Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania: The Blue Streak Still Runs

Pennsylvania's largest natural lake drew Pittsburgh families to its shores as early as eighteen seventy-seven, when a businessman named Aaron Lynce built a lakeshore landing with a dance hall and boat rentals. The enterprise formalized in eighteen ninety-two when Colonel Frank Mantor established Exposition Park as a fairground for western Pennsylvania industry. A carousel arrived in eighteen ninety-nine, and the fair slowly became an amusement park.

The name changed to Conneaut Lake Park in nineteen twenty, and in nineteen thirty-eight the Blue Streak wooden roller coaster opened, a coaster that ran for more than eighty years before it was demolished in twenty twenty-two. The park has survived fires, floods, and multiple ownership crises. It remains one of the last classic lakeside amusement parks east of the Mississippi.