Six Flags New England: One Hundred and Fifty Years on the Connecticut River
Near Springfield, Massachusetts
The amusement park in Agawam, Massachusetts, sits right on the edge of the Connecticut River just south of Springfield, and it has been drawing New Englanders to its banks for a very long time. Six Flags New England is the oldest property in the entire Six Flags chain, and its history stretches back to eighteen seventy, when the chain itself did not yet exist, and neither did most modern amusements.
It started as a picnic grove called Gallup's Grove, a stretch of shaded riverbank where families from Springfield came to eat lunch and enjoy the water. Most of the early visitors arrived by steamship, floating down from the city on warm summer afternoons. It was a simple pleasure in a pre-automobile age: a blanket on the grass, a basket of food, the river moving past.
The Springfield Street Railway extended its trolley line to the grove in nineteen hundred, and the crowds grew. In nineteen eleven, an entrepreneur named Henry J. Perkins purchased the property and began converting it into a proper amusement park. The following year he installed the park's first roller coaster, a wooden ride called The Giant Dip. The name Riverside Park stuck through most of the twentieth century, and the park became the dominant regional attraction for generations of New Englanders who grew up riding its coasters on summer weekends.
The modern era arrived in nineteen ninety-six when Premier Parks acquired Riverside, and in two thousand they relaunched it under the Six Flags brand, adding larger thrill rides and the corporate infrastructure of a national chain. The historic continuity is easy to miss behind the superhero branding and the height requirements, but it is there: the same riverbank, the same basic impulse to come down to the water on a hot day and have a good time.
Few people arriving for a day of roller coasters realize they are visiting the oldest site in the Six Flags system, a grove that was already a generation old before the Wright Brothers ever flew.
