Dinosaur Worlds
An intimate history of America's Roadside Jurassic Parks
Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope this dispatch finds you well; here’s something to keep you out of a tryptophan coma.
This story originally ran in a slightly different form in publication called County Highway. I think you’ll like it better this way, with these pictures.
Please enjoy!
Matt
Dinosaur World
Is a fallen Kong still King? Can a Kong who cannot stand still be a King? Is any royal ape, disarmed, rendered recumbent, really still a royal deserving of the title of King?
I wonder this as I shimmy up Kong’s flanks, scaling along the fallen Eighth Wonder of the World. The forty foot statue of the Great Ape ― once the largest in the world ― toppled a few years ago, losing the limb that once held an effigy of the Ayatollah dangling from a noose. This Kong can’t stretch necks anymore.
His right arm broke off in the fall, the left arm is grasped close to his body as if cradling a chest injury. The red eyes once lit by “Psycho Lights” from RadioShack are vacant now gazing skyward. Supine Kong, in this ruined Ozymandias state, looks scared, not scary.
I suppose Kong knows. Some part of him knows—that for him the end is near, just as the end once came for all but the concrete dinosaurs that now surround him. I’ve long been haunted by ghost reptiles and now visions of Roadside Thunder lizards in their glory days appear before my eyes. Here, Kong has fallen, but he once stood King, at the former home of Farwell’s Dinosaur Park, opened in 1967 by Ola Farwell. My name is Matt Farwell. Turns out—we’re kin.
I can see the whole park from up here. The Cavemen that once guarded the place are likewise crumbling; the suspension bridge connecting the park’s footpaths are un-passable, but some of the Dinosaurs are well preserved, as if in amber. There’s a two story creamy parasaurolophus with it’s face painted like Ziggy Stardust behind a tree.
This was once the largest roadside dinosaur park in the world, a place advertised by a small card size flyer featuring Ola—a big man with a shock of white hair dressed like Johnny Cash hand-feeding feeding his pets—a cat, dog, deer, and what appears to be a monkey with—“The Dinosaur Park”as superscript and the — On the Beaver Dam Access Road off of U.S. Highway 62 as subscript.
The Kong Burger at the snack bar offered a full-pound of ground beef cooked any way you like. The gift shop sold Tchotchke’s made by some of my relatives across the border in Missouri. Tourists from Dallas or Chicago could buy them and take them back to their hotel rooms in Eureka Springs, “The Little Switzerland of the Ozarks,” which is about twelve miles from the dinosaur park, a living breathing David Lynch movie disguised as a spa town.
We were technically trespassing the day I climb Kong, so wearing a tiger stripe track suit seemed appropriate. I wasn’t alone accompanied by my family; mom slipped under the barbed wire, dad went over the fence, along with my sister and the kids and the ghosts of relatives unseen.
A nephew climbed a Mastadon’s tusk and surveyed the water, a niece climbed the ankylosaurus’ back, we were all glad to be there, all had fun. It was my first time among the dinosaurs, I’d never gone over the wire, only observed it distantly from the road, and was glad for the company. Look what we found!
I went back there this spring with my friend Hannah after we got done camping at nearby Lake Leatherwood, where by the bathroom there’s a giant Bigfoot carved out of wood. Bigfoot is seated like Lincoln at the memorial in Washington. You can get pictures in his lap.
Hannah and I first drove up and checked out the dam, then got to Spider Creek and the turnoff, now gated shut, and hopped the gate to walk around after asking the lady working on her boat behind an RV on the hill, it was afternoon and the bass would be hungry soon. She was going to scoop some up. She figured we had about forty five minutes before the old man that owned this place’s boys got back. She told me one of the boys was her son, and they might not take kindly to strangers on the land. She didn’t care what we did and planned to be on the water when they got back.
We did a quick loop around the park, took pictures, saw a copperhead snake on the gravel by the two story tall T-Rex with the fish in its mouth. That T-Rex, for some reason, provided b roll and was on the poster and DVD for the 2005 Cameron Crowe film Elizabethtown, a middling movie with Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom that, I’ll note, is set in Kentucky.
It all makes sense once that part is established. I feel less weird, I feel less crazy. It’s just in the blood, we’re all kinda like this. A little offbeat. It makes sense if you let it, in a woo-woo way, and what better center for that woo than Eureka Springs, Arkansas?
Let’s drive from here, the Dinosaur Park on Spider Creek, back to Eureka Springs; we pass bait shops on switchbacks around a lush and verdant valley; just before town there’s Inspiration Point, next to the Velvet Otter, down the street from the Rowdy Beaver, which is up the hill from The Cat House. The place with the dinosaur in the yard, across from Magnetic Mountain that I’ve been attracted to, was built by a long lost cousin of mine, a cattleman named Ola Farwell.
Our common ancestor, Albert Moors Farwell, moved to Eagle Rock, Missouri before the Civil War; the family was Yankee, Albert Moors Farwell was born in Massachusetts and came to Arkansas by way of Illinois. Farwell’s fight in wars and have for a long time, but by the time the Civil War rolled around he was too old for combat but died in the War anyway.
When Union troops commandeered his wagon and horses—necessary war requisition, you understand—to move supplies down across the border for the Battle of Pea Ridge; The Blues said they were just borrowing them and he could take them back to the farm afterwards if he accompanied them, which he did, and caught ill on the way back; it was a fatal type of ill, leaving my great great great Grandma Angeline alone for the rest of the war and post war “peace”—she’d had to move from Eagle Rock to Cassville during the war because of Bushwackers with confederate sympathies, to keep the family together and the farm going. She might have been a Yankee spy, but no one really knows, that secret’s safe and six feet under in Eagle Rock.
My great grandfather, a different Albert, moved to southern Idaho in 1913 to farm. His brothers stayed; that’s where Ola came from. A couple years before Albert moved out to Idaho, the idea of a Dam on the White River was floated; in the 1920s & 1930’s the Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the land and wrote up feasibility studies, in the early 1960’s construction started on the dam, described by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas as a “1,333-foot-long concrete section keyed into a limestone bluff, 1,242 feet of earth and rock embankment, and three small earth and rock dikes that fill gaps between adjacent hills.” (Encyclopedia of Arkansas)
The dam flooded out much of the old family farmland; Albert’s grave across the border in the Eagle Rock family cemetery is now just feet above the shoreline; his old house is technically more of a submarine now. Just when the prospects for the land went extinct, Ola saw possibilities in the extinct beings on the remaining shoreline.
So began construction on Farwell’s Dinosaur park in 1967 with an initial batch of ten dinosaurs, designed by Emmit Sullivan; They kept the park going a good thirteen years--adding more dinosaurs; at a family reunion up the road in Cassville, Missouri, my cousin Stona told me he’d helped make their steel skeletons in a workshop in downtown Eureka, they’d put them on a truck and bring them out to Spider Creek when they were ready to roar.
Ola had other plans and ambitions for the park, a dome that was supposed to be a hollow moon housing a collection of rocks but was half built and never finished; he’d walk the perimeter of the park, manicuring the trees by ridding them of vision obscuring branches until 1980, when he sold it to a man named Ken Childs who renamed it John Agar’s Land of Kong. Ken was friends with King Kong star John Agar. Agar was the first husband of Shirley Temple, the “Bright Eyes” child actress who married Agar in 1945 at age 17 and divorced him three years later, for alcoholism & womanizing, the legal justification was mental cruelty.
Agar went on to B movies and she went on to be a diplomat, Henry Kissinger overheard Shirley Temple talking West African politics at a party and the rest was history; she was the American ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring and at one time Chief of Protocol for the State Department. John Agar got his name on a dinosaur park—he never visited—that used to have my name on it, and the curse of Agar’s name, as much as anything else, was the beginning of the end of the dinosaur park. As much as I’d like this to be true it was actually a combination of factors that led to the decline and fall of Farwell’s Dinosaur Park, AKA Dinosaur Land AKA John Agar’s Land of Kong;
Truth be told, by the time Ola sold it he was surfing off the wave at its crest. Stagflation, soaring gas prices, the demise of the American road trip down Route 66, all these played their part, as did Ola’s age. The age of the American Dinosaur Parks—it’d been a real craze, like the Beatles, and like the Beatles the craze got its start in Hamburg, Germany, site of the world’s first drive through dinosaur park. There was Petrified Creatures Park in Cooperstown, New York, a full scale Tyrannosaurus restoration outside the Geology Museum at the University of Wyoming, the place that educated another cold-blooded carnivore named Dick Cheney.
There was the Lion Country Safari in Scott’s Valley, California, the Dinosaurs at Wall Drug in South Dakota. It’d all started at the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, when Sir Joseph Dalton designed a glass structure that housed a dinosaur model, continued on through Emmet Sullivan’s WPA funded Dinosaur Park in Rapid City, and soon drive through dinosaur parks were dotted all over the country.
A week after the Kennedy assassination the world’s first airborne dinosaur—a to scale Apatosaurus, 72 feet long, 24 feet wide and 36 feet tall, covered in 50 gallons of green paint and advertising Sinclair Oil— floated down broadway during Macy’s 37th annual parade; it remained a fan favorite until 1976 when the Balloon was retired and made an honorary member of the Museum of Natural History. The Sinclair Balloon Apatosaurus retired and the Man of the Ozarks was now the Old Man of the Ozarks, ready to likewise retire to the house on spring street with the Triceratops on the lawn.
