

The park isn’t unblemished. Management hired a known registered sex offender, without doing background checks. That didn’t go over particularly well.

And Jack Gillette himself made some waves, particularly in the late 90s and 2000s. He was described as more interested in restoring his Corvettes than in repairing park rides. Several times, he ran afoul of the local government over property disputes, saying that they inappropriately removed boulders from his property, and that they wrongfully used his property for a public snowmobile and biking path.

In 2013, he sued Warren County over these alleged misuses of his personal property. The suits were finally settled in 2018, with Gillette reportedly receiving $150,000 (reportedly less than the costs of the legal fees) over the five years in compensation.

Sale of Magic Forest

Late in 2018, local papers started reporting that Magic Forest was being sold. The deal had reportedly been in negotiations for several years, but couldn’t proceed due to the pending lawsuits. Once the suits were taken care of, the sale was free to go on.

Gillette officially sold Magic Forest at the end of 2018 for $2.5 million dollars to Ruben Ellsworth, “the son of a family friend”, owner of the local business “Ellsworth & Sons Excavating”. Gillette was ready to retire, and Ellsworth had a set of plans for the park that pleased the local county government.

Ellsworth is turning the park into “Lake George Expedition Park”. Part of the park will be a scaled-down Magic Forest. A much larger part of the property will become Dino Roar Valley. This dinosaur themed park will have a large walking trail featuring twenty life-sized animatronic dinosaurs, as well as dinosaur themed shows and additional paid activities.

But Ellsworth didn’t want the majority of the fiberglass figures that Magic Forest has been so well known for over the years. Up for sale they all went. American Giants, known for its restoration work with Muffler Men, was put in charge of the sale, which you can find on its website.

Reportedly, many of the figures were purchased by Storybook Land in Egg Harbor, NJ. Several of the larger Muffler Men are headed to Dallas, TX, where they’ll advertise for a plumbing company.

Uncle Sam Returns to Danbury

The largest of them all, 38-foot-tall Uncle Sam will be returning to Danbury, CT. He was originally a resident of the Danbury Fair. “Danbury – that fair in 1981 and ’82 – the things I bought took my amusement park to another level and allowed me to go even beyond that in two or three years. It really made my park. I thought it was only fitting for it to go back.”

The city of Danbury purchased Uncle Sam for $50,000, including the fence and its support pole; officials estimate that transportation, lighting, and refurbishment for the statue will cost another $50-100k. Moving the statue was reportedly difficult. Movers had to remove one of Uncle Sam’s hands in order to fit under an overpass on the three hour drive between Lake George and Danbury.

Refurbishment has been ongoing over the winter of 2018. The paint covering the entire statue was stripped completely off. Interestingly, restorers found that Uncle Sam originally had a different face. His face was paper-mached over with newspapers sometime in 1975 to give a different shape. “His old face has some crazy eyes” is the quote.

Uncle Sam’s new home is in front of the Danbury Railway Museum, where they plan to unveil him officially at a Fourth of July celebration in 2019.

A New Era for Magic Forest

“The Only Living Girl In New York” blog said: “I love, love, loved the Magic Forest—a theme park that has remained untouched by time, become abandoned while it’s still in business and is completely unaware of how cool and marketable it actually is—and I hope it continues to forget that it should have closed years ago and remains in Lake George forever.”

Magic Forest isn’t abandoned. In its later years, it has certainly seemed as such, with the lack of lines, lack of crowds, and lack of maintenance. But Magic Forest is certainly coming to the end of an era. The sale of its iconic vintage fiberglass figures and massive changes earn the Magic Forest a place on this podcast. The modern era is coming to this retro park, and it will no longer be trapped in the 60s. Lake George Expedition Park opens for the season this weekend: how much of the Magic Forest will remain?

The retro, kitschy feeling is much of what made Magic Forest special. Only time will tell as to whether the Magic Forest portion of Lake George Expedition Park sticks around.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

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