CHAPTER THREE
“I Would Much Rather See a Sermon Than Hear One”
Faith at Silver Dollar City
Since its inception in 1960, the Silver Dollar City theme park in Branson, Missouri, has offered patrons a sometimes anachronistic fusion of the Missouri frontier, preindustrial craftsmanship, and simple faith. In a 2003 interview, Peter Herschend, co-owner and vice chairman of the Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation (Silver Dollar City’s parent body), discussed the ways his attraction seeks to inculcate visitors with a sense of Christian ethics and values. Vocalizing the experiential nature of his park’s piety, he declared, “I would much rather see a sermon than hear one.” This statement keenly speaks to the visual and pragmatic character of a site that currently draws more than two million guests per year to its presentation of late nineteenth-century Ozark culture, purportedly timeless “family values,” and unique rendering of religiosity. Silver Dollar City has continuously appended thrill rides and artisan demonstrations, but even such seemingly secular updates are designed to satisfy the values of their producers and consumers and thus subtly support more overt exhibitions of Christianity.1
Not all contemporary visitors to Silver Dollar City arrive expecting to be blatantly inculcated with Christian principles. In 2005, a $43.65 single-day adult admission offered access to many ostensibly worldly offerings. There were five yearly festivals ranging from World-Fest in the spring to Old Time Christmas in the winter; twenty attractions and rides, including some of the nation’s best roller coasters; sixty specialty shops and hundreds of craftspeople; forty musical shows per day; and a host of dining opportunities. However, according to Peter Herschend, these attractions were built on a supernatural foundation—one that is encountered on different levels by different patrons. As he stated, “Sometimes people will never know why they feel good about this place. There are people who are Christians who spot it rather readily in the feeling of the park—you do not hear swearing, or the Lord’s name taken in vain. People who are not Christian say this place has a special feeling. People often write back and say this is where they met the Lord.” An investigation into the popular brand of Christianity offered at the site requires an unearthing of the various ways that this imprecise sense of faith is conveyed through the theme park medium. As tourist S. T. Lambert commented by paraphrasing an interpretation of enigmatic parables offered in Matthew 13:16 (New Revised Standard Version [NRSV]), Silver Dollar City’s devotional aspects are available to all who have “eyes to see and ears to hear.”2
Silver Dollar City was built atop Marvel Cave, a site that for nearly one hundred years welcomed visitors who regularly observed an indefinite yet palatable godly presence within a subterranean world. When the theme park was constructed above the fissure, its founders envisioned an attraction that approached guests with the Golden Rule (“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you” [Matthew 7:12, NRSV]) as a guide and honored divine creation through the stewardship of nature. Employee guidelines since the 1980s have codified these initial dictates by compelling staff members to handle their work in a fashion that is consistent with Christian values. Missionary sentiments, while present, have intentionally been merged with the site’s thematic attempts to create a seamless presentation of religion and recreation. Sometimes one must even look to more explicitly sectarian organizations and initiatives associated with Silver Dollar City to realize how thoroughly it has been linked with proselytizing impulses.
Ever growing attendance and revenues indicate that this melding of faith and frivolity has been a successful strategy. The Herschend family took ownership of Marvel Cave in 1950 by investing $7,000. That summer they welcomed 8,000 guests for tours. By 1959, 65,000 vacationers visited the site, generating $200,000 in revenues. The company opened Silver Dollar City one year later and, with only a dozen employees, served 125,000 visitors. By 1966, nearly 500,000 people visited the park, and it brought in $3 million in revenues. In 1967, several episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies (whose characters purportedly hailed from Silver Dollar City) were filmed on site. This produced the park’s greatest one-year increase in visitation and inspired a national interest. By the early 1970s, more than 1 million guests visited. By 1977, “the City” welcomed 1.5 million patrons and employed more than 1,000 individuals. In the early 1990s, revenue totals approached $40 million, and by the end of that decade attendance surpassed the 2-million tourist mark with approximately 2,500 full-time and seasonal staff working on site.3
Silver Dollar City’s success allowed its proprietors to add additional locales to their tourism holdings. As of 2005, the Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation owned and operated Celebration City in Branson (a theme park that nostalgically remembers various “golden eras” of twentieth-century American history), Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a southern-themed attraction within Stone Mountain State Park in Georgia, a showboat on Table Rock Lake, an additional Ozark cave, various water parks, and a shopping center. Although Silver Dollar City is the best illustration of the company’s relationship with popular Christianity, each site has tried to integrate Christian values into leisure activities. All these attractions generated well over $100 million in revenues in the year 2005, and they collectively earned brothers Peter and Jack Herschend a spot in the Theme Park Industry Hall of Fame in 2004. Most important for this study, Silver Dollar City has been Branson’s most popular tourist attraction for the past forty years. Through its leadership’s focus on preserving a local religious ethos, it has impacted the social, cultural, and economic climate of the city and the region in a wide variety of ways. Finally, despite the tendency of some commentators to view religion as a sociocultural sphere mired in stoic demeanors and languid creeds, the history of Christianity in the United States demonstrates an overriding concern for lively enactments of devotion meant to inspire and entertain. In light of the various attractions, marketing approaches, and ideological vantages discussed below, Silver Dollar City has fully involved itself in this historical merger of faith and frivolity while functioning as a premier twentieth-century standard for the integration of a nebulous variant of evangelicalism into consumer culture.4
SUBTERRANEAN SPIRITUALITY
The foundation of Silver Dollar City arose hundreds of millions of years ago and grew out of the region’s unique geology. The area surrounding Branson, Missouri, can be categorized as a karst landscape, one in which the underlying limestone has been partially dissolved by groundwater. Throughout time, rain moving in cracks and crevices has caused large amounts of rock to soften and created nearly seven thousand Ozark caverns. In Sacred Places, a work that explores the relationship between nineteenth-century American tourism and religious sentiment, historian John Sears described how natural attractions such as Mammoth Cave in Kentucky possessed the ability to inspire a sense of sublimity. In his assessment, vacationers considered the site to be a type of “axis mundi “ (or meeting point between heaven, earth, and hell) and so bestowed on it a variety of ritualistic meanings. A 1992 promotional video for Silver Dollar City described the origins of its cave and park in a fashion that resonated with ideas of sublime transcendence: “The story begins with the Creator. It was he who fashioned a land of calm that would attract those of adventure, retain people of enterprise, and spawn fruits of vision.” Though associations between Branson area caves and the divine would remain indistinct for the first half of the twentieth century, Silver Dollar City is underscored both figuratively and literally by a fissure entrenched in numinous rhetoric since its discovery.5
The formation now known as Marvel Cave was originally dubbed Devil’s Den by Osage Indians who inhabited the Ozarks prior to the Louisiana Purchase and demarcated both the physical and mystical dangers of the site with V-shaped notches cut in nearby trees. Frequently compared to Mammoth Cave by early explorers and visitors, Marvel’s Cathedral Room is the largest cave entrance in the United States, and its passages and chambers have never been challenged as the grandest of Ozark natural wonders. Still, the first arrivals to Missouri caves came in search of mineral deposits rather than spiritual insights. In 1869, a St. Louis speculator bought the property from railroad interests hoping to discover lead. Finding no minerals, Henry T. Blow did mistakenly believe that much of the cavern was lined with marble and thus retitled his property “Marble Cave.” Blow’s interest in the cave quickly waned, and he abandoned his undertaking within the year. Evidence suggests that the cavern then remained undisturbed for thirteen years, except for occasional visits by vigilantes who purportedly used its opening as a repository for murdered bodies. Knowing this and that the cave was populated by thousands of bats, locals avoided the grotto because, in the words of longtime guide Ronald L. Martin, they were convinced that “the Almighty had not intended man to enter.”6
In the 1870s Marble Cave changed ownership a number of times, and in 1884 it was acquired by T. Hodge Jones of Lamar, Missouri. Jones and members of his fraternal organization, the Lamar City Guards, formed a mining company in the hope of extracting bat guano—a natural fertilizer and important ingredient in gun powder—which then sold for $700 per ton and could be found 25 feet deep in many portions of the cave. In 1884, the Marble Cave Manufacturing and Mining Company developed a small town at the mouth of its holding, and investors hoped to further their profits by capitalizing on a late nineteenth-century boom in tourist spas and health resorts through exploiting the “healing waters” available at their site.7
In the first published piece to detail the cave’s formations, stockholder Captain J. B. Emery described its surroundings in 1885 as “a bracing, invigorating atmosphere” of “springs of pure water, and medicinal springs, chalybeate, sulphur, etc.” Water cure, or hydropathy, was popular at the time, and people throughout the United States sought healing baths and springs as treatments for a wide range of ailments. Moreover, individuals such as Phineas P. Quimby, a celebrated mid-nineteenth-century mental healer, promoted the eradication of physical ailments through the cultivation of healthy attitudes rather than topical remedies. A great influence on those who championed ideas of faith-oriented treatments such as Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science) and Julius A. Dresser (a leader in the New Thought movement), Quimby joined promoters of homeopathy in acknowledging the power of suggestion and the workings of nature as viable means for encouraging wellness.8
Cathedral Room, Marvel Cave, circa 1950. Postcard from the author’s collection
The best-known healing waters in the nineteenth-century Ozarks were at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a town one hour south of Branson. When incorporated in 1879, Eureka Springs had a population of only four hundred clustered around more than sixty local springs. After a series of accounts claimed that consumption of the city’s water could cure ailments as diverse as hay fever, insomnia, and paralysis, however, the population grew to an estimated fifteen thousand residents by April 1880. Shortly thereafter, Eureka Springs’ water was bottled and shipped nationally, and investors constructed the elegant, Gothic-styled Crescent Hotel to house a massive influx of visitors. Closer to Branson, Panacea Springs in Cassville, Missouri, and Eau de Vie and Reno Springs in Christian County also flourished briefly as summer resorts in the 1880s by promising natural treatments for rheumatism, kidney disease, dyspepsia, and bowel troubles.9
The Marble Cave Manufacturing and Mining Company intended to draw on these regional success stories for its own resort community. Initial plans called for a housing development and a number of parks, but by the mid-1880s the only businesses were an ordinary general store, a one-room school (predominantly used to train aspiring cave guides), a blacksmith shop, and a sawmill. With its dream gone, the company dissolved itself in 1889 and sold the property to Arthur J. Lynch, a businessman from Jackson County, Missouri. A month later, Arthur sold Marble Cave to his brother, William Henry Lynch. Lynch, a Canadian miner, dairyman, and amateur archaeologist, bought the property primarily as a place to hunt for prehistoric animal bones. After five years of futile searching, he, along with daughters Miriam (an opera singer) and Genevieve (a nurse and poet), decided to develop the site as an Ozark attraction.10
The Lynch family allowed tourist access to the cave via wooden ladders that descended 200 feet into the Cathedral Room (a huge chamber 200 feet high, 400 feet long, and 225 feet wide). Though the attraction possessed many breathtaking qualities, transportation was problematic at the turn of the century. For instance, in a recollection by Miles H. Scott, the author described a harrowing 50-mile journey from Marrionville, Missouri, to the cave which took his party over some of the “roughest hilly roads” in the state. His 1922 visit was undertaken with twenty others who traveled to the Branson area in the flat bed of a Model T truck. Along the way, multiple stops were made to refill the radiator, patch tires, and push the vehicle up steep hills. On arrival, the group was outfitted with coveralls, equipped with candles, and led down a steep slope on “rickety ladders and wooden steps.” Despite the dampness, mud, narrow passages, and “long strenuous climb” to the surface, Scott concluded his narrative by invoking the “awe and admiration” felt by the tourists amid “the beauties of the magnificent works of nature beheld.” Considering the travails necessary to both arrive at and tour the cave, it is not surprising that the Lynches were lucky to welcome ten or twenty visitors a day during the summer months.11
Over time, Henry Lynch took steps to make the cave more accessible and urbane. In the 1920s, he and nine-year-old Lester Vining blazed a winding trail with a gas-powered saw which would eventually become the Branson Strip. Lynch was also a primary lobbyist for the rail line that reached Branson in 1906. At the cave itself, he replaced wooden ladders with scaffolding, constructed gracious cabins, built an auditorium inside the Cathedral Room (said to be able to seat ten thousand spectators), and equipped this subterranean theater with a grand piano so Miriam could showcase her operatic talents for guests. Through such an incongruous merger of leisure opportunities, boosters drew on a time-tested regional tactic by attempting to imbue a vacation in the wilderness with the sophistication of Victorian culture, thereby offering an image of a rustic past nevertheless replete with modern comforts. After traversing rocky hills, dressing in coveralls, and plunging 200 feet on treacherous steps, guests could then relax in temperature-controlled surroundings and partake of arias from a classically trained singer.12
By the 1920s, the Lynches’ cave had become a heralded Branson-area tourist draw. Visitors increasingly proclaimed the other-worldly qualities (both terrifying and astonishing) of the site, which had aptly changed its name to “Marvel Cave” in 1913. An account from that period detailed vacationers’ concerns over “hobgoblin perils” that gripped “the soul with a dread that precludes passage into the unventured beyond.” Another guest recalled that her tour in 1920 produced “the kind of feeling that one might experience upon a visit to another planet.” Scientists joined tourists in extolling the cave’s ability to produce a sense of “mysterium tremendum.” In 1893, representatives from Missouri’s World’s Fair Commission and researchers from the state geological survey declared the cave a “new wonder of the world.” G. Kingsley Noble, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, recorded his experiences in an article for Scientific American magazine. Though primarily interested in the cavern’s blind salamander, Noble was “spellbound” by the “inky blackness and perpetual coldness” he found. Visitors thus departed with emotional imprints, not at all dissimilar from those available at more traditional grottoes, cathedrals, and sacred spaces.13
Little evidence suggests that the scholastic and scientifically minded Lynch ever envisioned his holding as a location where tourists could encounter the divine or the sublime. When he died in 1927, however, the property came under the ownership of his daughters, and the mood changed. These women began to employ their training in the arts and humanities to vest the cavern with spirituality and sentiment. For the next twenty-two years, the “Misses Lynch” worked to cloak their attraction in transcendent language that allied the cave with other piously grounded Ozark destinations.14
Miriam and Genevieve Lynch were good friends with both Lizzie McDaniel and Rose O’Neill and shared those women’s desire to merge the refined and luxurious elements of early twentieth-century America with the pastoral quaintness of the “frozen-in-time” Ozark hills. In an account offered by visitors from Chicago, Genevieve is described as a stylish proprietor clad in “tight fitting jodhpurs, a tight little woolen bodice, and a colorful scarf bound round her head.” Miriam, in contrast, is deemed “as picturesque as a character doll.” During this visit, the guest was not only awed by the cave but also amazed by the property’s hundreds of flowers and the Lynch sisters’ knowledge of botany. After only a few short paragraphs devoted to cavern exploration, this missive instead focuses on the owners’ impeccable decorum, a meal of chicken and asparagus served on rare English china after the exploration of the cave, and a cache of items from Rose O’Neill displayed with reverence and “devotion” in a large glass case. This report suggests that Miriam and Genevieve sought not only to valorize Marvel Cave’s attributes but to also showcase a variant of progressive culture for people aspiring toward middle-class status. By augmenting their attraction with a tea room, an antique shop, and a spacious lodge, the sisters celebrated and sanctified a vision of overly sentimental modernity within a locale supposedly immune to modern change.15
Harold Bell Wright also often toured Marble Cave while sojourning at the Rosses’ homestead. By 1904, the proprietors had even named his favorite grotto the “Harold Bell Wright Passage.” Because of his frequent visits, local lore began to hold that the cave was the model for the one mentioned in The Shepherd of the Hills—a hideaway for Maggie’s illegitimate son (Little Pete) and the refuge of the Shepherd’s outcast son (Howard). In fact, early twentieth-century tourists stopped at a chamber known as “Mad Howard’s Room” and were told that a small cabin built into the side of the cavern (actually meant as a retreat for the Lynch sisters to escape the public) was the character’s Ozark home. By the 1930s, the cave’s ties to the book had been cemented as promotional brochures subcaptioned it “The Famous Shepherd of the Hills Cave” and advertised cabins at the Marvel Cave Lodge named after Wright’s characters. The site’s operators thus joined all attractions and personages of early Branson tourism history in implicating themselves in the production of regional folklore (or “fakelore”) to entrench their cavern within a master narrative that sanctified Ozark people and places.16
In a tourist pamphlet from the 1930s, Miriam and Genevieve Lynch wrote that visitors to their cave would encounter a “veritable doorway to adventure, recapture youth, and in the almost endless welter of common things behold a star-like vision of sublimity.” Here, familiar Branson area promises of untamed nature, recaptured virility, escape from urban drudgery, and encounter with spiritual forces all merged around this subterranean attraction. When tourists guided by the sisters dipped tin cups into a natural spring christened the “Fountain of Youth,” they may have reckoned the experience as merely fanciful participation in a time-tested legend of American exploration. However, Marvel Cave’s advertising and reminiscences by visitors suggest that interpreting the cave through a religiously based lens was possible and often probable for guests. Though no explicitly Christian themes found their way into early promotional materials, the Misses Lynch certainly couched their attraction in general pious language and symbolism that pointed to a godly presence. For example, in a poem that memorialized the cave’s Cathedral Room, Genevieve wrote: “Here, something lingers, subtle, fine, / Irradiations, veiled, devine [sic]; / God’s temple and the age’s tomb.” Such poetics thus seem to promise psychical and spiritual wellness to those with “eyes to see and ears to hear.”17
When Chicago-area residents Hugo and Mary Herschend first visited Marvel Cave in 1946, it was drawing roughly four thousand visitors a year. They, like many urbanites, had come to the Ozarks to fish, hunt for wildflowers, and vacation at Mac and Annabelle McMaster’s Rockaway Resort. The Herschends returned to Branson for four consecutive springs and were introduced to a wide variety of local attractions by their hosts. During one trip, they met Miriam and Genevieve Lynch and toured Marvel Cave. Now both in their seventies, the sisters were looking to sell the property. The Herschends and McMasters entered into a partnership, brokered a ninety-nine-year lease for the cavern, and became its proprietors in April 1950. Because tour revenues were initially unable to support the Herschends and their two sons (Peter and Jack), Hugo kept his job with the Evanston, Illinois, vacuum manufacturer Electrolux and left operation of the property to Mary and the boys. Although they doubled previous totals by hosting eight thousand visitors during their first summer, no one could have predicted the amazing future of the enterprise.18
The McMaster-Herschend partnership lasted only two years before the latter family assumed sole management. During the winter of 1950–1951, the Herschends replaced wooden stairs and walkways with concrete and installed electric lights. However, they were not content with a solely underground focus. Tourists often asked for something to do while waiting to visit the cave, and so Hugo negotiated with Marlin Perkins, a Carthage, Missouri, native, to install a small zoo in the early 1950s. When this proved successful, Hugo dreamed further. According to Peter Herschend, his father believed that “visitors coming to the cave would like to see men and women of the hills . . . doing their own thing.” Not content merely with gimmicks such as underground square dances and séances, the family decided to purchase 640 acres around the site to showcase local culture. Silver Dollar City developed on this land (originally named “Marvel Cave Park”) and an additional 1,600 acres.19
Hugo Herschend died of a heart attack on November 14, 1955. But prior to his death, he laid the groundwork for an attraction that would come to define regional mythmaking and heritage marketing. Under his management, cave guides developed tall tales about the cavern and the surrounding country’s local history. Devoted not only to the manufacture of legend, Hugo also envisioned an area-wide valorization of Ozark craftsmanship through cottage industries that showcased the arts of the blacksmith, basket weaver, or potter. While researching his plot of land, he encountered the short-lived history of the guano company’s Marble City (or as he preferred to call it, “Marmaros,” Greek for “marble”). The former existence of this actual nineteenth-century village on the grounds inspired him further. Though Hugo failed to see his plans realized, Silver Dollar City—described by one St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer as “a mixture of fantasy, history, and just plain ‘hillbilly fun’”—would be the fruition of his aspirations.20
THEME PARK THEOLOGY
Silver Dollar City opened on May 1, 1960. A frontier-style blacksmith shop, general store, ice cream parlor, doll shop, inn, and two reconstructed, late nineteenth-century log buildings made up the village. One of these last structures was the Wilderness Church, a house of worship that continues to serve as an emblem of spirituality within the park. Guests were treated to local music performed by the Mabe brothers (who would later open Branson’s first music show) and entertained by staged “feuds” between the stereotypical Hatfields and McCoys. Later that year the park would append its first rides—a tilt house called Slantin’ Sam’s Old Miner’s Shack and a stagecoach-mule ride. The overall aim of the park was declared in a press release: “The Ozark Village is not a museum or a ghost town, but a living, working village.”21
Though early promotional materials adamantly proclaimed the park’s authenticity and boasted that “everything about the City remains just as it was nearly a century ago in the Ozarks,” promoters consciously elided problematic historical happenings. For instance, although the site did recognize and portray the existence of Alf Bolin, the region’s most notorious post–Civil War bushwacker, it benignly restricted (and continues to restrict) his murderous ways to a jovial attempted train robbery as patrons circumambulate the grounds. Reflecting on this reworking of the past, park historian Crystal Payton wrote, “Frontier bad behavior was recycled into good entertainment. History, bloody and painful the first time around, is enacted as playful amusement.” Thus, although Silver Dollar City owners, directors, and administrators have, since the attraction’s inception, stressed its accurate portrayal of history and its ability to educate patrons about the Ozarks’ past, the locale has continually offered only a sanitized and refined variant of earlier days which coincides with its equally genteel vision of proper ethics.22
Silver Dollar City, circa 1960. Postcard from the author’s collection
Throughout its history, everyone involved with Silver Dollar City’s management has resolutely stated that the site is a theme park, not an amusement park. Though the difference is seemingly small, this distinction is important for understanding the ways that the locale integrates promotion of Christian ethics and values with craft presentations, variety acts, and thrill rides. The creator of the theme park genre, Walt Disney, spent his boyhood in the northwestern Missouri town of Marceline, which subsequently served as a model for his quaint enactments of heartland America. Like Branson boosters who have followed his lead, Disney hoped to offer a leisure space quite unlike the existing models of Coney Island or Riverside in Chicago—attractions he characterized as “dirty, phony places, run by tough-looking people.” When Disneyland opened in 1955, its proprietor perceived American society as troubled by failing families, a lost sense of community, and a mounting disregard for moral principles, courtesy, and decorum. Thus, at Disneyland (and later Disney World), guests were offered a nostalgic portrait of what once was (or, to be more accurate, an imagined past grounded in the staging of sociocultural cohesion which lacked the messy elements of postindustrial America). A stroll down each park’s Main Street USA was to be a reembrace of a fabled public square prior to civil rights battles, ethnic divisiveness, or the muddling of conventional gender roles. For a hefty fee, patrons are still offered psychical reassurance that there is one spot where things are uncomplicated and “traditional”—a strategy described by E. L. Doctorow as the production of “abbreviated shorthand culture.”23
Commentators on the Disney experience have continuously described the parks’ presentations of stereotypes, archetypes, and historical pastiche in religious language, thereby more firmly indicating the sites’ desired ideological functions. Terms such as “pilgrimage,” “national shrine,” “Disney rites,” “New Eden,” and “secular mecca” find their way into descriptions and critiques. Though elements of sacred space, ritual, and clergy can be teased out of an analysis of Disney’s properties, his “imagineers” have chosen to interpret their version of core values as shaped, sanitized, and sanctified recollections of the past rather than using any overt reference to divinity. Silver Dollar City undoubtedly drew inspiration from this model on its opening in 1960, but it went beyond Disney by augmenting its brand of utopia with the workings of popular Christianity.24
No accounts of Silver Dollar City’s development indicate that Hugo and Mary Herschend were strong advocates of institutional religion, but Peter Herschend remembers his stepfather’s business practices as “an embodiment of the Golden Rule.” Additionally, Mary had an abiding concern for conservation motivated by a belief that she was protecting divine design. The park’s official history claims that this “almost obsessive reverence for the things of God’s creation” manifested itself sometimes antagonistically through the firing of people who harmed trees, but it was more often gently evidenced by her protection of the locale’s abundance of wildlife and natural features.25
When Silver Dollar City opened, the Wilderness Church was its one unambiguous religious space. The church was an abandoned log sanctuary designed to seat approximately eighty. It was found by Mary Herschend near a local creek in 1959, dismantled, and brought piece by piece to the park. The site chosen for reassembly was occupied by a massive sycamore. Ever reluctant to fell such specimens, Mary acquiesced when the tree’s trunk was hewn into a pulpit. Shortly thereafter, she insisted that a huge picture window be installed so that worshipers could draw inspiration from the site’s scenic vista. To reinforce this relationship between geographic place and transcendence, a placard quoting the King James Version of Psalm 121:1 (“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help”) was stationed prominently above the outlook.26
Touted as a site for spiritual refreshment amid the frequent disarray of the vacation experience, the Wilderness Church has, since the early 1980s, been conducting services for employees and guests with the aid of an on-staff parson. Sunday ceremonies are offered to staff prior to the park’s opening, and visitors are invited to the church for both formal worship and hymn singing. In keeping with the interdenominational thread that courses its way through the park’s presentation of Christianity, these events are billed as free of creed. Nevertheless, despite such nonsectarian attempts, it is easy to characterize the brand of religiosity offered at the site as Reformation-derived and often Manichaean. Referencing a classic Protestant contempt for the prioritizing of church tradition over the injunctions of scripture, former Wilderness Church pastor Bob Burton stated, “If I have a theme, it is that the message has to get out to Christians that we have tended to put religion over relationship with Christ. . . . We’re all ministers of the Word.” As a former Catholic priest turned member of a nondenominational fellowship, Burton was a good fit for Silver Dollar City’s brand of evangelicalism.27
Currently, the Wilderness Church offers three Sunday morning services, including an 8:30 a.m. event for staff. When this practice began, administrator Don Richardson claimed that the theme park was the only one in the nation that provides worship services, weekly Bible study, and an on-staff minister for its employees. Research indicates that this is still the case and thus demonstrates Silver Dollar City’s distinctive focus and unique place within the wider industry. Once the park opens, it offers two other morning rites for visitors. Both services are usually full. Additionally, hymn singing occurs five times daily. The singing is often led by employees who have left the ranks of institutional evangelism for the more popular variant offered at the park. For instance, Linda and Bob Friedel are retired missionaries who work on the grounds and frequently spearhead the hymns. Their efforts regularly inspire sizable crowds who had not ostensibly come to the site for devotion, with upwards of one hundred people gathering at the church for song. Wedding vow renewals are also available in the afternoons, and more than two hundred couples annually have their nuptials performed in the sanctuary.28
Picture window, Wilderness Church, circa 1970. Postcard from the author’s collection
As the site is within the confines of a theme park, it must tailor its religion to conform to tourist expectations of the frontier past. According to Bob Deeds, who had a thirty-four-year career as a Methodist minister before becoming pastor of the Wilderness Church in 1986, this message is extraordinarily straightforward: “We just preach Jesus Christ and the love of God. And once in a while we tell them there’s a Hell.” Fielding vacationers from across the Christian spectrum, the locale must serve a double function by putting forth a brand of spiritual succor that has appeal to millions of vacationing devotees and showcasing the religious intentions of the park at large. Such authenticity is evidenced by the lack of bulletins distributed to congregants, a simple presentation of both theology and liturgy, and a populist ceding of song choice to attendees. Though not presenting the attraction as one with an explicitly religious theme, Silver Dollar City’s proprietors still feel that their holding must demonstrate Christian epistemology. As Pastor Deeds asserted in a 2003 interview, “If you really want to know the truth, this church is the basis for this park.”29
Mary Herschend underwent surgery for cancer in 1963. Though she continued to be active in the park’s management until her death in 1983, administrative decisions gradually were ceded to her sons, with Peter fronting public relations and Jack overseeing day-to-day operations. Throughout these early years, the attraction continued to grow. In 1963 it became Missouri’s foremost tourist destination. In the late 1960s and early 1970s it added other craft displays such as glass-blowing, metalsmithing, candle making, and a print shop. Regionally themed rides like Jim Owens Float Trip (named in honor of a longtime promoter of Ozark rivers and multiterm mayor of Branson) and Fire in the Hole (a ride that invokes the tumultuous post–Civil War period in the region) were also added to the site. By the mid-1970s the park was one of the nation’s most popular tourist attractions and garnered more repeat business than any other similar locale. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Silver Dollar City became more hi-tech: state-of-the-art roller coasters joined its offerings alongside craft displays and musical acts.30
Exterior, Wilderness Church, circa 1970. Courtesy of the Lynn Morrow Postcard Collection, Jefferson City, Missouri
This period also saw the birth of many yearly festivals on site, such as a summer event for children, a Christmas celebration, and a global folk culture fair. Yet despite this growth and embrace of contemporary technologies, Mary Herschend was ever cognizant of offering predominantly urban midwesterners a glimpse of fabled premodernity. As she told a reporter during the park’s expansion, “My job is to keep the modern from creeping in.” Peter and Jack Herschend followed their mother’s lead. For them, avoiding the modern meant not only a supposed allegiance to late nineteenth-century artisanship and material culture but also a thorough yet muted integration of Christian morality into the park’s attractions and tone. Although raised by parents who looked to religious precepts for business guidance, the sons were not exposed to institutional faith in their youth. As self-described “baby Christians” in 1960, they sat down on a log bench behind the Wilderness Church for a “board meeting” that solidified Silver Dollar City’s future direction. Peter recalled that during that session they decided “to look [the] Lord in the eye” in terms of their business and subsequently coined the phrase “Making decisions with Christ in the room.” Peter Herschend married in 1966. In 1969 he and wife, Jo Dee, were “baptized in the Holy Spirit” while at a meeting in Springfield held by renowned Episcopal renewal leader Dennis Bennett; began to attend Shepherd of the Hills Episcopal Church in Branson; and, in Herschend’s words, “went from ‘sorta’ to ‘saved.’”31
Peter Herschend’s religious journey reflects a critique of theological liberalism within mainline American Protestantism which has been under way since the early twentieth century. This opposition was inaugurated by seminarians engaged in an ongoing fundamentalist-versus-modernist battle over issues such as evolution and biblical higher criticism, and it continues to simmer by way of a contentious “culture war.” American Protestant “renewal movements” began in the early 1960s as efforts within individual denominations to combat perceived threats of women’s leadership, homosexuality, ecumenism, and theological diversity. The Episcopal renewal movement has roots in John Stott’s Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion, which established an American branch in 1961. Since that time, liberal congregants and clergy within the Episcopal Church have faced opposition from a wide variety of right-leaning organizations, including Charles Fulton’s Episcopal Renewal Ministries (an association that formerly had Peter Herschend as its vice president) and Pat Robertson’s Regent University (with Peter Herschend serving on its board in the early 1990s). Ultimately, renewal movements have prospered because of their ability to integrate conservative religious stances into other sociocultural spheres and, by focusing on charismatic religious experience, to enliven allegedly wearisome faith practices. These tactics have certainly been utilized by Herschend when molding Silver Dollar City’s “public face” and organizational directives over the past forty years.32
In the late 1990s Peter and JoDee Herschend abandoned spirit-filled Episcopalianism to join the Pentecostal group the Assemblies of God, whose world headquarters is only 40 miles from Branson in Springfield, Missouri. This change reveals an ambivalent yet palatable interplay between institutional and popular religiosity. According to Father Richard Kellogg, current rector of Branson’s Shepherd of the Hills Episcopal Church:
They left here not because of any difficulties with this parish but because of the liberal attitudes of the entire Episcopal Church—the national church. But I would say they tend to be toward charismatic and probably a very conservative attitude. Part of what went on is that their charismatic tendency was almost divisive. This congregation, as far as Episcopalians go, is little more conservative than I anticipated. It’s kind of a subtle conservative.
Concomitantly, the promotion of a subtle yet transformative experience of Christianity is indeed the modus operandi at Silver Dollar City. According to Peter Herschend, “A friend once told me, ‘Preach the gospel always, using words only whenever necessary.’ We go out of our way not to be preachy, but if people leave here feeling good or a little closer to God, then I feel like maybe we’ve done our jobs.”33
The Pentecostal tradition has often been posited as an adversary of modernity because of its roots in the Holiness tradition and expressed disdain for immodest culture, social intemperance, and vice-ridden secular entertainments. However, numerous prominent adherents have undertaken a melding of religious message with popular and mass culture. Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and a revivalist, started the nation’s first Christian radio station in Los Angeles in the 1920s. Drawing inspiration from McPherson, fundamentalist Charles E. Fuller created the California-based The Old-Fashioned Revival Hour, which was carried on 575 stations and reached 20 million homes in the mid-1940s. In 1953, Pentecostal minister Rex Hubbard bought time on a local television station in Akron, Ohio, and set the standard for later manifestations of televangelism, including a faith healing ministry inaugurated by Oral Roberts in 1954. In 1961, Pat Robertson, an ordained Southern Baptist minister who yet espouses Pentecostal theology, began airing programs over his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and eventually launched the first privately owned communications satellite in the world. CBN featured the popular 700 Club, which was originally cohosted by Robertson and then unknown Jim Bakker. Bakker left the network in the early 1970s to host the equally popular PTL Club; fellow Assemblies of God minister Jimmy Swaggert commenced his own show in 1973; and Paul Crouch founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network that same year. Scholar of Pentecostalism Grant Wacker has accounted for the success of the movement by detailing its ability to blend a “primitivist” focus on returning to a purer and more spiritual past with a “pragmatic” impulse that encourages the use of modern methods to facilitate the spread of religious messages. In light of Silver Dollar City’s emphasis on a semimythical history and its creative methods for evangelism, Wacker’s explanation seems an apt paradigm for understanding the park’s connections to a larger Pentecostal history.34
Pentecostals have also been active in the realm of religious theme parks. Most notable among this group are Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, whose 2,300-acre Heritage USA in Fort Mill, South Carolina, ascended to the nation’s third most popular park (trailing only the two Disneys) in the mid-1980s. In 1986 it attracted 6 million visitors, who came to enjoy a 500-room hotel, 2,500-seat church, 5-acre water park, gable-fronted “Main Street USA,” and enclosed mall. During its tenure, evangelical and charismatic Protestantism was blatantly evidenced as lifeguards occasionally shut down their pools to perform baptisms and secular variety acts transformed themselves into Passion plays at Eastertide. Such moves led a writer for Time to characterize the overall experience as “the triumph of born-again nice.” Interestingly, in 2002 Bakker chose Branson as the place to revitalize his ministry after serving a prison sentence. In January 2003 he began broadcasting a daily television show from the Studio City Café on the Branson Strip, and he has recently acquired a 590-acre parcel of land just outside town for a Christian-themed residential community.35
As Bakker’s experience demonstrated, Christian-based leisure can be volatile and perilous when stripped of its perceived ethical underpinnings. However, industry experts also agree that Calvinistic and transparently proselytizing recreational offerings do not result in profits. As Tim O’Brien, an editor with Amusement Business, stated, “No one wants to go on vacation and be preached to. Just imagine the kind of rides you’d see. I think a ‘Fires of Hell Funhouse’ would be a bit too much to take on vacation.” Silver Dollar City boosters seem to have gently negotiated all these examples and caveats to offer a product that is perceived as sincere yet unassuming. As Peter Herschend has explained: “The phraseology my brother and I have long time used is, ‘What would we do if Jesus were in the room?’ It’s the guiding principles, the moral values that make a difference in the business.” Adding biblical precedent to this notion of Christly emulation, he has also asserted that Matthew 25:35 (NRSV; “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me”) offers a template for the park’s approach to customer service.36
The religious path of Jack Herschend, though institutionally dissimilar to that of his brother, has exhibited a comparable focus on methods of popularly mediated evangelism and religious instruction. Jack and his wife, Sherry, drew on the consecrated nature of their attraction when they married in the Cathedral Room of Marvel Cave. For more than thirty years they have been active congregants at Branson’s First Presbyterian Church. In 2002, their longtime service to the congregation was recognized when they were awarded the Sunday School Teachers of the Year Award by Gospel Light Publishers, a distributor of children’s curricula and resources. Throughout this period, the couple has emphasized the motto “Being a Christian is fun,” a maxim that is certainly at the root of Silver Dollar City’s approach. This delicate mix of prudent proselytism and entertainment within the theme park context was recently framed by Jack through the analogy of a spiritual feast: “Witnessing is like seasoning a meal. Too much spoils the meal. We don’t want to cross the line from what is tasteful and appropriate.”37
Sherry Herschend has also been involved with a more explicitly religious theme park venture. Nazareth Village in Israel, which opened in April 2000, is a re-creation of the first-century town where Jesus grew up, replete with authentic crafts and guides in period costumes. Existing as a site where the life and teachings of Jesus can be conveyed in a manner true to biblical text, Nazareth Village is also designed to bring people to Christ through multisensory exhibits of his ministry that are exciting and engaging. Throughout the past twenty years, Sherry has led more than twenty tours of the Holy Land. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Miracle of Nazareth International Foundation and donated $1 million for the building of the attraction. Sherry feels that the site not only offers a glimpse of ancient Hebrew history but can also help to facilitate Middle Eastern peace by stressing Christly emulation. As she stated, “Regardless of their cultures, they [Jews and Muslims] all know that Jesus was the great peacemaker.”38
In the late 1980s, Silver Dollar City Inc. (now Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation) codified its approach to religiously inspired tourism by crafting a mission statement that compelled employees to provide experiences “all in a manner consistent with Christian values and ethics.” According to Jack Herschend, the company recruits and trains its thousands of employees, religious or nonreligious, “based on Christian values.” Each is thereby expected to provide a “Christian witness” to the park’s guests without “wearing faith on our sleeves.” Evidence suggests that this obligation is welcomed by employees. Many staff members have been with the enterprise for multiple decades, and 70 percent of all promotions come from within.39
Verbalizing this mandate to missionize and allying Silver Dollar City’s Christian underpinnings with the historical period it seeks to represent, current employee Orville Conrad stated:
Christianity is integral to the Ozarks way of life in the late 1800s and cannot be separated from the theme. Many of us are really offended by non-Christian attitudes and behaviors of a few of our guests but the only Christian way to deal with these is to provide an appropriate example for them with gentle suggestions of what might be more appropriate without making any accusations. We can show the evidence of gods love in non offensive ways just as the early settlers of this area did.
Alicia Bolin, a singer at one of Silver Dollar City’s many shows, added that the park “supports God in a lot of things” and claimed that a majority of the site’s guests visit because it is a Christian-based attraction. As she wrote, “I know this because I sing at SDC and over half my audience comes up to me and the rest of the cast after the show and tells us how much they love the fact that there is a dress code, and that they play Christian music through the entire park all the time.”40
To further substantiate the ways that employees are compelled to provide Christian witness, Peter and Jack Herschend frequently have told stories about longtime street cleaner Luke Standlee. Jack recalled one instance when he was watching Standlee in action as he talked to a disabled and distraught girl visiting the park with her parents. As the child cried, Luke’s attention and effort to cheer her up became more resolute. After the family departed, Jack inquired about the circumstances. In his rendering, “Luke aw shucked, then said, ‘Whenever I see youngsters who have had a hard road, I try to get them to smile. Then I ask them to do things that would make their mom and dad happy and to please the Lord.’” Luke had apparently been utilizing this approach daily for many years and sealing each promise from a child with a shiny silver dollar. Marking Standlee as an exemplar of Matthew 25:35, Peter Herschend held that this is only one instance of a pervasive method used by Silver Dollar City “citizens”: “It’s simply living out what we as Christians are called to do. Our people know what it is to share love.”41
Additionally, an endorsement of Christianity has not been limited to on-site employees. Although the Herschend brothers are often listed as “co-owners” and are unquestionably responsible for the site’s spiritual impetus, Peter currently serves as vice chairman of the board of directors and Jack as chairman emeritus for the Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation. Since 1972 the still private company has been run with the assistance of a board that is given formal say on strategic decisions and sizable capital expenditures, and the company now has more than thirty owners with varying stakes in the enterprise (though the Herschend family retains the majority share). Individuals active within the realm of evangelical Protestantism have been part of this leadership structure from its instigation. For instance, Sam Moore, head of Bible publisher Thomas Nelson Inc., was an original board member. In the late 1980s, the company received frequent consultation from Harry Hargrave, the chief operations officer for PTL Network, who claimed that his first job priority was to “glorify God.” On his retirement in 1998 as president and chief executive officer of the corporation, Cary Summers claimed that the Lord led him to service at the park. Finally, in 2003 Joel Manby was named CEO. Among Manby’s many credentials was the founding of Family Wise, a nonprofit Christian ministry focused on offering to corporations, public schools, and churches tools that can facilitate the rediscovery of wholesome family time, trust in God, and behaviors guided by the Golden Rule.42
Although Silver Dollar City’s millions of guests are not fully aware of the ways that the Herschends ideologically position and justify their property, it is easy to identify these techniques. Though the park has featured a saloon since 1973, visitors are not able to imbibe Ozark moonshine (or any alcoholic beverage for that matter). In fact, the on-site “saloon” has roots in an embrace of physical restraint rather than drunken revelry. According to Jack Herschend, a park tavern was planned because one was included within the site’s original mining town. However, not wanting to promote inebriation, he linked the tavern to Carrie Nation, the ax-wielding leader of the nineteenth-century temperance crusade, who was born in nearby Eureka Springs, Arkansas. To showcase this regional connection, Silver Dollar City’s saloon show once started in a typical can-can girl fashion only to be interrupted by a Nation impersonator who broke whiskey bottles, called sinners to the stage, and closed down the business five times daily. A century after Nation’s campaign, temperance is still a calling card for the park. As stated by Ron Farris, a trucker who delivers supplies to the site and frequently visits as a guest, “It’s an incredible place. . . . I can bring my family and never have to worry about drunks because there aren’t any.” Other aspects of the attraction further equate it with Christian-based social and cultural decorum: visitors can enjoy bloodless bouts between law enforcement and outlaws, re-created nineteenth-century miners with sparkling hygiene and profanity-free dispositions, and stand-up comedians who resist the risqué jokes that exemplify their trade. In this manner, aspirations of wholesomeness fuse with a recent stockholder statement of objectives that mandated a “Christ-centered company” to produce a variant of “family fun” firmly entrenched in popular religiosity.43
While an amorphous translation of decency finds its way into all entertainment venues at the park and easily meshes with the upright brands of country, bluegrass, and “hillbilly” tunes continuously featured, a guest can also easily locate traditional gospel performances. Many of the gospel entertainers often claim that they appreciate the unique prospect of evangelizing to unchurched park visitors. As Tim Martin, lead singer for the a cappella group First Day, stated, “We welcome opportunities such as Silver Dollar City to be able to sing about our Lord to those who may not have a relationship with Christ. It is our hope that others will be moved to seek God and his word.” Furthermore, each day (except Sunday) concludes with a showcase of religious music at the site’s amphitheater. As a capstone to the week, a program currently entitled “Gospel Jubilation” is offered after the park’s close. Gary McSpadden, who holds credentials as a former Southern Baptist minister, member of the Oak Ridge Boys and the Gaither Trio, and inductee into Gospel Music Hall of Fame, has frequently hosted this Sabbath-day event. In addition, McSpadden also operates a ministry out of Branson that hopes to bring gospel music and biblical truths to Europe and Latin America. Silver Dollar City has also made devotional melodies ubiquitous throughout its acreage. As one strolls the winding paths, such songs are always heard though speakers shaped as rocks. These devices, which demonstrate the site’s commitment to fusing religion with the greater theme park experience, perfectly embody the dictum to preach while not being “preachy.”44
During a typical summer season (which amounts to half of overall visitation), four-fifths of all Silver Dollar City’s guests arrive with children. In light of this core constituency, the site is permeated with nondistinct “family values” rhetoric that reflects its similarly imprecise religious product. Appropriately, the performing of Christian precepts is therefore not exclusively aimed at adults. In 2002, animated Veggie Tales characters joined the park’s annual National Kids’ Festival. The creation of Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki, Veggie Tales cartoons feature fun-loving vegetables that entertain children with Bible stories and help their parents teach Christian values. A remarkable business venture in its own right, the Veggie Tales enterprise began in 1993 and has never been supported by a cable TV network or syndicated show. Nonetheless, it is currently the most popular children’s video series in the world, with more than twenty-five million copies sold. Prior to their arrival, Peter Herschend labeled the pious plants a “glove fit” for his property. Considering that Veggie Tales has prospered by presenting easygoing moral lessons in inventive ways, it is not surprising that Vischer declared, “Most parents want their kids to be more forgiving, more kind, more compassionate. It’s the same thing Silver Dollar City’s been doing for 40 years.” Attesting to ways that Veggie Tales conjoined with the restrained religiosity of all the locale’s offerings, tourist Shelby Sears stated, “It’s not a direct message. They [her children] don’t even get it that they’re getting preached at.”45
The theme park’s celebration of Christmas also brings to light its unique negotiation of sacred and secular sentiments. The holiday is commemorated with a living Nativity presentation, an Angel Garden that provides the story of cherubs throughout the Bible, and ornate crèches from all over the world. The venue also offers a five-story Christmas tree decorated with two hundred thousand lights and a “Wonderland” where children can make their requests to Santa. Seemingly profane Christmas displays such as these can be viewed while aboard the park’s steam train, where riders often sing nonreligious seasonal melodies en route. However, at the climax of this journey through signifiers of the secular holiday, the train rumbles to a stop in the woods. There a woodsman standing near images of the manger scene tells the story of Christ’s birth, wraps all the sights encountered into an overarching Christian narrative, and, in the locale’s typically understated fashion, lets guests know that Jesus is the “reason for the season.”46
The Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation often reiterates that its goal is not proselytism. As Peter Herschend maintained in 2000, “This is not Billy Graham. We’re not trying to convert anyone.” Still, although the park may not station preachers on its street corners, it is undeniable that the attraction and associations sponsored by its parent company engage in evangelism by broadcasting their variant of Christian values to larger society, with the site’s proprietors claiming that many people have “met the Lord” during their visits. Herschend intoned this approach when he was part of Billy Graham’s Heart of America Crusade held at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2004. Prefacing his address, he stated, “What I will speak about is ultimately how living with Jesus has directed my life and how important He has been to my life and our business.” Considering Silver Dollar City’s amorphous spiritual approach, a Herschend-Graham revival pairing makes much sense. Scholar of American evangelicalism Mark Noll has accounted for Graham’s remarkable success by highlighting his ability to “reduce friction” among Christian groups and trade “angularity for access.” Utilizing a “particularly inoffensive way of reminding people that they are sinners in need of grace,” Graham has opted for a focus on “mere Christianity” that greatly resembles Herschend’s own business strategies.47
As a central part of this religio-tourism mission, each spring the company sponsors “Young Christians’ Weekend,” an event that draws up to sixteen thousand teens for a combination of entertainment and dating, self-image, and sexuality seminars. Christian artist-ministers perform for youths, and despite attempted missionary restraint, Peter Herschend claimed that many attendees have “accepted Jesus” as a result of their stay. At the 2001 event, for instance, teens attended a sermon by Ryan Dobson, son of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, who told them that they are loved by God despite their flaws. Minutes later, the Christian boy band Plus One took the stage to the delight of hundreds of junior high girls. The park also used this occasion to unveil the $18 million looping roller coaster, Wildfire. Beyond braving the ride, attendees gathered on Sunday morning for a rousing service at the Wilderness Church. After this weekend of faith and fun, the park received calls from a bevy of youth leaders and estimated that nine hundred young people made a commitment to Christ as a result of these activities.48
Furthermore, all Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation holdings are required to give a percentage of their yearly profits to Christian ministries, and Jack and Peter Herschend have been active as board members with a variety of these groups for more than a decade. Organizations supported by Silver Dollar City donations include Habitat for Humanity, Lives Under Construction Boys Ranch (an association that offers alternative programs and homes for troubled boys), the Young Life/Discipleship Focus Program (a discipleship training and Bible study initiative for youth group members), and Ozarks Food Harvest (a mission intended to alleviate hunger in southwestern Missouri and northern Arkansas). Supplementing these endeavors is the Silver Dollar City Foundation, formed in 1996 to serve as a grant-giving umbrella entity for Branson-wide community programs. By offering funds that assist needy Ozarkers in paying their utility bills, “adopting” impoverished families at Christmastime, and providing conflict management classes to schools and community organizations, the foundation utilizes, according to President John Baltes, a “grass roots approach to growing a community centered in Christian values” and hopes to ultimately lead “people into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”49
In addition to his business enterprises, Peter Herschend has engaged in a variety of political pursuits that inform the tenor of Silver Dollar City and signal his importance outside the Branson area. A lifelong Republican, Herschend avowed, “I am a conservative, both philosophically and politically.” This claim was solidified in 1992 when President George Bush chose Silver Dollar City as the place to emphasize his “family values” message and celebrate his nomination to a second term of office—an event that attracted ten thousand people in the August heat to a brief rally. Also notable is Herschend’s long-term relationship with John Ashcroft. Ashcroft was raised in Springfield and practiced law in that city before beginning his political career; is a fellow member of the Assemblies of God and comes from a family of ministers; and was both senator from and governor of Missouri before serving as the U.S. attorney general from 2001 to 2005. This religious and political like-mindedness led Herschend to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to Ashcroft’s campaigns of the early 1990s—generosity that was rewarded by an appointment to the Missouri State Board of Education in 1991. He still sits on this board, and in 2005 he assumed the office of president for the second time.50
The Herschend-Ashcroft relationship has not been without controversy. In 1992, Branson was burdened with traffic congestion as thirty thousand cars a day jammed its Strip during peak season. At a press conference that year where he was introduced by Herschend, then governor Ashcroft declared an “economic emergency” in order to build additional roads. A $140 million, 18-mile bypass was quickly approved, and it soon came to light that the new highway would benefit several of the governor’s key political contributors, most of all Herschend. Skirting the city’s overcrowded primary road, U.S. Highway 465 (dubbed “Pete’s Pike” by disgruntled local residents) would offer people traveling to Branson from the north a direct route to Silver Dollar City. In addition, it was to cross three stretches of Herschend-owned property, including one parcel sold to the state for $2.2 million in 1993. Amid the planning and construction of the bypass, campaign contributions from Herschend, his family, and business continued to pour into Ashcroft’s coffers, with $33,000 donated between 1994 and 2001.51
Although this saga indicates a symbiotic, and perhaps suspect, economic arrangement, the men’s religious affinities clearly influenced the deal. Aside from their shared affiliation with the Assemblies of God, they are mutually acquainted with important figures of the Christian Right such as Pat Robertson and James Dobson. Famous for his integration of conservative Christian principles into public stances, Ashcroft has sought to “invite God’s presence into whatever [he is] doing.” Like-minded evangelicals, including Herschend, showed support for this union in the 2000 election cycle, when Ashcroft received more political money from religious groups and clergy than any other candidate for the U.S. Senate. By holding voluntary daily prayers with his staff and anointing himself prior to being sworn into political offices (a ritual meant, as he stated, to “replicate the ancient kings of Israel”), he therefore reproduced the blurring of a line between sacred and secular promoted by Silver Dollar City. And, through his renowned Christian-guided conservatism, he has advanced a variety of social policies fundamental to Herschend’s own agenda, with an opposition to gaming central to this overlap.52
Herschend has vigilantly campaigned against gambling in the Ozarks for more than a decade. The possibility of gaming in the area has caused consternation among many residents since it was first proposed by a New Jersey–based company and the Eastern Shawnee tribe in 1994. Throughout a decade of battles over this issue, Silver Dollar City has indeed led Branson’s charge against what Herschend has termed the “cancer of gambling.” On several occasions, the company has paid employees to conduct studies of its effect on local economies and to assist people combating its influences with fund-raising and resource gathering. In an attempt to defeat 1998’s Amendment 9 to the Missouri constitution, which legalized gaming in artificial moats, it donated more than $25,000 to a lobbying group. Illustrating the union of tourism boosters and clergy around this and other social matters, Howard Boyd, pastor of Branson Hills Assembly of God Church and opponent of local gambling, praised Silver Dollar City’s efforts when he stated, “I probably will not know until I get to heaven just how much the Herschends have influenced this community.”53
The most sizable challenge by gambling advocates arose in 2004 when Rockaway Beach, a tiny town 12 miles from Branson, proposed the construction of a casino that promoters claimed would bring year-round jobs to its depressed economy. In a now familiar refrain, Peter Herschend voiced his opposition by claiming that the enterprise would damage the “image” of Branson—one that relied on “wholesome, family-oriented, good entertainment.” To counter roughly $12 million spent by the pro-gaming coalition, the Herschend family and its corporation bankrolled the “Show Me You Care” campaign. Finance reports showed that Peter Herschend contributed $125,000, his brother and sister-in-law added another $125,000, and the Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation donated $970,000. These three gifts amounted to nearly 90 percent of the campaign’s overall budget. On August 3, 2004, Missouri voters defeated a constitutional amendment that would have made Rockaway Beach’s plans legal. While money and grassroots political effort certainly aided the antigambling cause, Peter Herschend also suggested that divine intervention led to victory: “The Lord’s on our side. I have such a tremendous prayer group working. I have consciously sought out prayer groups around the nation to be in prayer about this.”54
Because Silver Dollar City relies on Billy Graham’s innocuous mode of evangelism rather than John Ashcroft’s more brazen attempts to integrate Christianity into the public sphere, no contemporary visitor would find evidence of the Herschends’ opposition to gambling or to any other hot-button political initiative that is part of the larger evangelical “family values” agenda. While placards do not adorn the grounds in protest of abortion or homosexuality or in support of school prayer, a religiously derived focus on families is thoroughly commented on by guests and other observers. Although the American “culture war” is thought by most to be a product of the 1980s, it has a century-long history in the Branson area. Throughout the past one hundred years, regional attractions have promised an escape from the ills of modernity by means of retreat to a changeless and pristine environ. Many technological transformations and other progressive innovations arrived on Ozark soil during this period, but boosters (including those at Silver Dollar City) continued to tout the area as an escape from ethically bereft aspects of the country at large. Here was a place where people could leave their car doors unlocked without fear of theft; where children could safely play without constant parental supervision; where vulgarity was an infrequent occurrence rather than a way of life; and where the seeming chaos of contemporary existence was calmed by a core group of amusements focused on God, country, and the traditional nuclear family. Reflecting such promises, the three-million-member American Family Association (AFA), whose mission statement claims that the entertainment industry “has played a major role in the decline of those values on which our country was founded and which keep a society and its families strong and healthy,” offered a review of Silver Dollar City on its Web site in 2003. In it, the AFA praised the park’s emphasis on putting “God first” in all its endeavors and highlighted the understated yet effective ways that “Christian values are expressed in the thousands of small details that go into running a family attraction.”55
In contemporary exit surveys, Silver Dollar City patrons similarly extol the site’s “safe, family atmosphere,” “friendly” employees, “clean” and “orderly” environment, and overall “Christian values.” Often these attributes are juxtaposed against comments about competitors within the tourism market said to have a less welcoming, mannerly, and pious disposition. As one tourist wrote within a recent online review of the park:
During our June trip my mother lost track of my 4-year-old son. The staff not only kept him entertained, they sent someone out to find my mother. Later in the day she decided to buy the kids some ice cream, not thinking she left her billfold sitting on the counter. When we returned to the cabin she had rented we called the park, they had her billfold. I would like to add that there was nothing missing, not even a dollar, do you think that would happen anywhere else? . . . I went to Six Flags St. Louis recently and was really grossed out by the conditions of the park. Since they added the water park all you see is half naked women, running around half drunk, and trash all over the park. I may never go back there.
Thus, the nonthemed, urban, lascivious, and unrestrained competitor paled in comparison with its diametric Ozark opposite. Another Internet review perhaps summarized Silver Dollar City’s aura most succinctly by labeling the site “clean (in all ways).”56
Each of the aforementioned “family values” elements is integral to the vision of appropriate religiosity represented by the park and subtly preached to its guests. As Peter Herschend explained: “The greatest ministry that we have is the operation of the company properties. The greatest witness we have to who Jesus was and is, is how we operate day in and day out.” Although not every guest may ally characteristics of decorum, integrity, and modesty with imitation of Jesus, the link was apparent to a tourist from North Carolina, who wrote:
At so many amusement parks the attendants are all young people who could care less about their job and they let it show. SDC has mostly older people as attendants and they were so friendly. They also had some young people working for them, and they too were very nice and friendly. Also you didn’t see immodestly dressed people like you do at some parks, where you have to pray your children don’t see their lack of clothes. The entertainment was wholesome, we loved Chapter 6 [a Christian a cappella ensemble], and the Veggie Tales show was so fun for the kids. We are Christians and this was a fabulous wholesome place to take my children.
Through such an account, one therefore becomes even more aware of the ways that the park’s unwritten (yet thoroughly scripted) “sermons” are enacted within the everyday workings of the site and interpreted by patrons through a religious lens.57
In the minds of many visitors, Silver Dollar City has served as the antithesis of other American recreational locales. Moreover, the consciously crafted culture of the place, solidified within the park’s motto “Creating Memories Worth Repeating,” has often resisted the cultural inclinations of America at large. The site’s attendance surged in the late 1960s not only because of its national exposure through episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. As administrator Brad Thomas explained, “With Vietnam and other uprisings . . . a lot of people were purposely looking for ordinary people and simple themes that they could relate to. . . . Places like Silver Dollar City offered families a chance to escape from those turbulent times and get back in touch with their roots.” In the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, Silver Dollar City has employed its brand of antimodernism to combat a perceived severing of morals from daily life, the ever increasing degeneracy of popular culture, and the decline of wholesome leisure opportunities for families. In this manner, it may ostensibly represent the turn-of-the-century Ozarks, but on a larger level, it has always sought to enact an alternative culture for people able to see and hear its message.58
Marvel Cave has consistently had a spiritual dimension. Under the proprietorship of the Lynch sisters, the stress was on divinity. Contemporarily, nearly half a million people still take the cave tour while visiting Silver Dollar City, and its mystical nature remains palpable to many. As a recent guest from Illinois wrote, “It is amazing the treasures that our earth holds that God has created that are just waiting for us to discover.” Since the Herschend family bought the site, the cavern’s mystique has become part of a thorough, aboveground embrace of amusement-oriented Christian evangelism. A thread of piety indeed winds its way through park employees, guests, and attractions alike. The site has always framed itself as a simple place populated by plain folk who provide glimpses of a trouble-free age. However, its experiential brand of remembering, imagining, and worshiping has spoken to the complexities of culture for many decades and offered tourists unique reaffirmations of the place of Christianity within American life.59