Lagoon: One of the Oldest Amusement Parks in America
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The amusement park in Farmington, Utah, just off Interstate Fifteen, has been entertaining families for nearly one hundred and forty years. Lagoon is one of the ten oldest amusement parks in the United States, and it began not here, but on the shore of the Great Salt Lake itself.
On July fifteenth, eighteen eighty-six, a resort called Lake Park opened along the lake's eastern shore. Visitors arrived by train and enjoyed an open-air dance pavilion, roller skating, target shooting, a bowling alley, and a mule-drawn merry-go-round. For a decade, it was the recreational destination for Salt Lake City's growing population.
Then the lake retreated. As the shoreline receded westward through the early eighteen nineties, the resort became stranded in the mud. Simon Bamberger, a German-born Jewish entrepreneur who had built a railroad connecting Salt Lake City to Ogden, saw an opportunity. Bamberger extended his rail line to Farmington, dug an artificial lagoon beside the tracks, and in eighteen ninety-six opened a new resort he called simply Lagoon. The railroad would bring the crowds; the park would give them a reason to buy a ticket.
Bamberger later became governor of Utah, the first and only Jewish governor in the state's history, and when he took office in nineteen seventeen, he divested his interest in the park to meet the ethical standards of the time.
The park passed through several owners; the Freed family began managing Lagoon in the nineteen fifties and bought it outright from the Bamberger family in nineteen eighty-three. In nineteen twenty-one, a new owner had hired John Miller, sometimes called the Thomas Edison of roller coasters, to design a wooden coaster for the park. The ride, known simply as the Roller Coaster, opened in nineteen twenty-one. Operating continuously ever since, it is now the third oldest operating wooden roller coaster in the United States and the fifth oldest in the world.
Lagoon remains family-owned. It is one of the few amusement parks in the West that started before the twentieth century, survived the Depression, and is still running today.
