Silver Dollar City and the Cave Beneath It
Near Branson, Missouri
Long before it was a theme park, this hilltop was a hole in the ground. Marvel Cave opened as an Ozarks tourist attraction in eighteen ninety-four, when a Canadian entrepreneur named William Henry Lynch and his two daughters, Miriam and Genevieve, began guiding visitors into its enormous underground chambers. For more than fifty years it operated simply as a show cave.
Then, in nineteen fifty, a Danish immigrant named Hugo Herschend, together with his wife Mary and sons Jack and Peter, leased the cave. The Herschends had a bigger idea. In nineteen sixty they built an eighteen eighties Ozark mountain village around the cave entrance, set atop the foundations of a real old mining town called Marmaros, and they named it Silver Dollar City.
It opened on the first of May, nineteen sixty. In its very first year it drew more than one hundred twenty-five thousand people, roughly four times the crowd the cave alone had ever attracted. That little re-created village grew into one of America's most beloved theme parks, and the giant cavern that started it all still yawns open right beneath the rides.
