The Wax World of the Stars, Fan-taz-ma-goric Museum, King Tut’s Tomb, Santa’s Woods, and Grandpa’s Antique Photo Studio remain from a passing era of family summer entertainment around Cavendish, in the heart of “Anne’s Land” on Prince Edward Island. Rainbow Valley amusement park—the name comes from a novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery—closed its doors; the land acquired by Parks Canada in 2005. The gift shop was a castle and the canteen was a flying saucer surrounded by wooden picnic tables. Children tramped like giants through a miniature version of an old time Prince Edward Island village. They leaped along a swinging rope bridge over a ravine. Families paddled swan boats or rowed around the ponds. Children wore themselves out the old fashioned way: running across meadows, petting baby animals, shouting through a maze, and actively pursuing low tech fun. There was a talking owl but there was also live entertainment from characters like magician Rainbow Ron. A homegrown amusement park, Rainbow Valley sported two fascinating popular representations of the past.
Moonshine Manor, a shooting gallery, lay at the end of the rope bridge. The size of a semi-truck trailer, the manor was painted and furnished to resemble a ramshackle mountain home. A drawling voice warned visitors off, protecting the family moonshine enterprise. Wandering nearby, the visitor triggered an outhouse door that swung slowly open revealing its occupant – an indignant old man. The homemade figures rocked their chairs, hoisted a jug, or waved a rifle. The Moonshine Manor evoked the popular stereotypes discussed by Altina Laura Wallers in Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900. How did this stereotype come to herky-jerky life on Prince Edward Island? A quick search of the PEI tourism literature holds a clue: “ . . . additional names of endearment [for PEI] are: Million Acre Farm, Garden of the Gulf, Spud Island, Kentucky of Canada, The Home of Anne and Fair Island of the Sea.” (A Brief History of Prince Edward Island)
A second marker of popular history, The Dark Ride, was added years later along with the park’s expanding water slides. The ride sat in a massive barn of a building next to an idyllic looking pond of “shining waters.” Visitors stepped inside and took a seat on a boat that rotated gradually, carrying riders through nightmare scenes of Prince Edward Island’s rum-running past. The ride resembled Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the thirteen figures and the sound were more life-like than those at Moonshine Manor.
Parks Canada has erased Rainbow Valley. Only the building housing The Dark Ride remains, a venue for island ceilidhs serving up traditional and popular music to summer visitors. The former theme park will provide a new entrance to the park’s long and beautiful beaches, red cliffs, and sand dunes stretching from New London Bay to Rustico Harbor. This past summer, I drove past the green fields and woods, wondering what had become of the Moonshine Manor and The Dark Ride. I spotted the shooting gallery in the parking lot of a nearby tourist shopping center along with T-shirt stores, laundromat, and fast food venues. Stopping to take photographs, I asked the proprietor about the Dark Ride. Apparently, Parks Canada took some time deciding what to do with this popular piece of the past. Finally, they sold it off and many of the figures have found their way, in new clothing, to the Haunted Mansion and Water Gardens in nearby Kensington.
New theme parks still feature home grown entertainment but rum-running and moonshine have given ground to a full throttle celebration of a more appropriate past – that of Cavendish’s beloved author Lucy Maude Montgomery and her creation, Anne of Green Gables and Avonlea. There has been a construction boom along the coast and bays of Prince Edward Island. The restored farmhouses, cottages and log homes built decades ago now share the landscape with substantial year-round homes featuring all the modern conveniences. At the Rustico Home Hardware, they were pricing out a $25,000 window order for a new house. A few miles down the road, the paint peels from a plywood space shuttle and cars rarely pull into Bart’s Jurassic Park but the summer visitors still come to Prince Edward Island.
Prince Edward Island is home to a remarkable number of history and cultural museums. Visitors learn quickly of the Miq’Maq Indians, Acadian settlers, and British colonists as well as the economic activities—farming, fishing, shipbuilding, gathering Irish moss, and raising silver fox. Islanders have been adaptable in wresting a living from their short summers; it is time for Parks Canada to offer up an exhibit about the Islanders’ creativity in reeling in and entertaining tourists.
Thanks so much for this post – it evoked so many wonderful childhood memories! You can trace my sister and I as we grew up by looking at the pictures of us in the swan boats year after year. The Dark Ride was after my time, but I still remember the old haunted cave by the water slides – and still maintain I nearly fell through a trap door in the floor!
We still love to see the old places that hang on year after year (and wonder who actually goes to Ripley’s Believe It of Not) and root for King Tut to make it to another summer. Nowhere else do we get nostalgic for wax museums and “tourist marts.” I suppose all we can do is support the merchants we have grown to love and hope that the Island finds its next Rainbow Valley.
[...] by tellhistory I was surprised to find Tellhistory among the top sites in Google searches on “rum running.” Most visitors to this blog apparently come to read about Prince Edward Island where my parents [...]
[...] was surprised to find Tellhistory among the top sites in Google searches on “rum running.” Most visitors to this blog apparently come to read about Prince Edward Island where my parents [...]