Dorney Park: From Trout Pond to Trolley Shrine
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
West of Allentown, where Cedar Creek winds through the low hills of Lehigh County, sits one of the oldest continuously operating amusement parks in the United States. Dorney Park traces its origins to eighteen sixty, when a farmer named Solomon Dorney built a trout hatchery and summer retreat on his estate outside the city. He opened it to paying visitors by eighteen seventy, adding games, picnic groves, a restaurant, and eventually a small zoo.
Dorney's park became a proper public destination in the eighteen nineties when the Allentown-Kutztown Traction Company extended its electric trolley line and added a stop at the park's entrance. This was a common story in the late nineteenth century: trolley companies built amusement parks at the ends of their lines to generate weekend ridership, and Dorney Park is one of only fourteen surviving examples of these so-called trolley parks still operating anywhere in the United States. The electric streetcar brought working-class Allentown families who could not otherwise afford a day's outing, and the park responded by expanding its mechanical rides and attractions through the early nineteen hundreds.
The wooden roller coaster named Thunderhawk was built in nineteen twenty-three and still operates today, one of the oldest operating wooden coasters in the country. Riding it is an act of mild historical communion with the thousands of Lehigh Valley families who have done the same thing across more than a century.
The park changed hands several times through the twentieth century, growing steadily larger. In nineteen eighty-five a neighboring automobile racetrack was demolished and replaced by Wildwater Kingdom, a water park that expanded the operation into a full summer destination. Dorney Park is now counted as the fifth-oldest amusement park in continuous operation in the United States.
It is also, in its unassuming way, a working museum of the American leisure industry, from the trout pond that started everything to the steel coasters that define it today.
