Hot summer days remind me of my childhood years fondly spent
at local amusement parks near where I grew up in Connecticut —Quassy Amusement
Park in Middlebury and Lake Compounce in Bristol. I would also beg (usually, unsuccessfully!) to
go to Riverside Park in Agawam, now known as Six Flags New England, which is
certainly the most famous and popular amusement park still operating in New
England today. Opened in 1870 as “Gallup’s Grove” and known as “Riverside Park”
until being rebranded as “Six Flags” in 1999, it is the oldest amusement park
in the entire Six Flags chain of parks. Of course no amusement park is complete
without its signature wooden roller coaster--the Thunderbolt roller coaster at Six Flags New England dates from 1941
and was built with cars and plans purchased from the 1939 New York World’s
Fair’s Cyclone roller coaster and is still the oldest original coaster
operating in any of the Six Flags parks.
Memories remain too of beloved amusement parks of
yesteryear—especially those dubbed “trolley parks” that were established at the
end of the trolley lines to encourage ridership on the weekends, exactly as
their name suggests. One of the longer lasting and more famous of these was
Whalom Park in Lunenburg which opened in 1893. If you were living in Massachusetts
(or New Hampshire) during the 1990’s you might remember the catchy “For a Whale
of a Time” Whalom Park commercials airing on television. At the time of its closure
in September of 2000, it was the 13th oldest continually operating
amusement park in the United States (for the record, my hometown’s Lake
Compounce is the oldest, dating to 1846!). Another famous “trolley park” was
White City on Lake Quinsigamond in Shrewsbury which opened in 1905 and closed
in September of 1960 to make way for a shopping plaza. In its heyday it was
called the “Land of Fifty Thousand Electric Lights” which was rumored to be the
source of its name, however it is more likely that its namesake was the famous
White City of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. 
The Massachusetts seashore has always been a big draw for summer crowds in the past and remains so to this day. Like many other seaside towns in the United States, amusement parks were built alongside Revere Beach (the nation’s first public beach) and Nantasket Beach in Hull in the early 20th
century. Wonderland Amusement Park in Revere was only open from 1906 to 1911 and probably its most lasting legacy is the Blue Line T station that still bears its name but what is also noteworthy is the rumor that Wonderland was possibly the inspiration for the most famous amusement park of all: Disneyland. As for Paragon Park at
You can read about the fascinating history of these
“lost” amusement parks in these books found in the State Library’s Collections:
- A century of fun: a pictorial history of New England amusement parks
- Wonderland, Revere Beach's Mystic City by the Sea: the Story of America's Forgotten Amusement Park
- Remembering Lake Quinsigamond: from steamboats to White City
Judy Carlstrom
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