Idlewild Park, Ligonier

Idlewild Park along Route Thirty near Ligonier is Pennsylvania's oldest amusement park and the third oldest continuously operating amusement park in the United States, behind only Lake Compounce in Connecticut and Cedar Point in Ohio. It was born as a railroad promotion. In eighteen seventy-eight, Thomas Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker whose family bank later helped fund Gulf Oil and Alcoa, leased land along his Ligonier Valley Railroad hoping that a pleasant picnic ground would boost ticket sales.

Rides were added in the eighteen nineties. Some attractions from the nineteen thirties still operate today. The original wooden train depot still stands in the park.

Mellon's family owned it for more than a hundred years before selling in nineteen eighty-three. Today the park sits on about four hundred acres of wooded Laurel Highlands terrain, a reminder that American amusement parks did not begin with thrill rides but with a shady place to sit after a long rail journey.