Tucked away in the woods, just a stone's throw away from the battlefields of Gettysburg, PA once sat a quint little children's fairytale park called Fantasyland.
I actually wrote about the place a few years ago. It was a small park, similar in idea to Maryland's Enchanted Forest or New Jersey's Storybook Land. Unfortunately for Fantasyland, the people of G'burg do not like anything un-Civil War related anywhere near their battlefields and so the park was eventually purchased by the National Parks Service and the park was removed from the map and also from the memory of most people around these parts. The park is not a sacred childhood memory like the Enchanted Forest is to me and others that grew up near it. I've never really been able to dig up too much info on the park. Years ago, I went snooping around the land where the park once sat and snuck past a few No Trespassing signs and snapped a few photos. I've been wanting to share those pics here for quite some time, but only just found them this past weekend.
The fence in the photo above still stands, but the rest of the park entrance is long gone. The area was used for overflow parking to the Gettysburg National Military Park Visitors Center, but in recent years that facility has moved into a new building further away so who knows what's going on in Fantasyland's parking lot now...?
There wasn't much to see when I went snooping around the former Fantasyland. But my coolest find was an old stone bridge sitting in the middle of nowhere. Here's a before and after shot of the bridge. The first snapshot is a publicity photo from the park probably somewhere in the 60's or 70's.
And here's the bridge in 2001. I found the old photo later on, it would have been neat to look for any other remnants of the Santa Village over the bridge. Here's some more photos I snapped...the first picture looks like it's a hay bale from a Little Boy Blue attraction. (Click the photos to enlarge them!)
Now here is the above pictured lake in it's glory days...
Finally, one more picture. This structure was one of the only buildings still standing on the property. My guess is that it was a snack bar of some sort...
Perhaps when the weather gets nicer I'll head back out that direction and snap a few more pictures of the state of this former kiddie park.
Holy Cow! I finally found some film footage of Gettysburg's long lost theme park, Fantasyland. Somebody uploaded to YouTube about 12 minutes of family home movies including 2 minutes of a visit to the defunct Fantasyland park. Just click on this link to see about two minutes of silent footage shot on 8MM. You'll see the park's iconic entrance through a giant story book. The structure of the book was still standing as recently as 2002, but has since been destroyed. The film also shows kids on a sliding board attraction. Research shows the park did have a sliding board in The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe's house, but this appears to be more of a castle structure...perhaps Rapunzel's Castle which is also reported to have been an attraction at the park.
