That’s when Martha Clark stepped in.Ĭlark grew up on a dairy farm just a few miles down the road from the Enchanted Forest in Ellicott City, where she still lives today. In 2004, a charity auction and subsequent Baltimore Sun article brought the preservation of Enchanted Forest back into the public eye. Over the next decade, it became the kind of place that urban explorers dream about-an abandoned, decrepit theme park. By the early 1990s, the park was completely shut down, left to fade away in the overgrown forest as the Enchanted Forest shopping center was built around it. In 1987, the Harrison family sold the park and the surrounding land to a shopping center developer for a reported $4.5 million.Īt first, the developer promised to keep the park open, and they did reopen in 1990 for about a year, but it wasn't the same. “They decommissioned the rides and downsized … they were always going to make it smaller, lesser version of what the Enchanted Forest was,” says Clark. Despite nearly 400,000 visitors a year, the Enchanted Forest couldn’t keep up. At a time when schools in rural Howard County (where the park was located) were segregated, this theme park welcomed all.Īs the years progressed, however, the Enchanted Forest began to lose the competition for kids’ attention-mainly to television, the golden age of video arcades and larger amusement parks such as Kings Dominion in Virginia, which opened in 1975, and Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, which expanded in the late 1970s and '80s. The Enchanted Forest also opened its doors to everyone, no matter what race, unlike other family fun parks of its era. While there were no mechanical rides on opening day (Clark said he wanted kids to focus on " the make-believe figures that are before their eyes"), over the years the park added rides such as a rafting trip to Robinson Crusoe’s Island, a journey in a teacup through the world of Alice and Wonderland and a Jeep safari into “Jungleland.” For many of those years, the park was a major tourist attraction in the mid-Atlantic region. More than 20 acres of brightly colored concrete structures, rides and characters filled the park and its visitors with joy. “Smart entrepreneurs of that time saw the GIs come home and start families. Just like Disney, thought of what he could do to entertain these families. So, he built a fairytale land,” says Martha Clark, co-author of The Enchanted Forest: Memories of Maryland’s Storybook Park and the owner of Clark’s Elioak Farm, which is now the new home of the Enchanted Forest.įrom 1955 until 1989, the Enchanted Forest gave life to the imagination of the Baby Boomer generation. The American family entertainment industry took off in the 1950s with the ending of World War II and the presence of a newly prosperous economy and a growing middle class. Amusement and theme parks were well-suited for entertaining families who had a little extra money to spend. According to historian Jim Futrell of the National Amusement Park Historical Association, it was one of the first theme parks on the East Coast. The brainchild of former motor court operator Howard Harrison, the park was themed around familiar nursery rhymes and fairytales, with attractions including slides, animated characters, boat rides, walk-through houses, antique cars and a petting zoo. The Enchanted Forest amusement park in Ellicott City, Maryland, opened on August 15, 1955, almost a month after Disneyland. With the help of her fellow villagers and several large cranes, she brought the Enchanted Forest back to life.
But just when all hope seemed lost, a fairy godmother swooped in. The children stopped coming and the characters were abandoned, left to rot away behind a shopping center. For over 30 years, they brought joy to countless kids from across the Eastern Seaboard. Once upon a time in a forest west of Baltimore there lived Mother Goose, Little Red Riding Hood, Willie the Whale and many others from the land of make-believe.
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