For Mother's Day Tracy decided to skip the tradional lunch. Getting into a restaurant on Sunday would have been well nigh impossible anyway. Instead what she really wanted was to visit the local petting farm and get some photos of Thomas riding a pony. He'd done it before at a class trip, but she didn't have a camera at the time, so she was eager to get his mug and the pony's recorded for posterity.
I hadn't been to the farm for over a year (after an earlier, more disasterous school trip when Tom wasn't anywhere near as well socialized.), so I got a surprise when we got there. Turns out they've been saving a bit of my childhood.
You see, back in late fifties, a local developer spent about a half a million dollars of his own money to open up The Enchanted Forest, a little theme park with lots of plaster and concrete storybook scenes and play areas for the kids. It was all very low key and quiet, no animatronics at all, with the most mechnical part being a brief "safari ride" with passengers in a open top trailer towed behind a beige jeep. The park died a slow death in the 80's, unable to compete with more high-tech stuff like Wild World and Kings Dominion, finally closing in 1987.
[b]Edit[/b] Sorry, emergency project came up during lunch, but I didn't want to lose everything I'd written so far.
To continue: So the Enchanted Forest lay dead for almost twenty years. A private effort to buy the park from the original owners ended in acrimony, pretty much killing any other revival efforts. Some noise was made for the Maryland Parks Commission to take it over and run it, but nothing every came of that. The old attractions started to rot and were vandalized, and a large section of it was turned into a strip mall and a parking lot, with the remainder staying locked away.
This made a lot of people, mostly adults with fond memories of the place, quite sad. Fortunately the owners of Clark's Elioak Farm were in a position to start doing something about it. They've been steadily buying the remaining atttractions and hauling them bodily from Elicott City to their farm just north of Columbia, and selling old and reproduction memoriabilia from the Enchanted Forest's glory days to try and haul away more, and pay for restoration of what they have. There's still an awfully long way to go, but they've got lots of it already installed at the farm, and it was a shock (though a pleasant one) to find Mother Goose and Cinderella's Pumpkin waiting at the farm when we arrived yesterday.
Anyway, more information on Clark's Farm and their restoration efforts can be found here: www.clarkandfarm.com
Some history of the Enchanted Forest can be found here:
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