Family fun feeds Silver Dollar City

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Apr 27, 2000

BRANSON, Mo. (AP) -- The family friendly theme at Silver Dollar City may have a lot to do with the family responsible for making the park what it is today.

In 1950, Hugo and Mary Herschend, along with their two sons, Jack and Peter, uprooted from their home in the suburbs of Chicago to try their hands at the tourism business in southwest Missouri.

The family went into a partnership to lease part of Marvel Cave, one of the few attractions in this part of the country that brought paying tourists deep into the heart of the Ozarks.

The Herschends spent their life savings making changes and bringing electric lights to the cave, once called "Devil's Den" by prospectors searching for lead and gold among its smooth slabs of limestone and giant cathedral ceilings. Once young Jack engineered a tunnel and track for a train that carried visitors up and out of the cave, business jumped 40 percent. Set in the wooded Ozark forest just west of Branson, the Silver Dollar theme park grew up around the entrance to Marvel Cave to give visitors waiting for the next tour something to do. Within its first year in 1960, the park attracted four times more people than had been coming to visit the cave. The park got its first taste of national exposure when Beverly Hillbillies producer Paul Henning, a Missouri native, filmed several episodes of the television show on the park's grounds in 1967.

"With Vietnam and other uprisings in the 1960s, a lot of people were purposely looking for ordinary people and simple themes that they could relate to," says Brad Thomas, a park director. "Shows like Beverly Hillbillies and places like Silver Dollar City offered families a chance to escape from those turbulent times and get back in touch with their roots."

While their parents weren't particularly religious people, Jack and Peter say they developed personal relationships with God on their own as adults. After their parents died, the two men decided to run the park with a commitment to Christianity.

Unlike the real mining towns in the 19th century, there are no saloons dispensing moonshine, no knife fights and no profane miners with poor hygiene at Silver Dollar City. Instead, the park is renowned for its colony of working craftsmen who shape wood, clay, glass and leather into works of art for sale.

The thousands of employees, both Christian and non-Christian alike, are expected to provide a "Christian witness" to the park's guests without appearing preachy, Jack Herschend says. "It can come across to somebody who doesn't live with it every day as suspect, but it's a culture that we love," he says. Nearly half of the park's employees have been there for 20 years or longer.

Silver Dollar City also operates Branson's White Water park, Showboat Branson Belle and Grand Village shopping center. It is partners with Dolly Parton in the Dollywood theme park and the Music Mansion theater in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

"We get tremendous amounts of letters from people thanking us for the feeling of our parks and the general Christian attitude of our workers," Pete Herschend says. "It's a nice feeling, and that's why we get people to come back."