In , an article in Farm Journal and Farmer's Wife noted: "Over a hundred thousand cars stopped last year at a roadside farm known as Knott's Berry Place. The Knotts had also added a small dining room to the original coffee shop and began serving fried chicken in On opening day, Cordelia Knott served eight chicken dinners at 65 cents apiece.
By , when Farm Journal visited, the restaurant, called the Chicken Dinner, had been enlarged to seat , and the neighboring farmers' wives and children hired by Cordelia Knott were serving an average of 10, dinners a week. On a banner day in , they served nearly 6, chicken dinners. By then, the Knotts had also added a gift shop and several "attractions," including a room of rare music boxes from France, Switzerland, and Germany; son Russell's personal collection of rocks that glowed under ultraviolet light; several rock gardens with miniature waterfalls, water wheels, and wishing wells; a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon fireplace, which the Knotts had admired while on vacation; and a foot-tall volcano built of lava rock trucked in from the Pisgah Mountain and equipped with a boiler that rumbled, hissed, and spit steam at the push of a button.
They get so interested that I've had to install a loud speaker system to call them to their meals when the tables are ready. In , Knott had also started work on what would become the centerpiece of the developing amusement park--an abandoned, two-acre Old West mining town that he was moving board by board from the desert.
In , The Saturday Evening Post noted that the s ghost town was "authentic to the last misspelled sign, and original bullets in some of the doors. Like many of the projects at Knott's Berry Place, the ghost town began modestly enough. Knott's grandparents had come West from Texas in a covered wagon and Knott commissioned an artist to commemorate the experience. The result was "The Covered Wagon Show," a cyclorama showing a wagon train struggling across alkali flats. A narrator would describe the hardships faced by the early settlers while a girl's voice could be heard in the background whimpering for water.
Knott decided it was not sufficient to display such a spectacle in a modern building, so he found an abandoned hotel near Prescott, Arizona, the Old Trails Hotel, built in He had it dismantled and shipped to Buena Park and reassembled on the berry farm. Before long, he had added several other abandoned, frontier buildings, including the Calico Saloon, serving sarsaparilla and boysenberry punch, and the Bottle House, built from more than 3, empty wine and whiskey bottles turned inward so they would not whistle in the wind.
In the s, Knott also bought and restored Calico, a acre, abandoned silver mining town east of Barstow, California, which he later donated to San Bernadino County. It was still in operation as a tourist attraction in the mids.
In , the Knott family attended a pre-opening tour of Disneyland, just a few miles away in Anaheim. As they left, Knott glumly asked his youngest daughter, Marion, if she thought anybody would ever visit Knott's Berry Farm again.
They did, and in record numbers, but Disneyland had a definite impact on the development of Knott's Berry Farm. Soon after Disneyland opened, Knott added a cable-car ride, a "mine" where youngsters could pan for gold, and an electronic shooting gallery. In , Knott's Berry Farm added the Calico Mine Ride, described at the time as the park's "most adventurous undertaking.
The structure was so realistic that the Philadelphia Bicentennial Reconstruction Committee later borrowed Knott's building plans when it could not locate the original blueprints for the historic landmark. But perhaps the most significant change for Knott's Berry Farm came in , when vandalism forced the Knotts to erect a fence around their acre amusement park and, for the first time, begin charging a general admission.
Until then, visitors had come primarily for the chicken dinners and shopped or viewed the attractions while they waited to be served. Still, theme park consultants and others who follow the industry say the deal relieves Cedar Fair of debt pressure brought on when the company bought the Paramount Parks chain in Although theme parks nationwide will probably continue to offer discounts next year to attract guests, Speigel believes the discounts will be smaller as the economy slowly rebounds.
The deal is the second time this fall that a private equity firm has ventured into the theme park business. Crushing debt pushed one of its rivals, Six Flags Inc. Cedar Fair Chief Executive Dick Kinzel said that after considering a range of alternatives, the company decided that the Apollo deal was in the best interest of shareholders. The deal is another sign that the corporate takeover business is reviving as lenders open the credit spigot to fund buyout activity. The list was quickly whittled down, and about three weeks ago, the Knott family started serious negotiations with Cedar Fair.
Cedar Fair is known for letting each of its properties operate autonomously, something the Knotts liked. Roller coasters are the big features at the successful Cedar Point park, a pure amusement park with no themes to exploit. In those cities, Witherow said, even bad summer weather can hurt attendance. Attendance Rank Park in millions 1. Disneyland Disney-MGM Studios Universal Studios Florida 8. Cedar Point Ohio 3.
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