Intro

I moved the topic of today’s episode from my master list of parks to my short list based on the name. Just a silly, wacky name, and I expected grand things from it. What I learned once I began my research is that the story of Wobbies World is perhaps a story of misconceptions – where expectations do not meet up with the reality. 

As I welcome you to the new year and back from the holiday season, I invite you down under. It’s time to go back down to Australia and see what’s happening on that massive country continent. 

Well, what’s happening in 2020 is a massive series of wildfires, abnormally extreme due to the ongoing climate change crisis. For now, let’s dial the clock backwards to the sometimes comparatively blissful 1980s. Broadly speaking, the social revolution of the 70s gave way to the economic revolution of the 80s.

The 1970s and 1980s saw the development of a number of major and minor theme parks throughout Australia.

Today’s topic is not the biggest of these theme parks and not the best of these theme parks. It’s unclear if it was the smallest, but it’s certainly remembered online with quite a bit of notoriety. Everything about this park was a lot grander in advertisement and memory than reality. 

Today: Wobbies World.

Wobbies World

Wobbies World opened around 1978 in a Melbourne suburb called Vermont South. The land in this area had predominantly been orchards, specifically apple orchards, until the 50s or the 60s. At this point, demand for housing in the Melbourne area was growing, and the orchards began to be subdivided. The 1966 acquisition of a large block of orchards is considered the start of the acquisition by the local government, Nunawading Council. 

(This begins the start of the delightfully fun names, at least to American ears, which my statistics tell me most of you listening are. For all that Australia speaks English, the odd place names and baffling slang definitely provide a little bit of a language barrier. And even though I know that intellectually, it’s still surprising and amusing when I come across it out of the blue. It makes me happy!)

With the rise of the suburbs, there was a boom in the development of theme parks in Australia, ranging from small to large parks across the country. 

Wobbies World was on the smaller side, as I said earlier.  

From the beginning, the park advertised itself to local and not-so-local kids TV, with well-edited footage promoting the thrills of the park. A near-universal remembrance of the park is its TV commercials, which reportedly played “often” or “incessantly”, depending on your perspective. (Several of them can be found on YouTube, and linked through the shownotes, of course.) People who were children at the time remember the FOMO feeling of seeing the commercials and then hearing mom and dad say no. But ultimately, the park was very good at promotion, as we’ll see, and the actual experience was often more of a letdown.

What’s a Wobbie?

The first question you might wonder about is what’s a wobbie? Is it a person? Is it a thing? 

Google unfortunately did not answer this question for me. The majority of people discussing the question out there are confused. It turns out, no one knows. There’s no real definition for the word. There is a book series out there (“The Wobbies and the Caterpillar”). Meant for children, it shows Wobbies as miniature blue fox-like creatures. A 1946 short story in the Sydney Morning Herald tells the tale of Wobby the Whale. There’s a modern guy named Mike Wobschall, nickname Wobby, a major talking head for the Minnesota Vikings who recently quit or was fired from that role. The American Agriculturist Cyclopedia of Natural History from 1887 described “red-throated diver” birds as “wobbies”. One single reference used it colloquially to mean “shark”. But that’s about it, and that’s not a lot of results.

Google also suggests “woobie” in the search, which, while an unlikely option, does have an interesting history. Did you know that a woobie is colloquially a child’s lovey, and that this became the name of a popular item of military kit? Technically called the “liner, wet weather, poncho”, this item was originally produced in the 60s in the Vietnam War. Troops fighting in the jungle needed a lightweight poncho to serve the dual purpose of both rain protection and warmth. The poncho and liner were originally crafted from leftover camouflaged parachute material all the way from World War II, or so the story goes. This poncho was so beloved by the troops and so synonymous with comfort that it began to be called a “woobie”. Today, if you search for the term “woobie”, the dominant result is for this poncho. In a writeup on the US Armed Forces focused website, “Task and Purpose,” they described the woobie thusly: “Simply put, it is the greatest thing to ever be issued by the U.S. military.“

Ultimately, none of these possible meanings for the word appear to have anything to do with the theme park, leaving an open mystery for now. 

What Was Wobbies World?

Back to Wobbies World, then. Wobbies, spelled without any apostrophe as far as I’ve seen in my research. There was a “Mr. Wobbie” used as a mascot to promote the theme park in shopping malls, but the internet holds no details about what or whom he was. My suspicion is that he essentially looked like the Saggy Baggy Elephant based on some abandoned photos, but there’s no confirmation of this.

The park is said to have opened in or around 1980 on seven acres of land off Springvale Road in Nunawading. (The real opening year may have been 1978, based on a line item in the official “Survey of Post-War Built Heritage in Victoria” done by Heritage Victoria, the governmental heritage department. 1978 was also the year the park began acquiring vehicles. At least one internet commenter specifically notes a visit to the park in 1979, as well.) It was a place geared towards younger children and particularly those interested in vehicles and moving attractions. The owner was a man by the name of Robin Laurie, and he owned the theme park (or “children’s playground” in Australian) for most of the park’s operation. He’s remembered online as being a nice guy and good to work for, at least at first. 

Wobbies World was memorable for its handmade and unique, vintage rides, in particular. The aesthetic wasn’t much: “this place looks like it’s from the 1930s” is a quote from a visitor videotaping the park during its operating years. Overall, the theming was perhaps “transportation”, if anything at all. Here’s an album of photos in operation and a second album of photos. Kids remember the park for mailing free park vouchers on your birthday – quite the highlight to get a birthday card from a theme park as an under-10 year old, if I’m being honest. I like this policy!

Attractions at Wobbies World

Vickers Viscount

Perhaps the attraction with the longest history at Wobbies World was the big old Vickers Viscount airplane sitting with a staircase, waiting for guests to walk through it. It perhaps was not incredibly interesting for small children at a theme park, but had a deep history.

The Viscount, as a general model of plane, was one of the first turboprop planes. This plane was revolutionary for introducing a new type of engine, the turboprop engine: a jet engine with a propeller on the front, and incredibly fuel efficient. The engine it replaced was a piston-driven engine. 

Designed by a man called George Edwards, it was originally called “Viceroy” after the viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten. After India’s independence in 1947, the plane was renamed Viscount as it began production. The first aircraft entered service in 1950, a British plane. A comment from 1953 described the play as “an excellent shorthaul airplane and a definite crowd pleaser”. It was known for the smooth flight, lack of turbulence, and higher flying altitudes.  In Australia, the Viscounts were widely used by Australian airline companies, as replacements for the piston-powered planes favored a generation earlier. 

This specific Viscount was built in 1958. It was built for the Cuban state airline Cubana, registered as CU-T622 and CU-N622. Rumor says it served as the personal transport for Fidel Castro for some time. By 1961, after only a few years in service, it was seized for non-payment of debts and cannabalized for spare parts for other planes. The plane was intended to be sold until Cubana to South Africa Airways, but this deal never went through. Instead, the planes was eventually sold to Trans Australia Airlines (TAA) with the tailnumber VH-TVR in 1962. She was named as “John Murray”.

There is some discussion on Facebook posts that TVR was involved in an incident where a catering truck ran straight into the wing, damaging the plane. The March 2015 issues of the TAA Museum newsletter describes the incident as a forklift, and not a catering truck, running into the plane just after it had been completely rehauled to new condition. This was during the time when the Viscount was being retired, so spare parts were at a premium, having to come all the way from England. In a pinch, the wing from sister plan VH-TVP was removed and attached to TVR to allow the plane to continue to fly.

After a few years flying in Australia, VH-TVR was retired from service in April of 1970. 

In June of 1970, it’s said that the personal intervention of TAA’s chairman, Sir Frederick Scherger, saved TVR John Murray from being destroyed as a fire training aid. 

Instead, she was donated to the Australian Aircraft Restoration Group at Moorabbin,, but space considerations meant that she had to take a substantial detour first. Reportedly she languished in the Essendon graveyard for several years after the airplane wing incident.

In October 1978, she was delivered in a basic paint scheme with the name “Wobbies Airlines” to what the Vickers Viscount plane book describes as “a children’s playground”. Yes, our plane friend with that long history was now solely an exhibit for mildly interested children to tromp through. Well, tromp through isn’t quite fair. Apparently you got to pay an extra $0.50 in 1991 dollars to sit through a 25 minute video of a plane taking off and landing at Melbourne airport. (Walkthrough of the plane in its current incarnation at the Moorabbin Museum.) When they weren’t experiencing the other rides at Wobbies World, that is.

Rides at Wobbies World

A commenter online states “A place more schizophrenic between ‘awesome’ and ‘■■■■■■ awful’ than Wobbies World I have never seen.” 

Wob Cats

One of the attractions generally considered awesome were the real vehicles, like a real construction vehicle (a Fiat 4S1C Diesel Bull Dozer) and a real tractor (Kubota L246 Diesel Tractor) and a real Bren Gun Carrier from World War II that kids could drive. Collectively, they appear to have been called the Wob Cats.

Quote from an online commenter: “I was 12 and I was DRIVING A REAL TANK.  Talk about the best thing ever.”

http://www.mapleleafup.net/forums/showthread.php?t=20487 The tank (the gun carrier) had no actual guns on it, but the ride line was reportedly always long, indicative of its popularity. Children were able to drive an actual tank and get a token for their troubles. Imagine! Or a real tractor, or a real bulldozer – can you imagine the chance to do that as a child? The latter were rigged to a power grid like a supercharged bumper car in later years, and only those over the age limit could take their turn to drive the vehicles in jumpy mechanized circles across muddy ground. 

There were other rides too. Nothing was a “standard” theme park ride – everything had the aura of the custom and homemade. Take the entrance, for instance. By some bizarre reason, the entrance and offices were inside a boxy bulky castle facade. The park’s nominal theme could best be said to be transportation, so it’s unclear what “theme” this castle was intending to tie into. 

Carousel (Wobbies Whirls?)

A six-person swan shaped carousel (an extra $0.50 per ride in 1991) sat at the park, by all accounts appearing to be home brewed in most ways, as the swans were simply two plywood swan-shaped cutouts bracketing a basic seat. In one of the videos of the park in operation, we get a good view of this ride, with one single child glumly going round, mum chivvying them to smile and wave, trying to induce some excitement into the scene. The carousel appeared to operate at about the speed of your average airline luggage carousel. 

In the March 1992 issue of “The Fare Box” (which is a monthly newsletter for transportation token collectors) there is a description of “a beautiful ride token” which appears to have been for the swan merry-go-round (labeled carousel) –  “I’ve never heard of Nunawading before, so I guess it’s some sort of theme park with rides”. Very inspirational.

Wobbies Wheels

There was some sort of amphibious ATV type ride, bright red cars, called “Wobbies Wheels”. These were actually Sierra Trailboss vehicles, six-wheeled ATV type cars circa 1970. They went along a three rail track through the woods. There’s some debate online as to whether the cars were powered by motor or by the track it ran on; in my opinion, a motor seems most likely based on the other Sierra Trailboss vehicles out there, but this is only a guess. (Here’s a photo of the cars in action during the park’s operation.)

The ATV ride provided minor thrills like small puddles and a fake crocodile popping out at unsuspecting guests. These ATVs (and according to some commenters, all rides at Wobbies World) did not have any emergency stop zones – it was apparently solely up to the operator’s discretion to decide when each car should be released from the station. Clearly, this is not a situation that would fit with more modern standards of health and safety.

Splash Down

In the later years, in 1994, roughly $40,000 was spent to add a ride called “Splash Down”. This ride barely seems worthy of the classification of “ride”. It was literally just a small red boat with stick-on “Wobbies World” letters on the side. The boat was winched up maybe 7-10 feet on an incline and then splashed down in a small pool of water, coming to a stop almost as soon as the splash occurred. (It can be seen in this circa 1998 promo video: https://youtu.be/tQCkWIfaHAY?t=4) This appears to be the “log ride” that some refer to when describing the park. General opinion on the internet is that this ride was underwhelming, to say the least, with only a few former visitors exclaiming happily over this as their favorite ride. 

Fire Trucks, Mini Golf, and Other Rides

There was a vintage Dennis fire truck, and also a fire truck “ride” which ran on a small central rail track. It seems that there was a mannequin “firefighter” who sprayed the car as it went by at one point, and everyone who rode got firefighter hats to wear. The online commentary does seem to find this ride memorable, despite how basic it seems in the description. Perhaps it was the plastic hat.

Of course there were other rides. One was a vintage hand pump car on a small circuit (reportedly requiring much effort to operate) called the Push Pull Railway (an additional $0.25 in 1991). There a basic kids playground setup with several slides and sense-confusing spinning tunnels and a rope swing and a swinging rope bridge and a flying fox (that’s the name for the thing that’s essentially a heavy duty zipline). There was a ball pit of bright colorful plastic balls (reportedly 18,000 of them). There were large trampolines with injury-awaiting exposed springs. 

There was a mini golf course of no particular special theming – just basic blue surfaces surrounded by concrete gutters. But hey, mini-golf was an extra $1 per 18 holes. Apparently the final hole, #18, had a large rock wall or mountain facade of some sort, where a hole-in-one would earn you a free game.

Trams and Trains at Wobbies World

And there were several trams (which are sort of like trolleys to an American audience, and not my initial interpretation from the video of “train”) – actual commuter trams, formerly serving the Melbourne area. (In a minor tangent, I found it interesting in my research how trams are a huge form of public transportation in Melbourne, and that they have by at least once source the largest urban tram network in the world. Obviously given my accent, I’m an American living in this vast wasteland of terrible public transportation that is the majority of our nation, and I’m envious.) 

Briefly, trams in Melbourne have operated since 1885; electric trams operated irregularly beginning in 1889, and have been operating continuously for more than a century, since 1906. Where other cities shuttered their networks, Melbourne’s stayed in operation: factors included wide streets and gridded geometry of the city; union resistance; and successful argument from the MMTB chairman that it would’ve been prohibitively expensive to rip up the tracks in the streets. The tram network has expanded several times over the years, and today, trams form much of Melbourne’s character and occupy a large part of general tourism and travel advertising. 

The backbone of the Melbourne tram fleet between 1940 and 1969 was the W2 class, a model of electric tram introduced in 1927. More modern, wider trams began to replace the W2 series, with the final W2 being taken out of service in 1987. What’s fantastic is that the government maintains public records of each tram and where it went after it was sold from service.

As Wobbies World geared up to open, it was November of 1979 that they purchased their first W2 tram, number 302. The next spring, April 1980, they purchased another, number 283. Both of these were originally “W” models from 1924 which had been converted to W2s in the mid 1930s.

Five years later, in November of 1985, Wobbies World bought two more W2 trams: number 579 and 624, both manufactured between 1929 and 1930.

All of these W2 trams were stationary, serving as exhibits and places to have picnics, lunches, and parties. 

There was another set of trams said to have been installed in the late 80s, and these were a “ride” – a very slow-moving mechanized trip up and down a pathway. These were painted a very cheerful green and yellow, matching the paint scheme livery of their larger cousins. The miniature trams used a traverser – essentially an automated switch to move the tram from one set of tracks back to the other to allow a return trip. These trams had names after local suburbs: Vermont, Burwood, Nunawading, Forest Hill.

A Flickr album also notes a few other pieces of rolling stock set up together, originally having been displayed with the J550 locomotive at Mirboo North station. According to one commenter on railpage.com.au, they were called “The Crumpet Train” when they were at Wobbies World. One was a “BPL 59” painted pale blue (this was a “bouncing passenger lounge” or carriage); and a “ZL 539” (or perhaps 536?) painted bright red (wooden frame, built towards the end of the 1920s). The “Z van”, I learned, is what’s called a “guard’s van”, or a brake car, akin to a North American caboose, albeit with a different look. Originally, the only brakes on the train were in the loco and in the brake van, not continuously on every car, so you might see the importance of the guard’s van. As continuous brakes began to be implemented, the guard’s van fell out of use. 

Traverser miniature tram images: image one, image two, image three.

Helicopter Rides at Wobbies World

There were two other big rides at Wobbies World, though, and both involved helicopters. 

Bell 47J at Wobbies World

The first was the big Bell 47J helicopter, perched on a large piece of machinery in the middle of a field. Formerly registered as VH-INE, this Bell 47J with serial number 1772 once operated for Airfast and Ansett-ANA Airlines in the 1960s. The copter was said to be one of those used during the search when former Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt went missing in 1967. 

(Here are links to images of the helicopter in operation and sitting in the paddock post-Wobbies World; and a nice image from the National Library of Australia here and here and here. It was withdrawn from use in 1976, and from there made its way to Wobbies World.

It was positioned as a virtual reality simulator. For an additional $1 (in 1991 dollars) per ride, kids were able to “drive” the copter and experience what it would be like to fly one.

In reality, of course, the ride was nothing like the expectation. I suppose from a “guy builds amusement park from his workshop” sense, this ride was impressive. But compared to any actual theme park ride, it fell spectacularly short for all but the youngest riders. The copter rose up a few feet on its mechanical post and did spin in circles, but otherwise didn’t do much at all in the way of a proper simulator. Remembrances online are all about how disappointing the helicopter ride was in reality, and of guests trying to spin the copter in order to hit other guests still queuing up. Others recall simply riding the ride as an excuse to get frisky behind the blacked out front viewscreen.

Nonetheless, regardless of reality, in commercials and pictures, the big Bell helicopter cut an impressive figure. 

Whirlybird Copter Rail

The other helicopter ride featured miniature Whirlybird copters done up in primary colors, and was somewhere between a monorail and a roller coaster. From a layout and structural perspective, the ride was incredibly tame. However, given that this ride was essentially to the scale of, say, a beach ball perched on a string of yarn, the thrill came from the constant sensation that this ride was going to fall apart and kill you. Most visitors online recall this ride as quite scary.

A former visitor online sums it up, describing the ride as ancient and decrepit. The ride was said to shudder along, shedding flakes of rust. Some even described the I-beam rails as shuddering beneath the helicopter-shaped car’s weight or the entire apparatus, track and copter both, literally swaying in the wind. Quote: “the whole contraption just gave off a million-decibel ABOUT TO COLLAPSE AT ANY TIME warning.” 

The gentle turns and U-bends combined with the mild slopes to give a terrifying coaster-like ride, solely because of the wildly unsafe nature of it all. Every time a small copter took a gentle turn on the rail, the small two person capsule shuddered and wobbled, seeming to barely hang on to the rail. A 90-degree turn after a short downhill incline seems to have been the worst offender, terrifying many who rode it. Multiple reports and stories exist online of the cars stopping, tilting, dangling, or doors simply not opening, so it’s a fairly safe bet that this ride was not anywhere near modern standards of safe. One particularly vivid story described a day nearly to end of the park’s life, with a worker on a ladder, shoving at a dangling whirlybird car with a broomstick, attempting to right the car onto the track before the two screaming children inside puked or passed out. It sounded super safe.

In fact, none of the rides were close to today’s modern standards of health and safety.

Closure of Wobbies World

Wobbies World is long gone by the time I’m recording this in 2020, which I’m sure is unsurprising given what I’ve already told you about the park. One commenter online sums it up, describing their only memory of the park as the lingering sense of deep and utter disappointment.

A number of factors were involved in the closure, not the least of which were the typical: mismanagement, compliance with safety standards, and financial difficulties leading to audience decline. 

Costs

The park was said to be expensive for the time: $36 for a family of four admission in 1994 dollars, the oft-quoted number I saw. This is over $60 in today’s money. However, we could argue about the validity of that price quote. A 1991 price list I saw from a very reliable source (a legal proceeding) has adult admission at $3 and kids ages 4 and up $2, which is a very different pricing scheme. 

However, given the miniscule scope of attractions at the park, the increasingly unsafe maintenance, and the very short amount of time a person could find themselves entertained at the park, and you can see how the cost was high. Additionally, most attractions had an additional cost, as noted earlier. For instance, to walk through the Vickers Viscount, the 1982 price was an additional $0.50. (About $1.30 today.) Only the playground equipment, firetruck, vintage cars, and trampolines were “free” (included in admission price). 

Very late in the game, a “Red Baron” monorail type ride was added, featuring a single airplane on a very gentle slope. Most recollections of this ride are not particularly fond, and many describe it as “lame”.

Maintenance

Unsafe maintenance too seems to have played a large role. Urban Dictionary actually has a review or definition for the park:  “Located in the state of Victorian, Australia, Wobby’s World was a little kiddie’s theme-park hangover from the 80’s. Was run, until recently, with complete disregard for health and safety regulations: the rides were never oiled, many were structurally unsound such as the best ride there which resembled a Hills Hoist washing line, and the workers there seemed as if they either never slept, were hung-over or stoned. The last two options were definitely more likely.”

Many reviews and comments online from the latter years of the park’s history describe how poorly the park was looking – rides and attractions broken down, covered in rust, ungreased, and not working properly. The ride vehicles in general were said to all smell like sweat. Other comments talk about the overgrown landscaping, with stagnant water in the ponds and blackberry bushes overgrowing the paths. My general sense is that most people in the area found the park iconic, though often in a negative, run-down sort of way. 

One comment relates an anecdote about riding the Whirlybird monorail in the later years, with the Whirlybird tipping over on a curve and dangling from the rail; passengers reportedly had to be rescued with the help of a stepladder. Another commenter online talks about giant cracks in the minigolf course and a hedge maze that was more holes than maze. 

And of course, the park had to have broken so many health and safety laws. Or, perhaps if they didn’t actively break them, they didn’t upgrade to comply with new regulations. The rides certainly were relics from a different age, of common sense, burning hot slides, exposed machinery, and the like. 

Hand in hand with health and safety laws had to be the ever-rising cost of insurance for a park such as this, as we’ve talked about so many times. That certainly didn’t help the bottom line, especially as maintenance and advertising costs also rose, and as attendance began dropping.

Mismanagement

But the final nail in the coffin for Wobbies World was “mismanagement”. Such a small word to describe some rather large ramifications and shenanigans. 

Come the mid-to-late 90s, Wobbies World began having trouble staying in the black with the park – reduced attendance, larger spending on maintenance and advertising, and even new rides like the Red Baron airplane monorail (similar to the Whirlybird but not appearing to replace it).

In February of 1996, roughly $16,000 was spent to move the Vickers Viscount from Wobbies World back to Moorabin and the Australian National Aviation Museum (originally known as the Moorabin Air Museum). All pieces acquired by the museum are required to be directly related to Australian aviation history. And of course, as noted earlier, the Viscount was simply on loan to Wobbies World.

 Apparently there was some drama involved with the move, of which I wished I knew more details. From an account of the life of the plane, we have only this quote: “the aircraft was transported to the Moorabbin Air Museum ( a saga in itself)”. Perhaps it was simply a difficult job to get the plane out past the tight squeeze of the Whirlybird tracks and other attractions? I’ll include links to several photos of the plane on the move in the next paragraph. One comes with the caption “a sigh of relief”. 

To move the plane, the wings, engines, and nose were removed. A large crane hoisted the plane body up onto a very large flatbed truck, and from there, it presumably moved quite slowly to its new destination, some 20 km south. An album with four images of the plane being moved is located here; a different image of the plane being moved is here; another different image of the plane being moved with its faded Wobbies Airlines signage; an image of the plane being lifted off the stands at Wobbies World; the disassembled engine props. Here’s an image of the plane beginning to be reassembled at the museum.

In 1998, it still sat partially disassembled, as seen in this image linked here.

The plane still lives at the museum today, reportedly the only complete Viscount remaining in Australia. It is still on display, and is reportedly undergoing major restoration. 

But returning the Viscount to the museum in 1996 may have only hastened the public opinion issues with the park – one of the major attractions and pieces of background scenery, after all. By 1997, attendance was continuing to drop. Mr. Laurie, the owner, perhaps saw the writing on the wall, and put up the park for sale. 

By December of 1997, the sale was finalized. Laurie was no longer the owner: now, it was owned by a company called Crystal Auburn, changing hands for the tidy sum of $550,000. Remember that Australia is in the southern hemisphere – summer runs from approximately December through February – so the park was in operation at the time of the sale. 

And it seems that as they operated the park in the high season and went through the paperwork immediately following their purchase and acquisition of the park, Crystal Auburn began to smell a rat in the walls. Something wasn’t right. By March of 1998, three months after the purchase, they began seeking legal advice, and reportedly asked Laurie if he would take the park back. 

He declined.

Crystal Auburn put Wobbies World up for sale at the end of that month, March 1998, at a sum of $650,000. 

From a public perspective, the park was seeming increasingly run down, untidy, and simply not up to par. Things were dirty, rusty, moldy, mildewy, and broken. Descriptions of the park from former workers around this time paint a picture of an empty park and not much to do. Workers were primarily bored high school and university students, whiling away the days. There were said to be a bare handful of visitors on most days, with workers helping themselves to hot fries from the snack bar and passing the time with some hot book reading action (Stephen King! It was the 90s). Visitors weren’t being drawn in by the constantly running television commercials. The park had some irregular operating hours. It was circling the drain, in medical parlance. Ultimately, it was ingloriously shuttered the next year, in mid-1999, with fixtures being sold at public auction in June of 1999.

Of course, none of this tells the story of what really happened to Wobbies World.

It wouldn’t be until a series of three court cases, in 2000, 2001, and 2004, that the details came to public light. 

The problem was that the 1997 sale of Wobbies World had apparently been done under false pretenses.

(The remainder of this section is sourced from my interpretation of three court cases, linked in the shownotes. I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll apologize in advance if I’ve misinterpreted anything. Read the case for yourself here: http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/FCA/2004/821.html) 

So it seems when the park was put up for sale, attendance figures and a profile in a business magazine were used to promote the sale of the park, and were the basis by which Crystal Auburn chose to purchase the park. Only the problem was, it turns out that the business numbers – profits, attendance, etc, were determined to be falsified and misleading. The park’s income tax returns, even, were apparently incorrect for several years. 

Of course, this wasn’t known at the time that Crystal Auburn purchased the park in December of 1997, though they quickly seemed to be figuring it out. Wobbies World under Crystal Auburn operation reportedly had attendance numbers 60% lower than the previously provided attendance figures. It wasn’t until several months later in March of 1998 that they began to ask for legal advice, and subsequently put Wobbies World back up for sale.

In August of 1998 with no offers coming in on the sale of the park, Crystal Auburn took the advice of their lawyers, walking away from their contract, walking away from Wobbies World. Laurie and his associated companies subsequently re-occupied and re-opened the property throughout the summer of 1998-1999 (remember, southern hemisphere – what Americans would consider winter months). A major vandalism incident is reported to have occurred during this time, closing several of the rides; ultimately, this may have been the final death knell for the park and its visitors. 

By January of 1999, Laurie and his businesses had relisted Wobbies World for sale at a cost of $390,000. A buyer was found when the park land was finally auctioned in June 1999. The ad wrote: “Falling within an area zoned reserved living and in a predominantly residential district, agents believe the property is ideally suited to residential subdivision. But the site will be sold with conforming use rights, allowing an enterprising purchaser to continue to operate a theme park. McGees director Mr Richard O’Callaghan said the Wobbies World theme park commenced trading in 1980 and was a “source of joy for countless children. It would now appear that the site will be the source of much enjoyment for one successful residential developer.’ ”

A buyer was indeed found, splitting the theme park land up, so Wobbies World as it had been had to go. The park was shuttered. A public auction was set in July 199, one month later, to sell the park’s fixtures and rides. I’ll include a listing of the auction contents in the Appendix below. It’s said that Mr. Laurie himself personally bid on at least 24 different items.

By 2000, Crystal Auburn filed a legal proceeding against Laurie and his associated companies, seeking damages under the claim that Laurie’s companies had misrepresented Wobbies World when selling it. It took three cases and four more years before everything was settled. Ultimately, the courts came to a decision: apparently Laurie’s companies had knowingly misled, deceived, and mismanaged the sale of Wobbies World by falsifying data that led to Crystal Auburn’s purchase of the park. Crystal Auburn was awarded damages to the tune of almost $1 million dollars.  Again, I recommend reading the original case, linked here.

After Wobbies World

The land that was formerly Wobbies World, there on Springvale Road in Nunawading or Vermont South or Forest Hill, whichever Melbourne suburb you’d like to place it in, was split up after the theme park shuttered in 1999.

Half of the land was sold to property developers, and became just your average basic housing tract. The other half stayed nearly as it was, and this was the half with the “castle”. The castle, in fact, was one of the longest-lasting parts of Wobbies World, as this half of the theme park became….a garden center. A plant nursery! In fact, there’s an indication that for a period of time, the castle was considered a heritage site, though this is only an educated guess.

The name was “The Park Nursery and Pool Center” – after a few weeks of research with this name kicking around in my head, I’ve decided that perhaps it wasn’t as generic as it sounds – do you think “The Park” was a subtle Wobbies World reference, as in “theme park”? Maybe.

Anyhow, the garden center stayed there for several years after Wobbies World was broken up. A few internet commenters say the original owner and/or his companies remained the owner of this garden center, though this isn’t clear or well-sourced in the slightest. A surprising amount of the physical infrastructure from Wobbies World remained – posts, the snack building, the mini-golf setup, and of course, the castle. Google Earth extends back this far, and shows that pots and plants are simply organized in neat rows over much of where the parking lot used to be. For a time, it looked quite nice (thanks, Google street view).

Everything stayed for years, because I suppose if there’s one thing Australia has a ton of, it’s land. But finally, a sign went up indicating a new purpose for the site, and in September of 2012, it was announced that the Forest Hill police station was to be built there. The garden center closed, and the property began to be the target for graffiti artists, as seen in this album of gorgeous abandoned images of Wobbies World. An October 2013 Google street view shows the shuttered, graffiti’d former castle.

A few accounts exist online about explorations of the park at this stage, and even a short video round about the demolition timeframe. There are few images available of the abandoned property since most of the interesting items (the rides) were sold fairly quickly. One shows a dingy, decrepit section of the mini-golf course blue AstroTurf obscured by debris, while another shows folks looking at an original Wobbies World sign that had fallen in the grass. A sad, misshapen elephant (possibly Mr. Wobbie himself) perched on a ball remained as a peeling mural on the wall of a building (apparently the former “birthday hut”). What little infrastructure that had been left was in a sorry state: rotting wooden bridges and walkways, rusting metal, massive overgrowth of blackberries and other flora, muddy mucky pools of water.

Between January 30th and February 27th of 2014, the castle building was demolished. The ceremonial first shovelful of dirt was dug February 12, 2014. The $12 million Forest Hill Police Station went up in its place, opening in March of 2015 all shiny and gleaming and modern, but the outbuildings and the back quarter of the park remained in their decaying glory, until the entire site was finally demo’d in July or August of 2016.

Wobbies World in Culture Today

That was the end of Wobbies World as anything resembling a physical site, but the park remains to this day as a concept in Australian cultural parlance.

Back in the 90s, it was the height of the late-night sketch comedy show. One of these was the short-lived but well-remembered show, aptly named “The Late Show”. Based out of Melbourne, this was a show appearing to be similar to America’s MADtv or Canada’s The Red Green Show. One of the recurring segments on the show was “Pissweak World”, where fake commercials were shown promoting a theme park called Pissweak World. Video showed bored-looking children (known as The Pissweak Kids) experiencing disappointing rides at a terrible “theme park”. Voiceover provided exuberant commentary about the terrible-looking rides and attractions: “travel on a real golf buggy”, “roll down a slope”, etc. The exciting-sounding descriptions were obvious send-ups: for instance, the voice-over of “ride a bucking bronco” showed a child sitting calmly on the back of a golden retriever, Marine World was a swimming pool, and one of the Air World rides involved wearing ski goggles in front of a small fan. Ultimately, there were seven Pissweak World episode segments: Pissweak World, Pissweak Colonial World (also known as Ye Olde Pissweak Worlde), Pissweak World Fun Park, Pissweak Western World, Pissweak Marine World, Pissweak Movie World, and Pissweak Air World. (Here’s a playlist of the Pissweak World segments, linked here!)

(And in a brief sidebar, the voiceover narration was provided by one Tony Martin, who today has his own podcast, Sizzletown, among other things.)

It’s generally accepted that this segment for the worst theme park ever was directly inspired by and parodying Wobbies World in particular. Depending on your point of view, it’s a direct example of how influential, inspiring, uninspiring, or unexceptional Wobbies World actually was. Today, Pissweak World is perhaps even more well-known or commonly referenced than Wobbies World, evidenced by its regular use on Twitter and other social media sites.

The park also reportedly was immortalized in an episode of the Aussie TV show Prisoner. If anyone has any leads on which ep (there are 692!), I’d love to know! 

And of course, Wobbies World remains a talking point in discussions today, including political debate. From online notes, we find at least two references to Wobbies World: April 2016 comments by the Premier Andrews to the opposition leader during legislative assembly: “The Leader of the Opposition ought to get down to Wobbies World because he might have the numbers there. He should not waste his time on me; he might have the numbers down at Wobbies World. They might need a leader down there — he will be unopposed.” And Parliament of Victoria Legislative Council, Mr. Leane, April 2013: “I am glad I have parliamentary privilege because Wobbies World was probably the worst amusement park you could ever imagine in your lifetime. Sorry, Mr Wobbie, but it was pretty ordinary.”

And on YouTube, in addition to all the vintage commercials, don’t sleep on the “Jurassic Wobbies World compilation.

Wobbies World: the Physical Remnants

Of course, physical remnants of Wobbies World still remain, even with the park long-shuttered and the castle demolished.

The miniature trams remained onsite for some time – one commenter online posted a picture of them said to be circa 2005, still in their former storage shed, now much overgrown and dirty. At least one of these mini-trams was sold at auction, and the remainder are said to have been gifted by the former owners to the same person who now owns the iconic Bell 47J helicopter, on a farm near “Frankston-Dandy” road. 

The copter sits in the front paddock next to a busy road, delightfully visible to all traffic passing by. According to an online comment, the local council fought the owners about it for several years after they’d purchased it at the Wobbies World auction, but finally settled. Reportedly the copter is unlikely to fly again, missing the motor and gearbox – an expensive proposition to get it in flight-worthy condition. Today, the copter’s paint is peeling and there have unfortunately been some vandalism incidents. However, it remains safe from the scrap heap, and a reminder of good times gone by for the regular traffic on the busy Frankston-Dandy road. Link to Google map view of the helicopter here.

Another copter, one of the Whirlybird monorail cars, is also visible at a house on the road to Healesville Animal Sanctuary. Link to the Google map view of the helicopter in Healesville.

The W2-class trams are all now said to be in the hands of private collectors or restoration enthusiasts. And as recently as 2018, the 6-wheel Sierra Trailboss “Wobbies Wheels” ATV cars could be found for sale up on Facebook Marketplace. Little bits of this decades-gone theme park still remain, and there’s something infinitely charming and melancholic about that. What remains when we’re gone into obsolescence, and what meaning is left for those looking back?

Conclusions

 “It’s great at Wobbies World!” 

I can’t close out this episode without bringing the discussion back around to the wildfires raging in Australia right now. Half a billion animals are dead, millions of acres have been destroyed. It’s bonkers. 

Climate change is real and causing massive, problematic weather, amongst other things. You can combat this. You can make small changes like reducing your car and airplane usage, eating less or no meat, supporting policies that control and reduce large companies’ emissions, and by talking about climate change to others. Climate change is relevant to us all, even if you’d rather be talking about defunct theme parks. 

For many, Wobbies World remains a place of good memories, especially for those who visited at a very young age or with young kids. It was a place for birthday and holiday parties, and a place for the young at heart who wouldn’t necessarily see the flaws. For the older folks, it seems as though Wobbies World was more mixed – everyone seems to remember the constantly-running TV commercials and the iconic sights of the park as they drove by, but the general sentiment was of misconception, disappointment, and a fairly sad theme park experience. “I think the ad was more enjoyable than the real thing.” and “So bad, it was good” and “the worst theme park ever, which was what made it great.” No matter what, Wobbies World was memorable. And it inspired the parody “Pissweak World”, a concept which I might be incorporating into my own vocabulary. 

And you know, for all that I said at the beginning that this park was about misconceptions, Wobbies World was actually a whole lot of fun to research. I think given the right frame of mind, or the right age, it would’ve been a fun place to visit, too. Even if it was really a bit of Pissweak World underneath.

“At Wobbies World, there’s heaps to do / bring your friends, and Mum too / visit the castle, or fly in the sky / Wobbies World has lots of rides: helicopters, fire engines, trams, and slides.”

Appendix: Auction Listings for Wobbies World

These lists are taken from the 2004 legal case regarding Wobbies World, and are presented here to help the interested understand the types of rides and equipment which used to be at the park.

References

1. Trams Downunder. https://tdu.to/m/242547/wobbies-world-vic. Accessed December 17, 2019.
2. Trams Downunder. https://tdu.to/33738.msg. Accessed January 3, 2020.
3. Trams Downunder. https://tdu.to/m/242547/wobbies-world-vic?insearch=1. Accessed January 3, 2020.
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6. Laves YM Laves – Guess who went to Wobbies World today!!!! Woo Hoo! https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1542542755963550&set=bc.AbrLFoGZqfxbigqBAu92kjcX6MR1tJX-rIvBEPbXmVArPSyH-gIYpdkxNlSrrfHUGQ5lTdd5ChVGEt5Dy6n9f7-yCM8EXgWI9IO_GWdiE57DYfMUpQVJvXe9xAv1Jxfh_JNsCsHpmQNIjcp9lzWAsctW&type=1&opaqueCursor=AbpYvcsl2f3VY85aNcpBGAvNhy_-eRh4U0HIg6eo8JeBgPCNoHf_zQU5S5OF500e6f7fo2IZk4D0stzxJGJQz94N0DwUe31qZEHa3haSkjVwUb8X0HANk3_o2u_O43-K1hc7jcaMmrlqLTkPUE6aVKbwjvPjGhr8vQUrwBmNnh-ZPJd0vlT4onVDq6KAkS6x7hyXg3TiUU17q1p0x-GIVdMHbvpW3V2byPVTSt_-tQpaxwopH1tisXCA7UdqZFIbCYvlo_RIQUjxb5ZxnuNwbNAl6-kSV9n9Dv_t0n1ZDdQVkiSWuWLA7HPzGoaWmYyq-wTCFOQaMo7XILuM0SJj49GuvBCeG5y7inHWjlb5f6gTKRHnmil60i9uYeD1O_sFC5IkQnAe0k5gxJ0cZmzHaYrwjU7L50JEHXIKt43SpI-9FPaknzhIu5S-E2dbbhqYv3WYawqCDeFzZwq5TrN2nQYzagKH0j3rUh68F7JrZY-QaA&theater. Accessed December 31, 2019.
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17. Check out this vintage ad for Wobbies World. https://www.timeout.com/melbourne/blog/check-out-this-vintage-ad-for-wobbies-world-041516. Accessed December 18, 2019.
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The post Wobbies World appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

January 24, 2020: I originally posted this podcast episode and accompanying blog post in September 2019. With Dogpatch USA back in the news recently, I’ve updated this post and re-published it. I’ll be back with a new episode of The Abandoned Carousel next week – see you then! –Ashley

Sadie Hawkins

This week, our story begins in perhaps a seemingly roundabout way. 

Remember Sadie Hawkins Day, that pseudo-holiday where girls ask boys to a dance? Maybe you don’t, maybe you’re a younger listener from a more enlightened era who never had this phenomenon forced on them. Let me explain. The tradition originated in the late 1930s, when culturally, men did all the inviting and women rarely were socially allowed to do the same. The Sadie Hawkins dance (and Sadie Hawkins day) became a cultural phenomenon of gender role-reversal. Women asked men out to the big dance for once!

Does it seem empowering? Does it seem enlightened? Maybe not as much as you might think.

Sadie Hawkins was not a real person. Sadie Hawkins was the “homeliest gal in all them hills”, a character from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip. She was an unmarried spinster, and when she reached the “horrifying” age of 35 years old and was still unmarried, her father came up with a plan to solve the horrifying dilemma. Depicted in the comic originally between November 13-30th, 1937, Sadie’s father set up a foot race and invited all the unmarried men from the fictional town of Dogpatch USA. Whichever one Sadie caught first at the end of the race was obligated by town law to marry her.

The idea caught fire and spread out of the newspaper comic strip and into pop culture. By 1939, two years later, Sadie Hawkins had a double-page spread in Life magazine, and Sadie Hawkins day was an annual feature of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip.

Li’l Abner

You might also be saying to yourself, who or what is Li’l Abner and why should I care?

It’s always surprising when something once so incredibly popular and well-known is in modern times an unknown, distant memory. As the wheel turns, so too go our cultural references. 

Li’l Abner was a comic strip, written and drawn by one Al Capp. It debuted in August 1934, and ran daily until November of 1977. The strip was one of, if not the first comic strips to focus on the South. Before Li’l Abner, comic strips were based around Northern experiences. (Capp, probably unsurprisingly, was not actually from the South, despite the characters in his comic.)

The strip was set in the fictional town of Dogpatch, initially located in Kentucky, but later carefully only referred to as Dogpatch USA (likely to avoid offending Kentuckians and avoid cancellations of the strip from Kentucky newspapers!). Capp described Dogpatch as “an average stone-age community nestled in a bleak valley, between two cheap and uninteresting hills somewhere.” And the plot? Not so much a plot-driven comic, this strip was about the characters and the socio-political commentary. It was loud, bawdy, detailed, sexy, and poked sharp humor at the world. 

Li’l Abner was an over-the-top stereotype of poverty and Appalachia. Residents of Dogpatch were ignorant and lazy or scoundrels and thieves. It wasn’t without purpose, though. Reportedly, the characters in Li’l Abner allowed Americans suffering through the Great Depression to laugh at someone even worse off than themselves. 

The stars of the strip were the titular Li’l Abner, his love interest and later wife Daisy Mae (their nuptials landed them a Life magazine cover in March 1952), parents Mammy and Pappy, and a host of other supporting characters. There were also a number of allegorical animals over the years, including the fabulous “shmoo”, which “bred exponentially, consumed nothing, and eagerly provided everything that humankind could wish for.” (The Wikipedia article on the characters and settings is quite detailed if you’re interested in more information.) The strip as a whole was outright misanthropic.

Reception of Li’l Abner

Li’l Abner was a cultural phenomenon. It was like nothing anyone had seen before.

At its peak, the comic reportedly reached over 70 million households, in a time when the US population was only 180 million people. That’s almost 40% of the population. 

John Steinbeck “called Capp “very possibly the best writer in the world today” in 1953, and even earnestly recommended him for the Nobel Prize in literature”. In a 1997 book, comics historian Richard Marschall said: “Capp was calling society absurd, not just silly; human nature not simply misguided, but irredeemably and irreducibly corrupt. Unlike any other strip, and indeed unlike many other pieces of literature, Li’l Abner was more than a satire of the human condition. It was a commentary on human nature itself.” 

Li’l Abner marked a change in the tone of the comics world when it was introduced in the 1930s. It introduced politics and dark social commentary into a market that was primarily filled with lighthearted amusements. As the popularity of the strip grew, the audience makeup shifted, as well, comprised mostly of adults now.

Li’l Abner was even reportedly the inspiration for MAD magazine. Both captured the satirical dark humor that was becoming more popular with American audiences.  

The comic was the subject of the first book-length scholarly critique of a comic strip, as well. “One of the few strips ever taken seriously by students of American culture,” wrote Arthur Berger. “Li’l Abner is worth studying…because of Capp’s imagination and artistry, and because of the strip’s very obvious social relevance.” (Berger shows a little bias here, since he’s the author of this first book critiquing the strip. It has exactly one review on Amazon at the time of this recording: “It wasn’t what I expected since Lil Abner doesn’t need to be psycho-analyzed.”

Li’l Abner in Pop Culture

Beyond literary criticism, Li’l Abner touched all parts of culture, particularly during the height of the comic strip’s popularity (between the 1940s-1970s). At one point, Al Capp reoprtedly convinced six of the most popular radio personalities of the mid-40s to record a song he’d written about Daisy Mae; one of these was ol’ blue eyes himself, Frank Sinatra.

There was a radio drama and a Broadway musical. There were comic book anthologies and a short-lived TV cartoon and a live-action movie. And then of course, there was licensing.

Characters from Dogpatch were licensed to dozens of popular products throughout the decades, appearing throughout the grocery store and pharmacy aisles, and on the pages of men’s and women’s magazines alike. There were toys, games, clothes, and a series of family restaurants called Li’l Abner’s. (All have gone out of business by the time of this recording in 2019; a Li’l Abner’s Steakhouse in Tucson currently operating is not related to the Al Capp comics brand.) 

And finally, beyond all of that, there was a theme park, called Dogpatch USA.

Dogpatch USA

Before it was Dogpatch USA, a now-abandoned theme park based on a once incredibly popular media property, the land in the Ozarks, Harrison and Jasper, Arkansas, was just a scenic spot off Arkansas Highway 7.

The area was called Marble Falls, Arkansas.

In the 40s, Albert Raney purchased a trout farm. The Raney family also owned the nearby Mystic Caverns, caves with beautiful natural formations that had been commercial tourist attractions since the late 1920s. A local realtor, OJ Snow, saw the potential in both the caverns and the Raney trout farm when Raney put up the trout farm for sale in 1966. 

Snow gathered a group of businessmen and formed Recreation Enterprises, Incorporated (REI) to develop the property into an amusement park. (As a sidebar, this will be our first, but not last, business acronym. Keep count.) REI approached Al Capp with their plans for the park, reportedly assuring him (somewhat ironically, we’ll find out) that the park would be quiet and dignified, and wouldn’t have any roller coasters or thrill rides that would conflict with the hillbilly themes of Li’l Abner. 

Capp consented, having turned down several theme park proposals in other areas in prior years, and the planning was on.

Groundbreaking on Dogpatch USA

Capp and his wife came to Arkansas for a groundbreaking ceremony in October of 1967. Reportedly, Dogpatch USA was the by-product of his comic strip that made him most proud, as he said in his remarks during the ceremony. “This is the one which will finally gain me some respect from my grandchildren, who until now have always thought of me as a silly man who just draws pictures.”

Local perception of the park was mixed. State officials were reportedly concerned about negative impressions of Arkansas due to the hillbilly stereotype. Attendees of the 1967 Central Arkansas Urban Policy Conference also expressed doubts about the likelihood of success for the park, as many other parks in the decade prior had tried to replicate the success of Disneyland (1955) but failed. Still, the local Chamber of Commerce approved plans for the park.

This may have been in part due to an optimistic projection report from an LA consultant firm, which projected 400,000 visitors in year one, 1M visitors by year ten, and annual revenue of $5 M by year ten. 

These projections were incredibly optimistic, in retrospect, as we’ll later see.

Albert Raney, who still maintained ties with the park, was actually the town postmaster, and the post office is and was right in the Dogpatch USA parking lot. In 1968, Raney helped the town of Marble Falls officially change their name to Dogpatch, Arkansas, to promote the park. 

Over $1.3 M was reportedly put into the park’s phase I. Construction, according to some, was rushed. Scores of workers descended on the area in March, April, and May of 1968 in order to accomodate the opening date of mid-May 1968.

REI renovated the Mystic Caverns and renamed them Dogpatch Caverns, installing lighting, handrails, and additional safety features. Authentic 19th century log cabins were found elsewhere in the Ozarks, disassembled, and painstakingly reassembled at Dogpatch USA. 

Additionally, an 1834 watermill, already on the property, by the name of Peter Beller’s Mill, was restored to working condition for the park. The mill was not only for looks – it actually operated, grinding corn into cornmeal, which was then packaged and sold to visitors.

One of the major pros of the park for the Chamber of Commerce was the Cornpine Square business region, which employed many from the local area, demonstrating and selling wares, arts, and crafts. One such building was called the Ladies Brotherhood Hand Sewing Center for all things knit, sewn, or woven. There was a diamond and stone museum, including demonstrations from artisans. There was a honey shop, a glassblowing center, a woodshop and wood carving, photo studio, pottery center, candle shop, and of course, trout fishing.

Opening day was May 17, 1968.

Dogpatch was immediately a success. Motels in the area reported hordes of tourists they couldn’t serve, even going so far as to seek private rooms in the area for the summer season in order to handle the crowds they couldn’t serve in their motels. Reportedly, there were about 8,000 visitors on opening day, with 300,000 visitors reported in the first year. They also reported a net profit of about $100,000 at the end of the year – $700,000 in today’s money. Not too shabby, but not quite the 400,000 visitors projected by that LA firm prior to the project’s start.

Early, Hazy Days of Success at Dogpatch USA

Things at Dogpatch USA looked so sweet in those early days. A local 1968 op-ed wrote that Dogpatch had “a good chance of becoming one of the nation’s biggest tourist attractions”. That same op-ed projected a gross of $12 M for the park in the first six years, adding “the rest of Northwest Arkansas had better start rounding out their own tourist facilities to take advantage of the crowd”. 

This is the point where, to be honest, I would always get bored and confused in the story of Dogpatch USA in my research. Hang in there if you feel the same way. I’ve punched it up a bit, and honestly the story of Dogpatch USA is so much wilder when all of the details are left in instead of being glossed over. 

REI, the developer group who owned the park, spent their first off-season squabbling over how to use the profits from the first year of Dogpatch USA’s operation. Many of the members wanted to divide the profits amongst themselves personally, while some members, including our realtor friend OJ Snow, wanted to reinvest the profits in the park. This dispute left an opening for an entrepreneurial spirit.

Enter businessman Jess Odom. He saw that opportunity, and purchased a controlling interest in the park from REI members in late 1968. He signed a 30-year licensing agreement with Al Capp: the park had the rights to use Capp’s Li’l Abner intellectual property from 1968 through 1998, and in return, Capp would receive 2-3% of the gross profits of the park.

Dogpatch USA: 1969

In addition to further licensing of the Li’l Abner IP, Odom had capital p Plans for Dogpatch USA. He reportedly installed $350,000 worth of rides before the park reopened for the season in May 1969. It’s likely that one of these was the “Frustratin’ Flyer”, a Monster Mouse model Allan Herschell mad mouse coaster. 

One other was the “Earthquake McGoon’s Brain Rattler”, a Chance Rides prototype Toboggan coaster. This ride was painted as a track wrapped around a metal tree – riders in a small coaster car climbed through the tree and then circled around the structure before doing a short out and back to the station. This ride bore serial number #1 from the factory in Wichita. (If you’re new to the podcast, check out the Joyland episodes, where I talk about Chance Rides, and the recent C. P. Huntington train episode). A scant 32 Toboggans were manufactured. Most were built on trailers for portability. Earthquake McGoon’s was not. Conflicting reports arise, as some places say the coaster was introduced later on (in 1981). However, this seems unlikely given the manufacturer’s date of 1969 and the manufacturing dates of other Chance Toboggans (via RCDB). 

Beyond rides, Odom hired former six-term Arkansas governor Orval Faubus as president of Dogpatch USA in early 1969. This was ultimately only a one-year position for Faubus that primarily consisted of promotional visits across the country, extolling the virtues of the theme park. 

Odom also arranged some cross-promotional opportunities. The first annual Miss Dogpatch contest was held in 1969, and the park also was a filming location for the 1969 horror flick “It’s Alive!”, which has 2.7 stars (out of 10) on IMDb. 

The park was doing well. 1969 marked a high point in rustic, hillbilly pop culture nationwide. Li’l Abner appeared in more than 700 US newspapers daily. Shows with rustic, rural themes like Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Petticoat Junction were all massive hits on TV. And locally, another theme park with a similar country rustic theme was finding success as well: Silver Dollar City, outside of Branson MO. 

Dogpatch USA: Early 1970s

Things continued to go well for Dogpatch in its next few years. A motel made solely of mobile homes was completed in time for the 1970 opening day, as was a campsite with over a hundred spaces. A funicular tram (essentially an angled railway going up and down a slope) was nearing completion and opened midway through the 1970 season. The funicular transported guests from the parking lot down to the theme park below.  

Odom was like Uncle Scrooge seeing unlimited dollar signs. He bought out almost all of the remaining REI investors and essentially became the new owner of Dogpatch USA.

By 1972, a number of new attractions were added, including animal exhibits with sea lions and exotic birds, and a “unique boat ride”. This was simply called Boat Train Ride, and involved a cast member driving a motorboat, pulling a train of non-motorized boats behind it. The ride went up the creek to the Mill and then back again.

Marble Falls Ski Facility

1972 also saw the announcement of a new project: Marble Falls. This was to be “a highly unique snow-skiing and convention facility which will offer a variety of seasonal attractions the year round.” Odom saw this as a way of maximizing the potential of Dogpatch, continuing the profits throughout the off season. The ski center used snow machines to produce adequate ski slopes, and also featured an ice-skating rink, an inn, condos, and A-frame Alpine chalets that were sold as timeshares to help defray costs. 

Ironically, a snowstorm caused delays in the opening of Marble Falls. The snow cannons were all stuck in a major snowstorm in Denver! Not only that, but it was icy on Marble Falls’ opening day, which kept patrons away. Slopes were finally conditioned for skiing by New Years, and for a few weeks, things went great. Unfortunately, it was an early spring, and by mid-February, it was too warm for even artificial snow. This was to be the story of Marble Falls for each year of its operation.

Many people, of course, point to the Marble Falls winter resort as the tipping point for Dogpatch’s downfall.

More Additions to Dogpatch in the 1970s

Additional rides were added to Dogpatch USA in 1973, including a scrambler, go-karts, a shooting gallery, a maze, and a swinging bridge. They all have Li’l Abner-themed names which I really don’t need to go into here. Pappy Yokum’s Positively Petrifying Putt-Mobiles, indeed. 

The “famous” Kissing Rocks sculpture was also added during the 1973 season – two very large heads of characters kissing, carved out of stone. 

1974 saw additional new attractions, including a replica Native American village and Hairless Joe’s Kickapoo Barrel. This was a very memorable thrill ride of which few photos exist. It’s one of the “Rotor” type, also known as “Devil’s Hole” and “Hell Hole”. Simple in concept, these were incredibly popular around the 1950s. Riders were spun in a circle until centrifugal force pinned them to the wall of the barrel, and then the floor of the ride dropped out while the ride kept spinning. This sounds absolutely terrifying to me, but I get that I’m a chicken about these things.

Attendance estimates for this time period vary wildly, from 200,000 visitors per year to over 1 million visitors per year at its peak. 

Trouble on the Horizon for Dogpatch USA

It did seem like prospects were looking up and up and up for Dogpatch, even with the stops and starts of the Marble Falls Ski project. As with all good roller coasters, it was time to fall down. A number of factors came together at once to really seal the fate of Dogpatch.

Nationally, in the early 1970s, interest rates skyrocketed. Odom needed money for Dogpatch, so even though it was a bad time to borrow, he had no choice. He borrowed money from Union Planters Bank in Memphis – $2M in 1972 and an additional $1.5M in 1973.

An energy crisis kept travellers home due to the high cost of oil and gasoline in the oil embargo of 1973. And in pop culture, there was the “rural purge”. Network TV executives, especially those at CBS, began cancelling rural, rustic shows in favor of more urban-directed shows that were aimed at a different audience. Additionally at play here was the newly-implemented Prime Time Access Rule, which forced networks to trim seven half-hour shows (from 7:30-8:00pm) from their weekly programming and return that time to local stations. Shows had to go. Urban variety shows were the new trend, so even though shows like The Beverly Hillbillies were popular, they had to go from the POV of a network executive.

Li’l Abner was still a daily comic strip in a declining number of papers, but the extensions of the property never happened given the changing cultural climate. No Li’l Abner restaurant chain, and no Li’l Abner TV series. Al Capp was facing sexual assault charges. Capp’s politics in his comic strip were changing. 

And back in the Ozarks, attendance numbers for Dogpatch USA in the 1970s were nowhere near expectations.

Weather and Money Troubles in the Late 70s

Mild weather was spelling trouble – this was awful news for the ski lodge of Marble Falls. You can’t have a ski lodge in warm weather, even if you can make artificial snow. Marble Falls sat empty and grassy and idle. Dogpatch USA made a moderate profit, but couldn’t make up for the resulting lack of income from the Marble Falls side of things.

Jess Odom was sitting at around $3.5 million dollars in debt at this point. He tried some business maneuvers, but ultimately failed. Banks began seeking their money back from Odom in the late 70s. In 1976 and 1977, two different banks sued Odom and his company, Marble Falls Estates.

And then in 1977, Al Capp retired, ending the Li’l Abner strip. This was a huge blow to the park, as the strip had essentially provided a constant, wide-spread advertising for the park. All together, expenses were up, and profits were down.

That same year of 1977, Odom made the decision to permanently close the Marble Falls ski slopes, citing the fact that the attraction had lost $50,000 to $100,000 a year since its opening in 1972. 

Despite all this, 1977 was reportedly the most profitable year yet, with the highest attendance numbers in the park’s history.

Odom tried to add some new attractions to stem the tide: the Slobbovian sled run, a puppet theater, a space flight simulator. It wasn’t enough. 

In 1979, Odom announced that he was in talks to sell Dogpatch to a nonprofit Christian group called God’s Patch, Inc, and reportedly had been negotiating the deal privately for several years. Should the deal go through, Dogpatch would be converted into a biblically themed entertainment and convention center. The deal never went forward, however, as God’s Patch, Inc. couldn’t find sufficient matching investment funds before their allotted time ran out.

Odom tried another tact, feeling himself sinking under the weight of the high interest rates on his loans. He went to the Harrison City Council. He tried to get their help in essentially refinancing all of his loans and extending their life while lowering the interest rates, through the issuing of tourism bonds. Ultimately, he was asking them for all of his personal money back out of the park, for Harrison to assume all the debts, and for the park to be run by this God’s Patch group. 

Harrison City Council wasn’t particularly excited by the proposal, and asked to see his books for the last five years. 

Within a week of the meeting, two lawsuits were filed. The previous year, in 1978, a child fell over 20 feet after slipping between a ride and its loading platform; a woman slipped and fell trying to catch the child. Both suffered spinal injuries and permanent disabilities. They sought over $200k in compensation, alleging in the suit that Dogpatch had been negligent in ride design, safety, and employee training. The lawsuits took two years to settle, and they left a bad taste in the mouth of the Harrison City Council. 

The Harrison City Council rejected Odom’s bond proposal, and they rejected his subsequent followup bond proposal. Councilmembers reportedly went on record at the time to say that the entire community was against any bonds relating to Dogpatch. The general sense was that the community knew the shape of it, and didn’t want any part in the bad deal Odom was trying to pass off on someone else.

Some new attractions materialized again at the park, doing little to improve attendance: a trained bear act, and the first appearance of a costumed Shmoo character.

In 1980, a new business entity was formed, this time called Ozark Family Entertainment (OFE). OFE stated that they had no connection with Dogpatch, although later records reportedly indicated that multiple people associated with OFE had been in management positions at Dogpatch USA or had been involved in other business dealings with Odom.

Several people were reportedly interested in moving Dogpatch to a new location, and Odom was reportedly no longer interested in being the owner of the park. The newest idea was that now they’d try getting Jasper (Newton County, where most of Dogpatch was physically located) to issue tourist bonds, with the gist of their proposal being no property taxes on almost 1000 acres of developed land, plus cheap money. 

OFE negotiated to purchase Dogpatch, which was unsurprisingly approved by the shareholders. Newton County tentatively agreed to the bond proposal only if OFE could find buyers for all the bonds AND convince Dogpatch USA’s creditors to accept the bonds in lieu of payment. OFE seemed to think they had this in place. 

In one of the many mind-numbingly complex situations involved with Dogpatch, REI maintained ownership of the park for the summer of 1980, but OFE managed it. Banks and creditors wanted to wait on the bond issue through the summer season to see how profitable Dogpatch USA was going to be without the weight of the now-closed Marble Falls ski resort.

What happened was a massive heat wave. 1980 saw what was reputedly the hottest summer in Arkansas history to date, with more triple-digit days that year than almost any prior year. Trees and plants withered, water sources dried up, and people stayed inside. They did not want to be out at a theme park in humid 100+ degree temperatures. The months rolled on, and summer at Dogpatch USA in 1980 was a bust. 

By the end of August, the creditors had seen enough. They weren’t willing to accept the bonds as payment. Additional banks sued Dogpatch and its holding companies over their unpaid, ballooning debts. The bond issue wasn’t going anywhere. Odom tried to get the banks to allow delayed payments on some of the debts, but they weren’t having any of it. And the lawsuits over the child and woman injured at the park were settled during this time as well, for an undisclosed amount of money.

In October 1980, Union Planters Bank, to which Dogpatch owed millions, filed to take possession of Dogpatch and Marble Falls. 

In November 1980, Dogpatch filed for bankruptcy. Their filing reportedly listed 90 creditors owed $3.2 M, including personal debts to Al Capp and Jess Odom himself. OFE would not be able to buy the park unless these creditors were all paid off. The bank, Union Planters, took possession of Dogpatch USA, including most of the associated business as well: hotels, chalets, post office, restaurant, and service station. Despite their ownership on paper, Union Planters was reportedly ready to sell quickly, as they were located in Memphis, almost 300 miles from Dogpatch USA. 

Here we go through yet more confusing legal ownership.

Union Planters expected that Dogpatch USA wouldn’t open during the 1981 season, but it ended up doing so after all. Enter Wayne Thompson, one of the former members of OFE and a former general manager at Dogpatch USA (during 1974-1975 season). He formed a new company called Ozark’s Entertainment, Inc (OEI), because who doesn’t love another confusing acronym? OEI purchased Dogpatch and much of its assets for an undisclosed sum early in 1981. 

The bank retained Marble Falls Ski Resort, and auctioned the property off in April of 1981 (we’ll get back to this in a minute). Also sold were the Dogpatch Caverns. The latter were purchased by Albert Raney, part of the family that owned the original trout farm property. After a rename to Mystic Caverns, they continued operating as a tourist attraction that year. 

Dogpatch USA under OEI Ownership

Wayne Thompson, as mentioned, had originally been a general manager of Dogpatch back in 1974 and 1975. In the intervening years between his management and his ownership of the park, he reportedly managed a different park down in Florida, leveling himself up on park management skills. As the 80s rolled on and Dogpatch USA began operations under Thompson and OEI, it was clear he’d learned some useful things. 

For instance, he cut staff – from 600 in 1980 down to 250 in 1981. He focused on upgrading landscaping and adding additional arts and crafts and shows. Thompson even re-invested in the park’s infrastructure, working with a local firm to rebuild the Marble Falls water wheel. They used original period wood-working techniques and the original cast iron spike, still drilled into the rock at the base of the waterfall. 

And of course, Thompson added new rides. The iconic “Wild Water Rampage” (the big waterslide still living on the property today) was installed for the 1984 operating season.

Reportedly, big name acts like Ike and Tina Turner, Hank Thompson, and Reba McEntire all performed at Dogpatch USA’s ampitheatre at this time. Denver Pyle from the popular TV show Dukes of Hazzard was signed on as the spokesman for the park. And Thompson signed licensing deals: Spiderman, Batman, and Captain America were all on hand for autographs and appearances. At the same time, Coke, Dr. Pepper, and Tyson Foods licensed their brands for amphitheatres, buildings, and season passes. 

All told, Dogpatch USA recovered from its slumps in 1979 and 1980, and made a profit. Reportedly, attendance was up by 21%, although this practically should’ve been a guarantee after the 1980 heatwave. 

More Legal Entanglements for Dogpatch

While the park seemed to be recovering, more was going on behind the scenes. The courts were structuring the debt after bankruptcy. 

Y’all, I’ve got to be honest, I’ve almost given up on this episode right here, so many times. Ugh, it is just an alphabet soup of confusion. I promise that the story is more interesting with all the details – stay with me. 

Okay. So, we have a new company. This one’s called Dogpatch Properties Inc, or DPP. Remember how I said the Marble Falls part of the property was auctioned? Well, DPP was a group of businessmen who formed this company and arranged to buy it. The plan was that secured interests in the property would be paid off first, and then unsecured interests paid off next, somehow with Jess Odom still in the mix to manage expenses only. 

Somehow too was introduced the concept of selling parts of this property as time-shares. Enter a new company: Buffalo River Resorts (BRR), still an Odom enterprise, that reportedly existed as a company only to sell timeshares for DPP. (Why all the shell companies? Perhaps to keep the name Dogpatch off sales and ad copy, and keep that associated bad taste out of people’s mouths.) 

Okay. So then, one of the Arkansas state laws get changed, and uh-oh, this one concerns time shares. This here is the most confusing part of the legal entanglements. Essentially, the Time Share Act of 1983 (Act 294) required that timeshare properties be registered with the State Real Estate Commission prior to being sold. This in turn would require that “BRR furnish the purchaser with releases from all liens or to put up a bond or buy insurance or to provide a document in which the mortgage holder subordinates his rights to those of the purchaser”.

It gets into legal spaghetti here, and to be honest, I think very few people understand what went on. You can get into the details at the website of Arkansas Road Stories, whose piece on Dogpatch is incredibly well-researched, and provides a solid backbone for my episode that you’re hearing right now. 

The long and the short of it was that there was a lot of legal mess roughly boiling down to “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” until 1984, when lawyers found a loophole. Essentially, the courts made a decision to exempt BRR from registering with the State Real Estate Commission, with one catch. Any time-share buyers had to be informed that banks had liens on the properties, and therefore that the banks could potentially re-possess timeshares if DPP and BRR didn’t pay their debts. 

Unsurprisingly, the number of timeshare sales subsequently dropped.

1987 and On: Dogpatch USA Ownership Under Telcor

After the dust from the OEI ownership and BRR timeshare kerfuffles had settled down, things were quiet at Dogpatch for a few years.

Then came 1987.

The Entertainment and Leisure Corp (Telcor) came on the scene. They purchased a controlling interest (90%) in Dogpatch USA for an undisclosed sum, leaving the remaining 10% in the hands of a few area residents.

Well, that was abrupt. How’d this all come about?

So it turns out that Telcor was a new company, formed in order to buy and manage theme parks. It was headed by a guy named Melvyn Bell, who also at the time owned Deer Forest Park in Michigan, and Magic Springs, in Arkansas. (We’ll get there, though not in this episode. Magic Springs was shuttered for five years starting in 1995 before a massive revitalization project, and Deer Forest Park is on my master abandoned park list.) Aside from theme parks, Melvyn Bell had made a name and a lot of money for himself in waste management and restaurant training (two separate businesses). 

The Dogpatch connection came from the new President of Telcor, one Wayne Thompson, who should be a familiar name by now as the general manager of Dogpatch USA for most of the 80s and current OEI owner. And funnily enough, another principle owner of OEI, Sam Southerland, became VP of Telcor, and became finance manager for all three Telcor parks. 

Corporate poaching or perhaps just some solid lateral business moves, who knows. The sense from my research is that the acquisition was well-received. After all, Melvyn Bell had deep pockets and Telcor had promised to spend at least half a million dollars on improvements to the park. 

Well, they did add a new ride called Space Shuttle, which didn’t seem to fit the rustic theming of Dogpatch USA very well. I haven’t dwelled on the theming very much with how much this story has been about ridiculous money mismanagement and legal mumbo-jumbo, but it should be very clear that by the late 80s, rustic was very out. Clean and shiny and new was in, and Dogpatch USA was never going to fit the new trends without a massive re-theming. Barring that, they just shoehorned whatever new ride or attraction felt fun into place and hoped for the best. Leave the theming to Disney, it seems. But they did take at stab at improving maintenance, at the least.

Anyhow, reportedly attendance was up 60% in the first year with Telcor compared to 1981, the first year with OEI. Okay. Odd comparison, but okay. 

If we flip back to the BRR and DPP timeshare side of things, we’ll still be mired in legal spaghetti. Three banks’ right to foreclose (on Jess Odom) were upheld by the US Eight District Court of Appeals. Summarizing and reading between the lines, it appears that the court placed the responsibility for Dogpatch USA, DPP, and BRR solely at the feet of Jess Odom. “If Dogpatch Properties, Inc. (DPP) can’t pay, the debtor will be responsible for the leins, the money will come out of the debtor’s estate, and unsecured creditors will get nothing.”

1988: Departures and Declining Cultural Relevance at Dogpatch

In 1988, Wayne Thompson parted ways with Melvyn Bell and therefore with Telcor and Dogpatch USA. Lynn Spradley became the general manager in his place, a man with fourteen years of experience already at Dogpatch USA in other positions. In his next few years at Dogpatch as general manager, he was reportedly often bemoaning the situation Dogpatch USA was in. As I said, the theming had really taken a dive, and rustic was out out out, not in. The Li’l Abner comic strip had been out of print in the papers for over a decade. Said Spradley, “A lot of kids don’t have any idea who Daisy Mae and Li’l Abner are.” Reportedly, Dogpatch had to spend more per patron than comparable parks on various promotions to attract guests.

Not only was the theming a problem, but location was always a problem, too. Dogpatch was on a side highway, a back road. As we know by know on The Abandoned Carousel, location is such a huge factor.

And as I mentioned many minutes ago, Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO was a relatively close attraction (50 miles north, just over the MO-AR border). This park is still open, spoiler alert. It is and was an 1880s-themed Ozark village. There are crafts and tradesman demonstrations, there are stages and performances, there are multiple coasters and rides, and there’s Marvel Cave, a cave that’s been open for tourists since 1894. Does it all sound like a better version of Dogpatch? Kinda. Sorry, Dogpatch stans. And if Silver Dollar City didn’t have it, Ozark Folk Center, an Arkansas state park, was a short distance due east, to meet the craftsman and Ozark heritage needs. 

As one author nicely put it, Dogpatch USA was, from the beginning, too hokey and jokey with its Li’l Abner dark satirical comic strip theme to ever successfully emulate a grander, more polished place like Silver Dollar City. And where Dogpatch does bear some resemblances to a rustic version of a Six Flags franchise park (with its mishmash of attractions and themes and licensed properties), it was located in the wrong place to ever draw enough crowds to succeed with that audience. Its location is and was one of the poorest in the state.

Dogpatch USA’s only true advantage over other local attractions was always the Li’l Abner theme. But every year past the strip’s retirement, the park declined in cultural relevance. Dogpatch was simply outdated. If you have to explain to your kids that Daisy Mae was a character in a comic strip that ended when you, the parent, were a kid, well…

You begin to see the discouragement that had to be setting in for those in ownership of Dogpatch USA. 

1991: Changes for Dogpatch USA

Melvyn Bell sat down in 1991 and began making major changes. He saw the writing on the wall, and local civic leaders in Jasper and Harrison were publically voicing their concerns about whether the park would ever be viable again. 

The Li’l Abner theming was dropped. Melvyn Bell and Telcor decided that they could save that 2-3% of gross profits for themselves instead of sending it to the Al Capp estates. The park was renamed “Dogpatch, Arkansas” and they waved goodbye to that licensing fee. 

Not only that, but the entry fee was dropped as well. What? As a cost-saving measure? Yep. They lengthened the season, charged per ride on each attraction, and reframed the park as an arts and crafts focused place. This brought more bodies in the park, potentially meaning more dollars in the pocket.

General Manager Lynn Spradley left Dogpatch in 1991, as well, in order to become a plumber. In his place, Shirley Cooper stepped in, an 11 year veteran of the Dogpatch world, serving as general manager for the park’s last two years.

Yes, there wasn’t long left for Dogpatch, even with the major changes Bell and Telcor had set in place. Visitors during these last years noted the declining maintenance around the park, the train’s PA system on the fritz, generic carnival rides like the tilt-a-whirl added to try and boost income…

Nothing helped.

Dogpatch USA’s last day of operation was October 14, 1993.

Abandoned Dogpatch USA

“There were a lot of mistakes. Bad judgement calls,” Bud Pelsor, a later owner of the park, is quoted as saying. “I don’t know that they could’ve made good ones. The United States was going through some serious transitions in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.”

Ultimately, the park was foreclosed upon yet again. Bell and Telcor had done pretty well on taking down that pile of debt, but almost half a million was still outstanding. In December of 1994, the park was put up for auction. The new owners were C. L. and Ford Carr, also known as Leisuretek Corporation and Westek Corporation. During these transition years, many options for revitalization were floated, including converting the space into a movie ranch, an ecotourism spot, or a better version of an Ozark history spot, but nothing ever came of any of it. 

And then the park sat.

New Operations at Marble Falls

Up at Marble Falls, there was a bit of action.

In 1997, reportedly facing public pressure, the official name of the post office (and the town) was changed from Dogpatch back to Marble Falls. Despite this, however, Google still thinks the official name is Dogpatch, AR. 

Back in 1988, when DPP was divvying out shares of the Marble Falls ski resort land, a woman named Debra Nielsen began purchasing what she could, when she could. According to news reports, she eventually owned much of the Marble Falls attractions area: the ski lodge, the convention center, the roller (skating) rink, and a motel. She reportedly named it “Serenity Mountain”. The skating rink she reported leased to a nonprofit called HELP, providing therapeutic horseback riding at no cost. Additionally, she reportedly operated a B&B as well as a church on the land, although I’ve been unable to find additional information on this. 

What I did find was a few businesses clustered in the former Marble Falls buildings. I’ll get into more detail later, but there’s Marble Falls Resort and Restaurant (which advertises some incredibly tasty-looking fried catfish on its social media accounts) and a place called The HUB. Both cater to motorcycle enthusiasts. Well, one does, one did. The HUB closed in 2017 after 12 years of operation. 

Back at Dogpatch, things were still stagnant. There were rumors and reports but no activity towards revitalization of any kind.

In 2002, Ford Carr listed Dogpatch USA on eBay, at a starting minimum bid of $1 M. There were no takers. 

In 2005, things changed again. 

2005: Pruett Nance and Dogpatch USA

Enter Pruett Nance, then 16. His grandfather was one of Dogpatch’s original shareholders, and Nance had grown up going to the park. When it closed in 1993, he regularly spent time on the former park land, reportedly with permission of the property owners, C. L. and Ford Carr. 

In 2005, he was ATV riding on the property, again with permission from the Carrs, “to tour the property”. He hit a wire that had been strung between two trees, and was severely injured, nearly decapitated. His trachea was severed and his neck was broken. Doctors didn’t expect him to survive, and when he did, they didn’t expect him to ever talk again. But Nance proved them wrong again, on both counts, and he did. 

Nance and his father filed a lawsuit against the owners, alleging that they’d put the wire there on purpose, as a deterrent against vandals, with malicious intent. The case actually made it all the way up to the Arkansas Supreme Court. The court ultimately ruled in favor of Nance. Between Nance and his father, Dogpatch owners were ordered to pay $764,582 in damages, to include medical bill costs, within 45 days of the decision. 

The owners could not, would not, did not pay.

The judge gave the deed to Dogpatch to Nance, and he became the new owner of Dogpatch.

“”I do have the ability to change things for the better of course,”” he said to the local paper in 2011. He was also pragmatic in his comments to the paper, stating that he was only 23 and did not have the experience or knowledge to properly deal with the ruins of Dogpatch. It was reported that Pruett Nance and his father Stewart Nance were taking the project one day at a time.

2014: Bud Pelsor and Dogpatch USA

It took a few more years, but it turns out that they did eventually decide to sell Dogpatch. In summer 2014, it found a new owner: Bud Pelsor, inventor of the spillproof dog bowl (http://greatamericanspillproof.com/), and his business partner Jim Robertson, the CFO of Great American Spillproof Products. (Curious? Pelsor’s dog-wolf hybrid is the spokes-dog for the product. Her name is Miss Arkansas Diamond, or Dia for short, and she’s a lovely animal. The bowl is sold with the tagline “Dogs love it because water does not go up their nose. You love it because you have less mess.” I am tempted to purchase one for my own pups.)

The story goes that Pelsor had briefly visited Dogpatch in its heyday. Talking to the newspaper at the time, he said “I saw how the local residents thrived from it. … All the houses along the road had jellies, jams, quilts for sale. I was really impressed with it. I kept making trips down here, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.”

Pelsor’s business partner Jim made him aware that the park was up for sale in 2014, and they purchased Dogpatch to the tune of $2 M, reportedly backed by promises of additional external grant money. (As a sidebar, the property records are freely accessible by the public and tell a fascinating legal and tax version of the story I’m telling you here. Worth checking out if you’re into that.)

He wasn’t particularly interested in reopening Dogpatch as it was, however. “Resurrecting the dead is something best left for someone other than me,” he’s quoted as saying. He had plans for “The Village at Dogpatch”. It was to be an ecotourism place, for reintroducing native mussels to the creek, for restocking the famous trout pond. He wanted a more arts and crafts focused place – maybe to bring back the music, maybe a restaurant, but not a theme park.

Regardless of the ultimate theme, with Pelsor as the new owner, he had immediate plans for cleaning and maintaining the property, at the very least. Volunteers even came out for weekends on end to help him clean up the property, cutting back the massive flora that was taking over the remaining rides and buildings. 

The crowds were incredible. Traffic was reportedly backed up on Highway 7 for the December 2014 public opening, the first time the park had been open to the public for 21 years. Over 5,000 people were reported in attendance. Very impressive for a defunct theme park, abandoned for 21 years! There were several of these Riverwalk events, allowing the public to see the cleaned up Dogpatch.

Plans didn’t move very fast – unsurprising as I’ve learned from firsthand experience that construction timelines are truly something else. A few months later, in February 2015, three buildings were burned down. Arson was suspected. 

In May 2015 it was time for more Riverwalk events at Dogpatch again. This time, the framing was as an artists village event. Several musical acts performed, and artists demonstrated their craft. Many pieces were Dogpatch themed: arrowheads made out of old broken glass from the site, pictures of the abandoned site pasted onto wood, etc.

But still, things were moving slowly. It seemed like it was setback after setback. There were floods. The overgrown buildings required extensive maintenance before any new construction could be done.

And then came the news that the promises for big name support and grant money for the park were empty useless promises. Pelsor is quoted as saying that it ”left me with my pants down and exposed to chiggers”.

And Bud’s business partner wanted out, too, reportedly due to poor health. 

In March of 2016, Dogpatch USA went up for sale again – either the whole thing, or just half. Pelsor was willing to remain co-owner if someone else was interested in being his business partner. “”I don’t want to sell out, but my business associate does,” he said. “I have the option to buy him out, but I can’t.””

2018: Heritage USA (But Not That One)

It took over a year, but in late 2017, after months Pelsor announced that he’d come to an agreement with a group called Heritage USA to lease the property. 

No, not THAT Heritage USA. This was not the Christian Disneyland, Jim Bakker, pyramid scheme Heritage USA. This group was (supposedly) unrelated, operated by a guy named David Hare. 

In YouTube videos, Hare looks and speaks like a TV preacher, well, a lot like Jim Bakker, to be honest. He’s filmed wearing button-down shirts and slicking his hair back. His background is as an executive member of the Las Vegas Broadcasting Company America’s TV Network, a very small media company. Prior to that, he did musical productions in Anaheim and hosted a kids radio show in the 80s and 90s. 

For months prior to the official announcement, Hare posted vague and confusing videos about the forthcoming deal with Dogpatch. But what was eventually announced was that Heritage USA and David Hare would lease the main Dogpatch property, with a potential purchase agreement at the end of the lease period.

In addition to making a deal with Pelsor, Heritage USA also made a deal with Debra Nielsen for a similar lease-purchase agreement on the Marble Falls hotel and convention center properties. 

Hare and Heritage USA posted multiple videos about the site online, often rambling. They branded themselves as “your conservative entertainment company”. Nothing is or was ever very clear with the Heritage USA operations of Dogpatch from what I’ve been able to see, but it appears they planned to have a resort, theme park, hotel, theater, and RV park, opening in stages. Reportedly a new train was supposed to open in 2019.

Based on their social media postings, things went okay for the first few months. They were active on social media, showing the progress on the land, a full house at the hotel, tours and other special events, etc. But somewhere in June 2018, things seem to have gone awry.

On June 28, 2018, Hare published a (frankly rambling) video on his Heritage USA Youtube channel, about the “challenges” he sees facing the company and project going forward. The gist seems to be that his investors decided to bail on their support of the Heritage USA project, but that he himself was not going to bail. In his comments, he insisted that it didn’t require a lot of money to operate the site. Several times over the course of the video, he reiterated that the property owners (Pelsor and Nielsen) “deserve to get their money”. (Obviously, as this was a legal contract he’d entered into.) The overall tone was of a man rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

It’s difficult to put together the pieces from where I’m sitting in 2019, as several of Hare’s Heritage USA videos have been deleted. But Hare goes on to say in his June 28 video (“Do It Talk 3: Moving Forward.The Challenge”): “Do you realize we could start paying the bills up here if people would start really renting rooms? […] if we had a good influx of steady bookings, we could make it. That’s how reasonable it is.” 

It’s so classic, to shift the blame to others. 

He closes the video saying “Don’t count us out” and then adds “but don’t make reservations for October, either”.  

Essentially, it looks like Hare could never fulfill his end of the bargain, or perhaps never intended to. Some online speculate that the Heritage USA name was intentional, and that the only real intent behind the park plans was a church or religious cult of some kind. Hare posted on social media advertising the park, but the hotel was vacant when paid guests showed up, utilities turned off, Hare and Heritage USA vanished in the night, completely unreachable. 

The nitty gritty of what happened seems to be that Debra Nielsen had filed an eviction notice in July, requiring Heritage USA to be out within ten days as a result of non-payment of rent. (Not just a short term lack of payment – they apparently had never paid her any rent, nor had they paid rent to Pelsor.) 

Heritage USA, in turn, reportedly claimed that this eviction was a breech of their lease, and requested mediation. 

Debra Nielsen filed a lawsuit in Newton County Circuit Court in August of 2018, saying that mediation was pointless since Heritage USA hadn’t made any payments on their lease (which had reportedly begun in January 2018 on the Marble Falls portion of the land). Heritage USA had originally agreed to pay $5,500 / month just for the Marble Falls portion of the land alone (this included the old HUB motel and convention center, as well as the old skating rink). “The lease began Jan. 15 and was to continue until Jan. 14, 2020, at which time Heritage USA Ozarks Resort was to purchase the property for $750,000 if the company didn’t opt to do so sooner.”

An immediate hearing was scheduled, as the property was in a state of emergency. Apparently Hare hadn’t paid the insurance companies either, nor the water and electric companies, so all insurance and utility services had been shut off. 

Reportedly, though, Hare disappeared. According to the newspaper articles, Nielsen’s attorney had exhausted every possible resource available to him to find Hare. 

Pelsor described Hare as “larger than life” and defended his original decision to work with Hare and Heritage USA in a newspaper article in August 2018. ““He had sound investors that were contractors. He had sound financial management. He had a good team assembled, and that’s what we looked at,” says Pelsor.”

Pelsor continued in comments to the local news, saying “Now it looks almost like it did when I bought it. A wasteland. Everything’s grown up and ugly again and it happened because David Hare made promises he couldn’t keep,”. By all accounts, Hare was all talk, and burned bridges with those around him.

And once again, Dogpatch USA as a theme park was abandoned.

Dogpatch USA: the Present and Future

Of course, in Monday morning quarterbacking, people have plenty of opinions about the many ups and downs the park has gone through. “The roads to Dogpatch were so rugged, so it was never an easy destination to reach.” says one person in the comment section of a newspaper article. Many other folks remember the park with fond nostalgia from attending there in the 70s and 80s, though, and praise the inexpensive pricing. 

It does seem like the park was originally a little bit magical – like something from a simpler time, surrounded by the natural beauty of Northern Arkansas. And the theming reflected the history of the people of the area, at least at first.

But in its abandonment, it only had offerings for those interested in abandoned places and urban explorers. Residents and former visitors described the area as a hazard, rotten and falling down. Many called it a problem, and it seems like most just want the eyesore to go away. There’s nostalgia for the past, but it seems like people have been burned too many times in too many different supposed revitalizations of the place.

And Dogpatch is incredibly outdated. Al Capp, while being an excellent writer and artist, was a known womanizer, misogynist, and accused rapist (including allegations by Goldie Hawn and Grace Kelly). And his Li’l Abner comic strip has been out of publication for 42 years as of this recording. Arkansas residents didn’t want to be seen as hillbillies back then, and that theming definitely wouldn’t fly in today’s culture. 

An online commenter summed it up: “Not worth tearing down and there’s no market for it if it was restored.”

Now in 2019, the park is back in the hands of Bud Pelsor. He’s quoted in an interview with Belle Starr Antiques, saying that he simply plans to ““clean it up, turn the lights on, the music up loud and party until it says SOLD on the sign.””

Yes, Dogpatch USA is currently back up for sale. The address is 256 NC 3351, Marble Falls, AR, 72648. At the time of this recording, asking price is just under $1.5M dollars.

Do you want to visit Dogpatch USA yourself? Reportedly Pelsor sometimes allows visitors, arranged ahead of time, for a modest $5/pp fee. Or you could go with a group, like this upcoming October 6, 2019 hike: https://joplinoutdoors.com/explore-dogpatch-usa-hike-october-6th-2019/?fbclid=IwAR0Zi9JnTXKcN5V4lfsZzJSzkip81Etqku4Rst2danRpN6hawLO0SsxZZZs

The Future of Dogpatch: 2019 and 2020

The writing has been on the wall for some time. But late 2019 and early 2020 have seen the wheels of bureaucracy, so familiar in this long story, back in action at Dogpatch once again.

In December 2019, Bud Pelsor announced that he was giving up on his dream of the ecotourism village at Dogpatch USA, and that he was moving back to Indiana. In a quote from the article, Pelsor said, “I’m just not able to pull it off. The stress of this place is killing me. I’ve had successes in a lot of ways, but everybody that was supposed to come on financially, well, there were just too many talkers.”

A January 2020 article fleshed out the story further: Pelsor and his business partners had missed multiple payments on the property through August 2019. The mortgage holders, the Nances, filed suit against Great American Spillproof. By late January, a decree of foreclosure was filed, giving Pelsor and his partners 10 days to pay the over $1M still owed on the property. At the time of this update (January 24, 2020), it is expected that the money will not be repaid. If so, the Dogpatch USA property will be sold at auction on March 3, 2020, there on the courthouse steps of Jasper, AR, with an expected starting bid of $1M.

Still in Operation

While The HUB has shut down, as I mentioned earlier, (that was where Heritage USA had made its base of operations, after all) things are still operation at Dogpatch and Marble Falls. There’s still the US Post Office. There’s a fairly new campground: CabinPatch USA. This is aimed at revitalizing the old campground at Dogpatch, and the views look incredible.

Marble Falls Resort and Restaurant is a recent effort from Debra Nielsen, the current landowner of most of the old Marble Falls properties. Operating in the former facilities of The HUB and Heritage USA, this place is currently operational and looks to be a very nice place to visit and stay. And, as I mentioned, delicious looking fried catfish advertised on their social media. 

Dogpatch USA Rides: Still Operating

And of course, you can still find a little bit of Dogpatch USA in one of its former rides. The waterslide (“Wild Water Rampage”), of course, still stands in state at the abandoned Dogpatch. It’s missing steps and will never be an operational ride again – an insurance nightmare. And of course, the funicular tram is still onsite, too, rusted in place. The paddleboats were left on the property after its abandonment, and are now long stolen.

Many of the other rides were sold or destroyed. Whearabouts of the carousel, the paratrooper, the Slobbovian Sled Run, the space ship, the barrel ride – all unknown.

Close to home, the Dogpatch Caverns, as mentioned earlier, were sold in 1981. They were renamed back to Mystic Caverns and are still open for curious cavers at the time of this recording.

The small coaster that was once at Dogpatch was called Frustratin’ Flyer, a Herschell wild mouse Monster Mouse model. Reportedly, the coaster was even wild during the park’s operation, with one guest commenting online that they could actually see the bolts holding the ride in place MOVING while the ride operated. While some sources state that this ride went to the Little Amerricka theme park after Dogpatch was shuttered in 1993, this would not be accurate. Little Amerricka owns a Wild Mouse model, not a Monster Mouse model – a close comparison of the track layout from photos and onride videos makes this clear. The only operational Herschell Monster Mouse coaster at this time is at Parque Acuatico Rey Park in Ecuador.

What IS at Little Amerricka is the infamous Earthquake McGoon’s Brain Rattler. If you head on over to Marshall, WI, some ten hours north of the former Dogpatch USA, you can ride the last Toboggan coaster known in operation at this time, now with a simpler name: Wild & Wooly Toboggan. Little Amerricka only runs one car on the coaster now, though, instead of the two it has the capacity for, and the ride does admittedly break down often. Spoilers.

And what about the miniature train that used to run? It was called the West Po’k Chop Speshul, and it was actually three different Chance C. P. Huntington trains, each of which had been heavily modified. On some, that lovingly ridiculous smokestack was removed and replaced with a crooked stovepipe. At the time of its construction, it was the first and only railroad in Newton County, Arkansas.

One online commenter suggested that one of the trains had been cannibalized for parts for the KC Zoo. This doesn’t fit with what’s known about the trains from the C. P. Huntington Train Project, though. 

We know that Dogpatch had CPH #64, #69, and another train. They were given the name “West Po’k Chop Spechul”. All engines were custom-themed. One was originally light green and orange; later black; the others were themed to the train from the comic strip. It pulled custom coaches with wood shingled roofs. 

Richmond Country Farms (up in British Columbia) purchased CPH #64 (Dogpatch #1) in 2013, and has been refurbishing it over the intervening years.

You see, word had been going around that the Dogpatch train was just rotting in some Kansas field somewhere. Well, this was the rumored train. Here’s a quote from Richmond Country Farms’ website: “It has been a dream of ours to have an operational railroad and miniature train for many years. We found our train tucked away on a farm in Witchita, Kansas in 2010. After many phonecalls and emails, we were able to secure a deal. Our two main farm hands, Nelson and Lucas Hogler, made the trek from Vancouver to Kansas to bring the train to its new home at Richmond Country Farms. After arriving home, we began an extensive 5 year full restoration of the locomotive and coaches. Construction of the railroad began in the summer of 2014- finishing just in time for October- for the grand opening of the train, and our annual Pumpkin Patch. Now, when you see that shiny candy-apple red train, you will know what we’re talking about!”

I’ve seen video of the coaches cleaned up and operating, sent to me by Chris Churilla, and they are looking very nice indeed. Good job on you, Richmond Country Farms.

Ultimately, Dogpatch USA was always in a state of flux, and continues to be so.

Whatever does end up happening at Dogpatch and Marble Falls, the tagline for the place will likely always hold true: “it was a heckuva day at Dogpatch USA.”

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References

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22. Dogpatch USA. Abandoned Arkansas. January 2014. https://abandonedar.com/dogpatch-usa/. Accessed August 11, 2019.
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28. Dogpatch USA for sale for $3M. Arkansas Online. //www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/mar/12/dogpatch-usa-for-sale-for-3m-20160312/. Published 3:17. Accessed September 5, 2019.
29. Imgur. Dogpatch USA then and now. Imgur. https://imgur.com/gallery/x0Wgb. Accessed August 12, 2019.
30. Imgur. Dogpatch USA: Abandoned Porn. Imgur. https://imgur.com/a/695Pz. Accessed August 12, 2019.
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32. Dogpatch USA: The Hillbilly Theme Park that Lies in Ruin. Slate. May 2014. http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/05/21/dogpatch_usa_is_an_abandoned_hillbilly_theme_park_in_arkansas.html. Accessed August 11, 2019.
33. Mike. Dogpatch!; 2018. https://www.flickr.com/photos/diatrib3/48061755872/. Accessed September 5, 2019.
34. Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Encyclopedia of Arkansas. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/dogpatch-usa-2302/. Accessed August 12, 2019.
35. [email protected] SR. Eviction lawsuit filed against Heritage USA. HarrisonDaily.com. http://harrisondaily.com/news/eviction-lawsuit-filed-against-heritage-usa/article_e33ab1dc-a4bf-11e8-b737-830b8da82386.html. Accessed May 12, 2019.
36. Bogle K. Explore Dogpatch USA Hike [ October 6th, 2019 ]. //joplinoutdoors.com/explore-dogpatch-usa-hike-october-6th-2019/?fbclid=IwAR0Zi9JnTXKcN5V4lfsZzJSzkip81Etqku4Rst2danRpN6hawLO0SsxZZZs. Accessed September 5, 2019.
37. Exploring The Abandoned Dogpatch USA Amusement Park In Marble Falls, Arkansas. Quicker Liquor Finder. August 2018. http://quickerliquorfinder.com/exploring-the-abandoned-dogpatch-usa-amusement-park-in-marble-falls-arkansas/. Accessed August 12, 2019.
38. Fire at Dogpatch USA being investigated as suspicious | Local – KY3.com. https://web.archive.org/web/20150223002747/http://www.ky3.com/news/local/at-least-3-buildings-destroyed-in-dogpatch-usa-fire/21048998_31412944. Published February 23, 2015. Accessed September 5, 2019.
39. For $2 million, inventor reels in Dogpatch acres | NWAonline. https://web.archive.org/web/20140818204615/http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2014/aug/15/for-2-million-inventor-reels-in-dogpatc/. Published August 18, 2014. Accessed September 4, 2019.
40. [email protected] SR. Hare evades eviction hound. HarrisonDaily.com. https://harrisondaily.com/news/hare-evades-eviction-hound/article_84912330-b538-11e8-80dd-87a4e8a849dd.html. Accessed September 5, 2019.
41. Heritage USA – Home. https://www.facebook.com/HeritageUSAinc/?hc_location=ufi. Accessed September 5, 2019.
42. Blevins B. Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image. Univ of North Carolina Press; 2003.
43. Hundreds Attend Dogpatch Re-Opening Event – OzarksFirst.com. https://web.archive.org/web/20141215233223/http://www.ozarksfirst.com/story/d/story/hundreds-attend-dogpatch-re-opening-event/20354/–qTkMEXD0K45v4KJFUQyg. Published December 15, 2014. Accessed September 5, 2019.
44. It was a heckuva day at Dogpatch USA. bellestarrvintage. https://bellestarrantiques.com/blogs/blog/dogpatch-usa. Accessed September 5, 2019.
45. Lost Arkansas Ski Area called “Marble Falls Resort” – Ski Southeast Messageboard. http://www.skisoutheast.com/messageboard/viewtopic.php?t=128674. Accessed September 4, 2019.
46. LOST PARKS OF ARKANSAS. http://arkansasacer.tripod.com/id41.html. Accessed July 24, 2019.
47. Marble Falls Resort and Resort – Formerly The Hub at Dogpatch | Marble Falls Resort and Restaurant in Arkansas. https://www.marblefallsarkansas.com/. Accessed September 5, 2019.
48. Marble Falls, AR – Dogpatch U.S.A. (Closed) – Page 2. RoadsideAmerica.com. https://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/46. Accessed August 12, 2019.
49. Mystic Caverns and Crystal Dome. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mystic_Caverns_and_Crystal_Dome&oldid=895839437. Accessed September 4, 2019.
50. Owner of hotel near Dogpatch files to evict firm, CEO. Arkansas Online. //www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/aug/21/owner-hotel-near-dogpatch-files-evict-firm-ceo/. Published 12:29. Accessed September 5, 2019.
51. Owners of former Dogpatch theme park reach deal to lease property. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/dec/04/owners-former-dogpatch-theme-park-reach-deal-lease/. Accessed September 5, 2019.
52. PHOTOS: 50 years after Dogpatch USA’s first full season, theme park memorabilia finds home at Arkansas museum. Arkansas Online. //www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/jul/21/after-50-years-fun-finally-wearing-off–1/. Published 4:30. Accessed August 12, 2019.
53. Pokin S. Pokin Around: Conservative broadcast group interested in former Dogpatch site in Arkansas. Springfield News-Leader. https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/local/ozarks/2017/12/08/pokin-around-conservative-broadcast-group-interested-former-dogpatch-site-arkansas/929136001/. Accessed September 5, 2019.
54. Return of Dogpatch USA: New Owner, New Plans? https://web.archive.org/web/20120316110810/http://ozarksfirst.com/fulltext?nxd_id=456217. Published March 16, 2012. Accessed September 4, 2019.
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58. The Rise and Fall of Dogpatch, USA. https://web.archive.org/web/20120331073138/http://arkansasmatters.com/search-fulltext?nxd_id=315391. Published March 31, 2012. Accessed September 4, 2019.
59. Kaitlyn. The slow demise (or rebirth?) of Dogpatch, U.S.A. Ozarks Alive. January 2017. https://www.ozarksalive.com/the-slow-demise-or-rebirth-of-dogpatch-u-s-a/. Accessed August 12, 2019.
60. The Strange (But True) Story Behind America’s Most Obscure Abandoned Theme Park. Theme Park Tourist. https://www.themeparktourist.com/features/20150515/30260/story-and-photos-laid-rest-dogpatch-usa. Published May 17, 2015. Accessed September 5, 2019.
61. The Village of Dogpatch. Only In Arkansas. https://onlyinark.com/places-and-travel/the-village-of-dogpatch/. Published August 5, 2015. Accessed August 12, 2019.
62. UALR Public Radio | FM 89 KUAR – New owner ponders future for former Dogpatch USA. https://web.archive.org/web/20120324030733/http://www.kuar.org/kuarnews/23466-new-owner-ponders-future-for-former-dogpatch-usa-grounds.html. Published March 24, 2012. Accessed September 4, 2019.
63. USA C. Welcome to CabinPatch USA Primitive Camping. CabinPatch USA. https://cabinpatchusa.com/. Accessed September 5, 2019.
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65. Dogpatch dream dies: Owner of abandoned Arkansas theme park served foreclosure notice. Bill Bowde, Northwestern Arkansas Democrat Gazette. https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/dec/08/dogpatch-again-for-sale-owner-says-he-s/ Published December 8, 2019. Accessed January 24, 2020.
66. Dogpatch’s time’s up; auction set to sell park. Bill Bowden, Arkansas Democrat Gazette. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jan/24/dogpatch-s-time-s-up-auction-set-to-sel-1/ Published January 24, 2020. Accessed January 24, 2020.

The post Dogpatch USA appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

The Human C. P. Huntington

The roots for this episode began growing a long time ago. I was looking at pictures of miniature theme park trains on Google. I started seeing these trains that looked really similar, except for the numbers on the sides, and started casually making A List. I later learned they were called C. P. Huntingtons, but I still had that question: what was the deal with all these trains?

The story of the C. P. Huntington trains begins with a member of “The Big Four”, the four tycoons who built the Central Pacific Railroad. We start our story with a great man from the 1800s: robber baron Collis Potter Huntington.

Collis had a nose for buying and selling. If you’re at all a fan of Star Trek, he would’ve made a fine Ferengi – very concerned with profit. Born in 1821 on the East Coast, Collis came westward in his late twenties, making money by selling supplies during the California gold rush. He was an entrepreneurial man, making his way up in the world by moving on to hardware store ownership before setting his sights on the “railroad issue”.

Collis invested in the new Central Pacific Railroad Company, along with the other members of the Big Four: Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker. Ultimately, their railroad in California connected with railroads from the east to finally make transcontinental travel possible.

Starting in 1861 in Sacramento, CA, the Central Pacific railroad began building eastwards until it met the Union Pacific Railroad at Promontory, Utah, in 1869. This was accomplished with the driving of a ceremonial “golden spike” which is now on display at Stanford University.

This was a huge deal – coast to coast train travel was finally possible, allowing for people to reach the opposite coast in about eight days. This replaced months-long sea voyages around South America’s Cape Horn, or rickety and dangerous wagon rides across the United States.

Huntington continued on throughout the rest of his life as a railroad tycoon, getting involved in the Southern Pacific Railroad line, too. He became a lobbyist, bribing politicians and Congressmen. He was reportedly one of the most hated railwaymen in the country by the end of his life, due to his preference for profit over people. According to his contemporaries, he was “possessed of the morals of a shark.” 

The CP Huntington Locomotive

Now that we’ve talked about the man, let’s get into the story of the locomotive that bore his name: the C. P. Huntington. 

“In the early days of locomotive building, it was considered a great achievement when that pygmy engine with a flaring superfluity of a smokestack, the C. P. Huntington, was put on the road,” wrote a 1926 newspaper op-ed.

Stories from a century ago often seem to bring up the wild adventures of these “Monarchs of the West” as the early Iron Horse engines were called. Apparently, all of these vintage engines were known for having interesting stories or thrilling escapes. 

The CPH was one of these. 

Origin of the CPH

Collis Potter Huntington needed some engines for his transcontinental line, but nothing else was available due to the Civil War – only these two small identical engines. Both engines had originally been built for a different railway back East, but were never delivered as the original purchaser did not pay for them. Collis Porter Huntington went ahead and purchased the CPH and her sister.

The engines shipped from Cooke Locomotive Works (also known as Danforth-Cooke) in New Jersey, all the way to San Francisco in a journey of 131 days around Cape Horn. CPH was #277 out of the locomotive works, and given the #3. The identical sister engine was #325 out of the factory, less popular in cultural references, was named the #4 T. D. Judah, in honor of the CP railroad’s first chief engineer who surveyed a passable route over the Sierra Nevada mountains. The CPH engine was put to use to help build Huntington’s transcontinental railway. 

The CPH: 4-2-4T

In technical details, the CPH is a 4-2-4T. I’ll give a layman’s definition of what this means, but I’m not a true train junkie (yet?), just a research nerd, so please forgive any errors. (I already know I’ll get letters about calling it a “train” and not a “locomotive”. Be kind, my train-friends.) 4-2-4T is train shorthand for the configuration of the wheels on the locomotive. A 4-2-4T has four leading wheels on two axles, two powered driving wheels on one axle (on the CPH, the big wheels) and four trailing wheels on two axles that support the tank (here, a “side tank” is noted with the T-suffix). There were other trains beyond the CPH that also bore this configuration, but a 4-2-4T is apparently colloquially known as a Huntington.

Working History of the CPH

The CPH did good work on the Central Pacific Railway, used in construction as well as pulling some passenger cars. Notably, she pulled the first passenger cars over the newly completed Western Pacific Railway from Sacramento to Stockton in August of 1869. In 1871, Southern Pacific purchased the engine and re-numbered it the #1. 

Under Southern Pacific operation, things were not as rosy for the CPH. In 1872, the train suffered a massive collision with a larger train. The engineer in the CPH was killed. Quote: “The San Jose Mercury of June 7, 1872, noted: “the construction locomotive is small, and when the collision occurred the larger engine went completely through the smaller, taking in steam boxes, cylinders, smoke stack, driving wheels, boilers, etc., and leaving it a mass of ruins.”” 

It took several years before the engine was rebuilt. Quote from “May 1, 1875, the following account appeared in the Minor Scientific Press of Nevada – most likely taken from an article originally appearing in a San Francisco newspaper. “Certainly a peculiar looking craft it is [the CPH]. The engine is of a most unique pattern, there being but one or two others like it on the coast. ”” 

However, the CPH was only put to limited use once she was rebuilt.

Around the turn of the century, the engine spent some time in storage before being rebuilt as a weed burner (someone’s got to clear the tracks, after all). Reportedly this didn’t last long either. The engine was rebuilt again back to her original configuration, and bounced back and forth out of storage in Sacramento at Southern Pacific’s machine shops, where it was put on a platform to display at the shops. She was pushed into official service retirement around 1900.

Disuse of the CPH

Why all this bouncing around instead of actually using the engines? Well, apparently this 4-2-4 locomotive design had significant issues. The single driving axle was too light and did not carry the full weight of the engine’s trailing rear end. The engine couldn’t reliably pull trains, particularly not on gradients. And the Forney-style water tank was too small, so the trains would consume all their water (necessary to make the steam) if they went any moderate distance. 

Something that’s hard to convey from all of this discussion so far is how small the CPH is. Technical schematics indicate she is 7 ¾ ft wide, 12 ½ ft tall, and 29 ½ ft long. This is incredibly small compared to many other locomotives. Indeed, some of my favorite pictures of the CPH I’ve found during my research are those where she is posed next to a larger engine.

The CPH Out of Working Service

As the years went on, loads grew larger, and the small CPH just couldn’t handle the requirements for larger modern loads of the times. With a need for bigger locomotives, the small 4-2-4s were left in storage, on back spurs at the train yard, or up on high trestles in the paint shops, for longer and longer, until they were scrapped.

The T. D. Judah, C. P. Huntington’s sister engine, was rebuilt into a 4-2-2 configuration at some point in the late 1800s. Some reports indicate that the Judah worked at a sugar plantation in the Hawaiian islands (“Sandwich Islands”); others say she was sold to the Wellington Colliery Company in British Columbia, sometime around 1889. Ultimately, the Judah was scrapped in between 1912 and 1914. (Though several of the 1922 texts I found indicated she was still in active service, nothing else I could find to substantiate this. Another 1899 text indicated she had been scrapped several years earlier. Central Pacific #93 was also converted to a 4-2-2 configuration, so it’s likely that the confusing reports is a result of mixing up the two. Big mystery, our T. D. Judah.)

Why the Poor Railroad Records?

As an interesting sidebar, you might be wondering why the stories of the CPH and the Judah are relatively light with details and mixed in with a bit of confusion. Well, as so often happens, this is a tale of fire damage. The 1906 San Francisco fires, the result of a devastating earthquake, destroyed nearly 80% of the city. Among the losses were those of the railroad: records, drawings, and photographs. A decade later in 1917, another fire in the Sacramento train shops destroyed more railway documentation. What we have available to us now from the time of the Iron Horses is what was saved by families of employees and the occasional state library record – the tip of the iceberg compared to what had been.

Back to the end of the working service record, we’d been talking about the scrapping of the T. D. Judah.

The C. P. Huntington was nearly scrapped in 1914 as well, but was saved this fate by the decision to have her put on display for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. This was a World’s Fair, meant to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal and showcase San Francisco’s recovery after the 1906 earthquake. 

At the World’s Fair, the C. P. Huntington was displayed alongside a much larger loco, a 2-4-4-2 Mallet. This was meant to drive home to the visiting audience the massive changes in railway needs over the prior 50 years, and it did so very well. The 1840s CPH looked practically like a child’s toy next to the large and modern 1900s locos.

The Original CPH on Display

Thus began the history of the original C. P. Huntington engine as a display piece and a showcase from a different era. 

In January of 1920, national papers reported the CPH being put on display in a place of honor outside Sacramento’s train shops. They called her “California’s oldest locomotive”, and in a bit of revisionist history, the papers declared that she had been the first loco to ever operate in California, a claim which certainly cannot be true. Tall tale or not, the CPH was getting a rest, and getting the due come to her.

She next went on major display at the “Days of ‘49” celebrating the 1849 Gold Rush. Not just a poem by Joaquin Miller that was turned into a song by Bob Dylan…no, in this context, I’m talking about the May 1922 celebrations in California to commemorate the Gold Rush. Old #1 was cleaned up and hooked up to a flat car with seats. She pulled passengers around the city for a modest fare of 49 cents. 

After this, she was kept in better repair, and participated in other displays and showcases, such as being part of the filming for the 1924 movie “The Iron Horse”, the highest grossing movie of that year.

The Iron Horse movie (click for more information).

Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, a lavish movie palace in downtown Hollywood that opened in 1922, held the premiere of “The Iron Horse”. During the movie’s run there, the little CPH was parked in the forecourt of the theater, facing the street, in order to help promote the film. 

She went to state fairs, dedicated bridges and railroad depots, and so on. When she was not out on display, she sat in front of the railyard there in Sacramento, under a small pavilion.

On December 16, 1935, she was even driven on a flat car down to New Orleans, where she was the first train to cross the new Huey P. Long Bridge. 

1939 Opening Ceremonies

In 1939, the engine participated in the opening ceremonies for the Los Angeles Union Station. 

The occasion was observed by Ward Kimball. If this name sounds familiar to you, that’s because he was one of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men”. Kimball was an animator, responsible for the creation of Jiminy Cricket (Pinocchio), Jaq and Gus (Cinderella), and the Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland) among many many others. 

Kimball was also a railway fan. He had his own narrow-gauge railway collection which he ran in his 3 acre backyard. Reportedly, Kimball’s train enthusiasm bumped up against Walt Disney’s, and Kimball helped encourage Disney to install the iconic railroad at Disneyland when it opened in 1955. 

Well, don’t mind me, going down a Ward Kimball rabbithole. He was a very interesting man, particularly if you’re into Disney. 

Why did I bring him up? 

Oh yes. Kimball was on hand to observe the opening ceremonies for the Los Angeles Union Station in 1939 because he was a train buff. Not only did he see the ceremonies, he filmed them on 16mm color film video, incredibly expensive in 1939. 

Kimball captured the only known footage of the opening. Decked out in brilliant red and green paint, Southern Pacific’s engine #1 was a relic from a different time, even in 1939 – the little engine was 76 years old at that point! It can be seen puffing smoke, wheels churning, steaming down Alameda Street in downtown Los Angeles.

It’s an incredible sight.

This was likely one of, if not THE, last time the boiler of the venerable CPH was fired and moved under her own steam.

Later Years of the CPH

The CPH was towed out for a few more railway events in the late 50s and 60s, but primarily sat on static display in the Sacramento park in front of the trainyard.

The railway donated the CPH to the state of California in 1964. It was displayed at the Stockton fairgrounds for years. After refurbishment at the Southern Pacific’s Sacramento train shops, the CPH was moved to an exterior display at the Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station.

C. P. Huntington on display. Click for more information.

In 1981, the CPH moved into the newly-opened California State Railroad Museum, where it is still on display in 2019. 

She was restored to her 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition appearance, covered in complicated and artistic gold leaf highlights. A 1930s newspaper article on California railroad history devoted several newspaper inches to descriptions of the paint schemes of the old wood-burning locomotives – what a luxurious, different time it was to see a newspaper devote column inches to such a thing.

The engine is reportedly the only surviving standard steam engine of its type. Danforth-Cooke’s factory produced well over 3000 engines in the Iron Horse era between 1852 and 1926. Of these, only 11 reportedly remain in existence now in 2019, one of which is the CPH; she is the only 4-2-4 remaining.

Reportedly, this locomotive will never operate under its own steam again. The California State Railroad Museum made investigations as to the state of the CPH in 1998. Reportedly “the boiler shell is too worn out to be safely steamed again without major repairs and replacements that would compromise the state of the otherwise intact artifact.”

The C. P. Huntington is the second oldest locomotive owned by the California State Railroad Museum, and one of the older surviving locomotives worldwide. (The oldest known locomotive is the 1813 “Puffing Billy” at London’s Science Museum, an engine some fifty years older than our heroine the CPH.) The CSRM currently owns eight of the 45 pre-1880s locomotives still extant in the US, inclduing the CPH. The CPH silhouette even serves as the logo for the museum.

The Chance CPH

Now, if you’ve sat through this episode in confusion so far about how all this locomotive talk ties into the theme of the podcast, get ready to have a galaxy brain moment. You might think back to the Joyland episodes, for a bit of a clue to the rest of the story. 

In the mid-twentieth century in Wichita, Kansas, a man by the name of Harold Chance was building miniature steam trains. First under the Ottaway Amusement Company name, Chance incorporated his own company as Chance Manufacturing in 1961. A year earlier, in 1960, Chance had begun production on the first version of a new miniature train.

It was the beginning of something magical.

According to the CSRM, the C. P. Huntington had been displayed at at least two occasions: the Southern Pacific Centennial Celebration in 1955, and the Salute to Steam Age in 1958. (The latter event was a good-bye ceremony marking the last run of the last steam engine of SP, #4294. The engines were placed side-by-side in the park in Sacramento to mark the beginning and end of the steam era in Southern Pacific’s history). 

Additionally, scale models of the train were reported nationally around this time in the papers, including a 1951 half-size model by a man named Jack Collier, and much smaller 1.5” scale rideable models by a man named Bob Harpur. Oh, and a very large model made entirely out of fruit by an enterprising Lions Club. 

Being a person interested in trains, it’s highly likely that Harold Chance saw news reports of these events, at the very least, particularly the reports on the end of the steam era for the Southern Pacific in 1958. And like a train at a switch, we can see the leap Harold Chance might have taken.

He began building a miniature C. P. Huntington train for use in amusement parks.

Chance’s CPH was a one-third scale model of the original. His miniature version was faithful to the original as far as looks – handmade, and incredibly detailed. The littler steam engine had the unique design of the original, with the iconic stack and wheel arrangement. 

From a mechanical perspective, his models made some changes. Apparently the big “drive” wheels are false (they can even be removed without affecting the locomotive’s operation, which many operations do to ease maintenance) and the engine powers drive shafts on the front and rear trucks of the locomotive. Gone too was steam power: Chance’s model used gasoline for fuel.

He delivered his first engine to Joyland Park, there in Wichita, Kansas, in 1961.

Joyland’s iconic train served that park from 1961 until 2006. “Joyland’s train really launched Chance Rides,” said Larry Breitenstein, National Sales Director at Chance Rides, some time later. The train was last seen publicly when the park closed in 2006. Reportedly, it is in the hands of a private collector local to Wichita.

Other Chance CPHs

Joyland’s CPH wasn’t Chance’s last miniature CPH, though.

The company has produced over 400 miniature CP Huntington rides as of the time of this recording – 400+ trains over about 60 years. 

Some basic stats: engines run about $200k, and coaches run around $60k (prices from Wikipedia, date unclear). The trains are a narrow gauge. Most CPHs are 24” gauge. However, some of the early CPH models were 20” gauge. Chance still provides individual parts for the CPH in their sales inventory. This is unsurprising, as the CPH is reportedly Chance’s most popular ride.

To some in the amusement park world, the train is frowned upon – considered a cookie cutter train, which is both sad and inaccurate. Each engine has its own modifications and personality, and each engine runs differently. But to a general audience, the CPH is an incredibly popular thing – because it’s a train! Who doesn’t love to go on a train ride?

CPH #1-400+

I’m not going to talk about every single engine on this podcast – that would be a wild, very long episode and I’ll tell you right now that this will already be a long one as it is. But I will hit a few highlights. 

Why should you care, and what is the reason for me even doing this episode in the first place? 

Rabbitholes and those giant numbers on the side of the locomotive.

The best and worst thing about these trains is that they often (but not always) have the engine number visible on the side. This number is usually (but not always) the loco number from Chance. This is the reason I got into the topic in the first place – I got sucked down into a Google image search, wondering why there were similar-looking trains all around parks and zoos, and why they had the numbers they did.

A minute ago, I said “usually” the numbers reflect the manufacturing number from the factory. It’s not always true. Some park remove the numbers, some parks never have the numbers installed, and some parks change the numbers to reflect internal numbering schemes, confusing us all. The only way to accurately know which number CPH a particular train is would be to look at the builder’s plate, attached to each loco, which contains the engine’s serial number. But sometimes these too have been removed, or have become illegible.

Additionally, they are usually robust little trains. (Engine #2 has been in operation for almost 60 years at the time of this recording!) Given their hardy nature, the trains are often sold from park to park. This often leads to confusion about the trains, as when they are in storage or in the hands of private owners, their locations are unknown or unclear. Some engines have also been scrapped, such as the #29, formerly of the St. Louis Zoo, where it was involved in an accident that more or less destroyed the entire engine. Others are nearly so, such as the #8, which currently sits without wheels on the dirt at New Orleans City Park.

Should this podcast ever make money (lol) it would be fantastic to do a history on each of the parks associated with a CPH. I cannot count the number of times during my research for this topic that I would get stuck down a rabbithole for a particular train.

I’m not even going to include a list of the CPHs in my shownotes, the List being the holy grail of CPH research. For that, I’m going to direct you to the incredible Facebook group “C. P. Huntington Train Project”, where you can find an incredible Excel spreadsheet and some very smart people and a lot of cool photos.

Anyhow, let’s talk about some of the engines. Every engine has a story, and here are a few.

#2 – “Robert D. Morrell” at Story Land (Glen, NH)

The #2 is the oldest train currently in public operation, as the #1 from Joyland is in storage or private ownership. It lives at Story Land in Glen, NH, a small family amusement park aimed at the under-teen set. They have five CPHs: #2 (red), #4 (blue), #14 (in storage), #18 (used as a backup), and #47 (green).

There are a lot of interesting things about the Story Land engines that we could get into at another time. For today, we’ll talk about the number on the front. Every CPH has the year 1863 on the front of the engine – that was the year the original CPH was manufactured. There’s only one exception: CPH #2, the red engine from Story Land named “Robert D. Morrell”. It says 1861 on the front. It’s a bit of a mystery why this is. One possibility is that this is a reference to the incorporation date for the Central Pacific Railroad, which of course was where the original CPH first operated as engine #3. It’s not clear why only one engine has this plate, however (and only #2, not #1!). 

#34 – Coney Island and Lake Como Railroad

The trains with the smallest numbers are the oldest, and some of these have been through multiple hands. Let’s take the case of #34, and I’ll illustrate how you might go down a rabbithole of fascination with just a single engine. 

This engine #34 was a 1964 model, part of the “Coney Island and Lake Como Railroad” in Cincinnati. It was painted light blue and red, the “standard” color scheme, and was called “Mad Anthony Wayne.” Coney Island in Cincinnati is a park with an incredibly long history, which we may get to one day. For now, we’ll just talk about the train,where engine #34 operated with engine #35 (“George Rogers Clark”). The train and amusement park delighted guests there at the site of a former apple orchard until 1971, when Coney Island moved to Kings Island. This was a larger site, further away from the river floods that had constantly plagued Coney Island throughout its history, and most of the rides from Coney Island were moved over to Kings Island. However, Kings Island already had trains – larger Crown models, so the small CPH engines were no longer needed. 

CPH #34 was sold to the World of Golf in 1971, reportedly along with the former station which had been cut into sections. Unfortunately, shortly after it was all installed, the nearby Florence KY sewer treatment plant overflowed in 1976 into the area, and the park, including railroad, was shut down. The train was reportedly stored in the deteriorating station for most of the next 20 years. 

In the early 1990s, it was sold to the Oil Ranch in Hockley TX. It has been repainted black and red and lost its number but still operates there as of this recording in 2019.

#235 – Michael Jackson’s Neverland

Other notable trains belonged to public figures. Take #235. Michael Jackson was a hugely influential public figure, of course, no matter what your stance on his personal life and the decades of abuse allegations against him. 

His private ranch, Neverland Ranch, was over five times the size of Disneyland. It had a zoo, a movie theater, an amusement park, and two different trains. One was a CPH – #235, a 1990 model. It was customized for Michael Jackson, and had extra twinkle lights around the coach canopies, extra decorations, and a high end sound system installed. When Jackson died, David Helm (of Helm and Sons Amusements based in CA) purchased the CPH as well as other amusement rides. The engine hasn’t been seen in public since then.

#195, 196, 178, and 89 – Heritage USA

Other problematic public figures had CPHs, too, like Jim Bakker over at his Heritage USA “Christian Disneyland”. (Don’t worry, Heritage USA is a whole, giant episode for the future. The story of Heritage USA is absolutely wild.) Although general public reporting only refers to one train at Heritage USA, it turns out that there were actually FOUR. 

Two trains were delivered new to Heritage USA in 1979, funded by the many private donors who believed in Jim Bakker’s televangelism – these were #195 and #196. One of these was featured on the Tammy Faye Bakker album cover for “Movin’ On To Victory”. The other two trains were purchased used (one was described as a “shell” and the other barely ran), one of which was #178. 

When the park went under in the late 80s as Bakker’s pyramid scheme collapsed, the amusement park assets were liquidated. #195 had been involved in a minor collision with a gate during Heritage USA’s operation, and suffered cosmetic damage. It also was reportedly cannibalized for parts to keep #196 running. As such, #195 was reportedly traded back to Chance Rides during the liquidation of the park in the late 80s (1987/1988). Chance rebuilt the loco, and sold it. This engine is currently in operation at Lakemont Park in Altoona, PA, home of Leap-the-Dips, the world’s oldest surviving, still operational rollercoaster. 

#196, the loco in better shape, was purchased by private collector Mokey Choate, who owned 13+ CPH locos under the business name Big Mokey Trains, Inc. While Mokey passed away in 2016, the business is still in operation. Big Mokey Trains leases out its fleet of trains to parks. Perhaps someone needs short-term extra capacity for an event, or perhaps a park finds it cost-effective to have the trains only during the season and outsource any maintenance costs. This of course adds an extra level of confusion for any CPH hunters, as trains are rotated in and out for maintenance and may not always be at the same park. #196, then, is one of the Mokey trains, and was last seen operating at the Jackson Zoo in Mississippi.  

The other two locomotives, #178 and the unknown loco, have not been seen since.

Electric #400 and it’s Electric Brother, #402

If you’re in Houston and you’re hearing this, I hope you’ve visited the Houston Downtown Aquarium. That’s the home of the groundbreaking landmark CPH #400, the first electric CPH train from Chance. It was named “Electric Eel”. CPH #402, also an electric CPH but this time with a blue color scheme, went to the aquarium just recently, in July of 2019. 

Both trains run through an incredible exhibit called the Shark Voyage, where the trains travel through a completely see-through tunnel with a unique view on a massive shark aquarium exhibit.

Chance Rides spent quite some time perfecting their electric train. One of the few train videos they’ve posted on YouTube is from fall of 2017, showing the electric prototype in a stripped down state, taking some test laps in the Chance lot there in Wichita. 

It is likely not surprising considered today’s environmentally conscious consumers, but it appears that Chance will be making a big push for electric trains as the main CPH going forward. Reportedly, many places looking to make a new train purchase have inquired about electric models. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the next trains be predominantly electric over gasoline models, particularly for more environmentally-minded zoos.

The St. Louis Zoo’s Many CPHs

Finally, the last in the case studies I’ll cover today…the St. Louis Zoo. If there were a record for the place that has had the most CPH engines pass through it, that place might be the St. Louis Zoo.

The zoo has a long history with the engines. They started with engines #27, 28, and 29 in 1963 and 1964. The Zoo caught the CPH bug, and began purchasing additional trains for what became known as “The Emerson Zooline Railroad”. They are reportedly the business that has purchased the most trains direct from Chance, and in the early years, replaced their trains after 10 years of service. 

So when it came time to purchase the next engine, we reach the slight snag in the story. Remember how I mentioned that sometimes, the big numbers on the side of the tender don’t always reflect the manufacturer’s number? This is one of those times. The St. Louis Zoo wanted the numbers of the new trains to be consecutive. So St. Louis Zoo #30 was not CPH #30, muddling the issue of The List significantly. And, as noted, they’ve moved through a number of different trains, with their old trains being sold across the country, continuing to muddle the history of the individual trains. 

All told, St. Louis Zoo has owned a total of 23 different CPH trains to date. The current trains in operation are St. Louis Zoo #45 “Daniel Boone” (CPH #247), #46 “Pierre LaClede” (CPH #263), #47 “Lewis and Clark” (CPH #289), #48 “Ulysses S Grant” (CPH #300), #49 “Charlton Tandy” (CPH #303), and #100 “Emerson” (CPH #362, purchased during the zoo’s centennial). 

Reportedly, the Zooline Railroad is in the preliminary steps of exploring an electric locomotive purchase. Apparently the Zooline Railroad is reputedly the steepest of any CPH railroad, and there is some question as to whether the electric version could handle fully loaded trains on that grade. 

And if you’ve got a child who’s a train lover, you’ll love the St. Louis Zoo – they’ve got a program where kids can shadow an engineer for part of the day.

Other Variations on the CPH

Of course, Chance isn’t the only game in town when it comes to the CP Huntington. 

Western Train Co CPH

Western Train Co, in California, builds its own variation of the 24” miniature engine, suitable for theme parks and zoos as well. There are subtle differences between the WTC versions and the Chance version, but both are beautiful miniature trains.

Little Engines and Bob Harpur

Or, if an even smaller version is your speed, Little Engines makes a 1.5” scale model. Yep, still to this day! These can hold 2-4 people, perched on top of the cars like giants. Remember the 1950s model written up in the newspaper by Bob Harpur that I mentioned, oh, thirty minutes ago? Yep, that was these. Bob’s miniature CPH can actually be seen onscreen in the 1956 film “The King and I” starring Yul Brenner and Deborah Kerr. http://www.trainweb.org/jeffhartmann/CPH_models.html 

The episode is running long, so we probably don’t have time to get too in-depth here. However, the short version is that Bob Harpur was a fascinating man. He was incredibly involved with the live steam engine scene through his work with the Little Engines company after his discharge from the Army. He met Walt Disney in 1949 when Walt and his daughter came to the shop to look at the trains. Bob ultimately joined the Walt Disney company as an Imagineer twenty years later, in 1969. He had his hands in a number of different projects, notably including the trains at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, Disney Paris, and WDW Animal Kingdom. 

So there you go, information on two different Disney Imagineers in an episode that has little at all to do with Disney. Isn’t life grand?

CPH in Pop Culture

Elsewhere in pop culture, the CPH (or T. D. Judah, depending on your perspective) are iconic, providing inspiration for books, film, etc. The most well-known of these is the design for the Little Engine That Could – think on that friendly blue engine in your mind, and you might immediately see the parallels. Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, the logo for the California Railway Museum is a silhouette of the CPH. And the engine was featured on the cover of the Nostalgia version of Monopoly.

#44, #55, the Pittsburgh Zoo, and Chris Churilla

It’s not just the classic Little Engine That Could, though. There’s a whole series out there in recent days, aimed at the elementary school and younger audience, starring zoo trains Zippy and Guido. 

The best part is that Zippy and Guido aren’t fictional. The series is based on author Chris Churilla’s experiences with the real trains, CPH #44 and CPH #55, both from from the Pittsburgh Zoo. I know I said I was done with case studies of individual trains, but let’s get into just one more.

Churilla actually spent several years as engineer for the #44 and #55, there at the Pittsburgh Zoo. At the age of 14, he began spending summers as “host” of the trains (since he wasn’t allowed to engineer/drive them until age 18). At that time, the Pittsburgh Zoo train ride was dilapidated, giving out a lot of problems for the zoo and receiving very little love in return. After all, the trains had been there since 1965. Chris was instrumental in restoring the trains. He gathered together a group of train lovers, and together they cleaned up the trains, performed regular maintenance, and began raising funding from donors to keep the trains running. 

Eventually, Chris became the primary engineer, in charge of the whole train operation. “Engineering them was a dream come true!” he told me. In 2010, he upgraded the train exhibit (along the train route) to tell the history of the Pittsburgh Zoo and breathe new life into the ride. 

Unfortunately, despite a new paint job for the trains in 2011, the entire train ride was shut down indefinitely in 2013. Although the trains themselves were in good shape, the tracks weren’t. The zoo didn’t see sufficient value in the train ride. They were unable to find funds to repair the tracks, and were looking instead for a place to locate a new dinosaur exhibit. 

To honor Zippy (#55) and Guido (#44), Chris honored them by writing and illustrating first one, and now four, books about them. “There were so many people who loved riding the zoo trains so I wanted them to be able to continue to bring smiles to families for years to come!” If you follow him on social media, he’s recently been showcasing delightful hidden details from each book, such as the real-life counterparts to the cats, coaches, and other engines in the book. 

He still loves trains today. The CPH Facebook group I referred you to is a project Chris moderates, along with several other train-minded folks. There, they collect information on each of the C. P. Huntington trains. Chris now travels the world to ride CPHs, especially those where he can participate in “engineer for a day” programs to get his engineering fix. He also consults with zoos and parks on all things train: finding used trains, operations, and historical information. 

As of the time of this recording, a private train collector has purchased the real #44, Guido, and the real #55, Zippy, and is in the process of slowly restoring them.

No End to the CPH Rabbithole

There’s something about the CPH, that quirky little engine and her 400+ quirky little Chance copies. The CPH gets in your head, gets her hooks in you, and you can’t stop falling down the rabbithole. Maybe it’s something in the steam?

I don’t quite understand it, myself. I’ve reiterated this a few times on the podcast so far, but I’m not really a train buff, not particularly interested in the technical specs and all that. But this episode on the C. P. Huntington train is the one I’ve been working on the longest. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d spend fifteen single-spaced pages writing an essay about theme park train history, I’d have called you mad. But there’s just something about the diminutive overall size, the comically large smokestack, the proportions of the wheels…the CPH just such a classic-looking train, and she really gets in your head.

There’s so much interesting information out there, not only about the 400+ Chance trains but about the namesake engine herself. Someday I hope to visit many of the places I’ve covered on the podcast and visiting the original CPH on display in northern California is definitely high on my bucket list.

Chances are (see what I did there?) that there’s a CPH at a zoo or theme park near you. Maybe get out there and ride one soon. 

All aboard!

Acknowledgements

I’d like to particularly thank Chris Churilla for patiently answering my many questions on the C. P. Huntington trains. You should check out his Facebook group “C. P. Huntington Train Project”, an exhaustive resource and archive for the person interested in compiling a more complete history of each Chance C. P. Huntington. And check out his books about Zippy and Guido – ask your local bookstore, or find them at a major online retailer. 

I also recommend the 1943 article by D. L. Joslyn, “The Life Story of the Locomotive C.P. Huntington As Told By Itself”, available for free online. It’s a charming chatty first-person history of the original locomotive, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Podcast cover background photo is by 4045 on freepik.com. C. P. Huntington photo is by Chris Churilla, used with permission. Theme music is from “Aerobatics in Slow Motion” by TeknoAXE. Incidental sounds and ambience: FreeSound.org (Dungeness miniature railway – jjbulley; old railway station – YleArkisto; Jacksonville Zoo Ambience – inspectorJ; Amusement Park – _alvaro_; Steam Train Interior – allh; Brighton carousel – onetwo-ber) and freesfx.co.uk (Blacksmith Working on Anvil With Hammer).

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show on your podcast app. You might also leave a review, or share an episode on social media. Your word of mouth brings new listeners to the Abandoned Carousel fold.

I’ll be back soon with another great episode, so I’ll see you then. As Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

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

I’ve included a complete list of references used while researching this topic. It’s hidden under the link for brevity.

The post C. P. Huntington appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

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The story I’m about to tell you is not the story I’d planned on telling when I set out to research Trinity Loop Amusement Park. I’d been going to talk about an empty Ferris wheel and an eerie old locomotive sitting on a hill by a lake. Maybe I had been going to talk about the block letters that still clearly spell out “Trinity Loop” up on top of a bridge.

I knew there was a train theme involved somehow. But to be honest, I never was much of a train buff, so I’d expected to gloss right over that part. 

It turns out, however, that the story of Trinity Loop is so much more than any of my preconceived notions. 

This is a story about historical preservation. This is the story of interesting engineering to solve a geography problem and connect a country together. This is the story of reuse and waste. This is the story of childhood summertime memories. This is a story about what we choose to preserve and what happens when we’re gone. 

This is Trinity Loop, in Newfoundland.

Trinity, Newfoundland

Let’s start with a wide view. 

We’re talking about Newfoundland. Newfoundland is an island, the eastern-most part of Canada. Newfoundland was formerly a colony and then a dominion of the United Kingdom. In 1949, Newfoundland became a part of Canada.

Narrowing in, we look at Trinity. Trinity is a small town on the eastern side of the island. Historically, Trinity served as a major port for the export of the island’s fishing exports. I recommend browsing through the Trinity location tag on Instagram – a beautiful town, with brightly-painted houses, amazing sunsets, and lots of whale-watching. Certainly a feast for the eyes!

In popular culture, Trinity might be familiar as a filming location for the 2001 movie “The Shipping News”, which has a lovely soundtrack, as well.

The Newfoundland Railway

Now that you know where we are, let’s talk about the history of the railway in Newfoundland.

In the 1880s, the colonial government of Newfoundland began construction of a narrow-gauge railroad across the island as a vital way to transport people and goods across the island. This was before the days of cars or any sort of highway system. Ultimately, at a total length of 906 miles, the Newfoundland Railway became the longest 3’6” narrow-gauge railway system in North America. 

Narrow gauge was chosen instead of standard gauge (which is 4ft 8 ½ in) as a cost-saving measure (reportedly costing roughly half of what a standard gauge rail would cost). This decision would save money in the short-term but spell the end for the railway in the long run. 

Trinity Loop in Train Service

The railway was constructed as a key way to connect small towns across Newfoundland. Remember that Trinity was located on the eastern side of the island, far from mainland Canada – the railway would’ve been huge around the turn of the 20th century. 

In addition to being a coastal town located in the bay, Trinity is surrounded by steep hills. A normal direct train route would’ve been too steep a grade for any train to pass.

To connect Trinity to the railway, then, some effort was required. 

In 1911, engineer J. P. Powell came up with a solution similar to those seen in the western Canadian mountains in British Columbia. The train route was looped around a pond outside of Trinity, slowing changing elevation as it crossed underneath itself. Overall, the elevation of the track dropped 10.3 meters over 6,600 feet. This allowed the train to then safely finish descending into the town of Trinity. 

The Trinity Loop is quite unique because of the visibility of the entire Loop.

The trestles were set for the train, and then earth was moved in great quantities to cover the exposed structure. This is quite the engineering marvel for hand tools in 1911 – think of doing this without a modern excavator!

Struggles for the Newfoundland Railway

Despite the influx of money from private investment by Sir Robert Gillespie Reid, the railway never turned a profit as the years went on. The narrow gauge of the railway meant its freight capacity was limited. The harsh winter weather at points, including Gaff Topsail (the north-central point of the railroad), meant constant delays and small fortunes in winter weather maintenance costs. And Newfoundland as a whole was a small island without enough traffic to truly support the massive train infrastructure.

After decades of operating losses, the government nationalized the railway, buying it back from the Reid Company in 1923. The railway passed from the hands of the British colonial government to the Canadian government in 1949, when Newfoundland became part of Canada as mentioned earlier. 

As the years rolled over, the railway’s prospects continued to fall by the wayside, the casualty of the more popular bus and Trans-Canada highway systems, which were paved in the 1970s. This was reportedly not only due to preference of travelers, but also to the allocation of government dollars. In 1979, CN restructured itself after years of complaints about the railway and significant subsidies, renaming the Newfoundland operations as Terra Transport. Between 1979 and 1988, the Newfoundland railway was slowly shuttered, with branch lines closing in 1984 and the main line closing by 1988. 

Closure and Preservation of the Trinity Loop

The train on the Trinity Loop operated from 1911 until the closure of the Bonavista branch of the railway in 1984, along with all other branch lines. With the line closed, the original plan was to disassemble, remove, and scrap the Trinity Loop, and all other parts of the shuttered railway, despite its recognized historical importance.

However, local researcher Clayton Cook, a former railwayman, took it upon himself to save the Loop. He began petitioning several of the local politicians and began a one-man campaign to save the Loop as a historical site and monument. 

He ultimately succeeded, and Trinity Loop’s original tracks were left alone, some of the only original railway tracks remaining on the island of Newfoundland. The structure of Trinity Loop was preserved, at least in that it wasn’t destroyed.

The Trinity Loop became government property. In February 1988, the Loop was recognized as a Registered Heritage Structure in Canada. 

Trinity Loop Amusement Park

Local Francis Kelly purchased the Trinity Loop by lease some time after its original rough preservation. Cook’s original goal for the Trinity Loop was reportedly a railway museum, but Kelly had other ideas. He began construction on an amusement park inside the area of the Loop. It was simply called Trinity Loop Amusement Park.

Kelly built a small miniature narrow gauge train to run on the former Loop tracks. After a few years, he added additional tracks to allow the train to circle the amusement park and connect to the start of the Loop. Visitors could take that historical trip around the waters of the Loop Pond, the Ferris wheel spinning merrily nearby. Plywood cutouts of popular early 90s cartoons at the time dotted the perimeter, an occasional surprise in the thick evergreens.

“Crossing over the bridge on the mini train on original track with my family and looking down at the pond, track and park was probably the most exciting moment of my childhood,” remembers local J. P. Coady.

The setting couldn’t have been more breathtaking – lush green forest, sparkling clear blue waters of the Loop pond, and the amusement park itself, set in a clearing in the middle of it all. Several former railway cars became part of the park – an old yellow Plymouth locomotive for patrons to climb in and on, several passenger cars, a sleeper car that could be rented for the night, and a boxcar as a small stage for performances. 

Other Activities at Trinity Loop Amusement Park

In a lower clearing, the mini-golf game, the bumper boats, the little playground, the Ferris wheel..all that sat down closer to the water. To one side, the cabins and the petting zoo.

“My first memory was catching a brief glimpse of the mini train on top of the hill, briefly visible from the road heading to the loop.” remembers J. P. Coady. “Then cresting the last hill my heart raced as I saw a railway crossing sign (which marked where the original line crossed the old Cabot Highway; this crossing was know as breakheart crossing)rail cars and park entrance! After reading so much about the Loop, being there was such a big deal for me.”

Visitors Loved Trinity Loop Amusement Park

The park is a quick drive from the town of Trinity. Reportedly, it was popular for its free swimming, as well as its good food. The restaurant was called Conductors Choice Diner (great restaurant in a converted passenger car). Burgers and the popcorn chicken are both mentioned in fond remembrances online. Former workers remember taking breaks, sitting on the stoops of the railway cars, listening to the band play: the Singing Hobo and the Brakemen. 

Scouting organizations took camping trips there (particularly the Girl Guides groups in the area). Visitors remember the area as being a nice place for a day trip, and a place they remember as kids (or a place they remember taking their own children). It was a place for families. Locals even called it the Florida or the Disneyland of Newfoundland.

Quote: “In the evenings they would have live music, on the upper part of the site by the RV park. People would drive up, or you could walk there, and the stage was a flat car on railway tracks. People would blow their horns in the cars or clap after each song. It was such a nice experience.” If you chose to stay on-site, you could stay in one of the Trinity Cabins, or even rent out the Terra Nova 2 sleeper car. From the back of the sleeper car, you could see the sun set over the water and the park, and listen to the band play.

Downfall of the Trinity Loop Amusement Park

As is almost always the case, there’s no one reason the park closed. At its peak, Trinity Loop amusement park attracted 35,000 visitors per year, which was a huge boost to the local economies of Trinity and nearby Goose Cove. 

Quite a bit seems to have hinged on the downfall of the job and tourism industry on the island of Newfoundland. Work locally became hard to find during this time, so many left for the mainland for more stable employment. Employes became hard to find. Tourism to amusement parks like Trinity Loop also dwindled, and the park management didn’t shift their focus to include a more broad historical context that may have pulled in additional visitors. 

Trinity Loop Closed Again in 2004

The park operated until 2004. At this time, the contract ended with the provincial government and the property returned to governmental ownership. There is some speculation about fees and back taxes owed, but this is only speculation and rumor. 

After the park’s closure, the small miniature train (Trinity Loop Express) went to Avondale, NL, where it was rebranded the Avondale Express. The train lives at the Avondale Railway Museum and gives rides in the summer over the 1.5km of remaining track there at Avondale.

Trinity Loop began to decay, there on the eastern edge of Newfoundland. Images online show nature beginning to take back the park. However, it wasn’t until 2010 that things seem to really have gone downhill for the Loop.

Hurricane Igor

What happened in 2010? In fall of 2010, Hurricane Igor swept through the area. This was the most devastating hurricane ever to hit Newfoundland.  (Interesting sidebar: if you Google “Hurricane Igor”, a top result is the “Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki” for a fictional 2028 Hurricane Igor. I love that people make up fictional hurricanes as a hobby. I can’t throw any shade on that and thought this was actually kind of fun. Hey, I do a podcast about abandoned theme parks. To each their own.)

Anyhow, back in 2010, the real Hurricane Igor did millions of dollars of damage to Newfoundland. 

The abandoned Trinity Loop Amusement Park was particularly hard hit. Most of the original Loop track was left mostly unharmed, but most of Kelly’s later additions to track were completely torn up, washed out by the riverbeds. This led to one of the iconic images of the abandoned park – a twisted train track, suspended in the air. Rocks and sediment from the washed-out riverbeds spread across other areas of the park. 

Despite the historic designation, neither the Heritage Foundation nor the Department of Environment and Conservation had any apparent interest in taking ownership of the park. 

Despite interest from a number of people in the Trinity Loop site, the government reportedly only wants to sell the land as an entire parcel, not portions, and thus has not chosen to work with anyone interested in the Trinity Loop site specifically.

Abandoned Trinity Loop

Much of the park was left in place when it was shuttered in 2004. Some of the large train cars were sold, including the Terra Nova 2 sleeper cabin, which now resides at the Orangedale Railway Station Museum in Nova Scotia. 

Abandoned Train Cars at Trinity Loop

Other large train cars still remain at the site, including the caboose and dining car that were used as restaurant and museum, as well as the cutaway car that was used as a stage for The Singing Hobo. The empty train cars have become increasingly vandalized as the years have gone by. Their interior paint peels, covered by bright graffiti tags. A torn red train seat sits perfectly positioned for “the” Trinity Loop Instagram photo.

The yellow Plymouth locomotive remains on the top of the hill, looking out across the scenic Loop Pond and the decaying remains of Trinity Loop Amusement Park. The locomotive has seen better days, now covered in rust and graffiti. 

Another train car remains, as well, away from the main area. A car from the miniature train, this car appears to have toppled from the track by a vandal. Over the years, photos show it slowly sliding from the bank into the Loop Pond. Today, a wheel on the back of the car is all that’s clearly visible in the water.

Abandoned Ferris Wheel at Trinity Loop

Of course, there was a Ferris wheel. Yes, I do say “was”. The wheel stood for many years, even after Hurricane Igor, but it looked increasingly worse for the wear. Where once the wheel had brilliant primary-colored paint, now was only the color of rust, with the faded seats stacked in piles on the ground nearby. Based on social media photos, it appears that the wheel collapsed between June 20, 2018 and July 2, 2018 (probably June 26, 2018, based on Weather Underground weather history – there was a big storm that day with 30+ mph winds). 

The collapse of the wheel of course has led to a darker tone in the social media imagery from the site – the whole place appears much more post-apocalyptic now. 

The mini-golf course remains in place, a testament to the eternal properties of Astro Turf. In the most recent photos at the time of this recording, someone has taken to stacking cords of cut wood on it.

And the bumper boat pool is still there, empty. The other outbuildings are still all there too, increasingly vandalized and destroyed: the “Good Food” building, the Trinity Cabins where visitors once could stay, the barns where the ponies for the pony ride once were stabled. Most of the kiddie playground items are gone, with only a headless ride-on motorized pony still remaining.

And that historical, iconic looped train railway, part of the original 1911 Newfoundland railway…well, it’s still there. It hasn’t really been maintained since 2004, but reportedly it could still be restored. The red letters spelling out “Trinity Loop” still sit atop the upper trestle.

Popularity of the Abandoned Trinity Loop

Trinity Loop is more popular than ever these days. 

Recent publicity from a Canadian Press article has encouraged even more visitors, beyond just the locals. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The romance of the abandoned place, says JP Coady, has been quote “attracting a lot of people, which is good because that gives me a chance to say, ‘Well, look, this is why it’s here.”‘

Trevor Croft and J. P. Coady are names you see a lot researching this topic, and I’ve mentioned them already in this episode. They are two locals who have a passion for the history of the Newfoundland Railway, and are even more passionate about preserving history before it’s lost, as so easily happens. They volunteer at the Avondale Railway Museum, sharing their private railway collections as well as their extensive knowledge. Quote: “…they [want] to make sure that people experience the history, which is a lot more important than reading posterboards.” 

The Avondale Railway Museum

I briefly mentioned it before, but the Avondale Railway Museum is located in Avondale, about 220km from Trinity and the Trinity Loop. The length of track at Avondale is the same as that at Trinity, interestingly enough, and they have the old Trinity Loop Express, now branded the Avondale Express. The museum is open in the summer months and is “wildly popular for those interested in rail history, as well as curious tourists.” There’s a great 20 minute documentary on J. P., Trevor, and the Avondale museum.

J. P. has been working on efforts to preserve the Loop since 2012, beginning with a Facebook group, letter-writing campaigns, and a petition to the local politicians and MPs. He added the Loop to the list of “Heritage Canada sites at risk”. His vision is for the site to be turned into a heritage operation, a working railway museum. 

No Changes for Trinity Loop Yet

Despite the lobbying of J. P. and others for a heritage operation on the Trinity Loop site, the government response to date has been tepid at best.

The condition of the site hasn’t changed. Many people reportedly now blame the government for the decaying condition of the park. 

Trinity’s mayor, Jim Miller, has reportedly addressed the issues of the unsafe site with the province. Nothing has changed yet, however, aside from some very “helpful” signs posted on the property. In a statement from the provincial Department of Fisheries and Land Resources, the possibility for restoration was indicated, though without any concrete timelines. They reportedly are working on arranging an inspection of the site regarding environmental remediation.

Memories of Trinity Loop

Many guests visiting the park after its abandonment describe the ghost-like feeling of the site. “Breaks my heart in a thousand pieces,” says one former visitor. So many visitors remember idyllic weekends and summers at the park.

“The whole place is totally destroyed.”

If you were to visit the park, you’d look out over the destroyed landscape. Despite the chaos, you could close your eyes and still almost hear the squeals of joyful children. You could almost see a generation of wonderful times. Like so many of the parks we’ve covered here on TAC, Trinity Loop as an amusement park was a classic local tourist gem: a small family place, for first jobs, first kisses, and friendly fun. 

Quote: “You could look down over all the park from the cabins on the hill, hear the music, see in cars lined up in the evening to hear the local musicians play, the dancing, it was a magical place.”

Trinity Loop: More Than an Abandoned Theme Park

I told you at the beginning that Trinity Loop was about more than my preconceived notions. It’s more than just a rusty Ferris wheel and some abandoned, vandalized train cars, though. Truly, what Trinity Loop and so many of these sites represent are the idea of the past. These sites challenge our ideals. What do we value as people and society? What happens to us all when we’re gone?

Trinity Loop was preserved once, and it has the opportunity to be preserved again, if we and the right people act quickly. 

History is about keeping alive what is left. History isn’t just dry old books in a library. If we don’t talk about our past or preserve our past, who will? If we don’t memorialize our past and keep it alive in common memory, it will be forgotten. It will be lost. 

These are the lessons I’ve learned from Trinity Loop, and from The Abandoned Carousel to date. I hope you’ll continue listening and keeping the past alive with me.

This week, I’d like to thank J. P. Coady for talking with me about his history with the Loop. You should check out his Facebook group: “Trinity Loop Heritage Railway and Museum”. The CBC Land and Sea documentary called “Riding the Rails” is also well worth your time. 

Remember that if you liked the show, subscribe, leave a review, and tell a friend. 

I’ll be back soon with another great episode, so I’ll see you then. As Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

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References

I’ve included a complete list of references used while researching this topic. It’s hidden under the link for brevity.

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