Cinderella’s Castle, the centrepiece of Story Land theme park in Glen, New Hampshire. Credits – Wikipedia
The park began with around $5,000, the New Hampshire Union Leader reported. They owned the Eastern Slope Ice Cream Company in North Conway, the Concord Monitor reported.
They purchased a piece of land in Glen that the previous owner said wouldn’t even make a respectable pasture. This was not their first rodeo in business.
The park opened in late 1954, a year before Disneyland came up and transformed people’s expectations of amusement parks. Then came a few successful seasons, aided by the arrival of Cinderella’s Pumpkin Coach and Castle in 1957. Bob bought an old German carousel in 1967 that still turns today, a train and a fleet of boats that became the Swan Boats. The park’s latest new ride was a compact wooden coaster with a 40-foot drop, which opened in 2014. Its more recent major addition was Moo Lagoon, a water play area that debuted in 2024.
It was once called Story Town and had only one ride, a fire engine Bob drove with youngsters as passengers, according to the Conway Daily Sun. Then the national economy stalled, and the fledgling park struggled. The local lenders didn’t want the mortgage on the home of the three bears, and the family got by working hard and giving money back into the park year after year. That habit paid off in the late 1960s. The Morrells had room to dream bigger, and visitors began to perceive the park as a location they wanted to return to. The 1970s were a busy decade. New additions included a chapel, a safari ride, a Moroccan bazaar, the first maze, a Dutch village with a shoe ride and a coaster that later became the Polar Coaster. The 1980s brought a pirate ship, a tea cup ride and a trip to the moon.
