The hotel was remodeled several times over the years, and was rebuilt entirely in 1997 along with most of the north side of Main Street. The Gold Trails Hotel on your right originally came from a real ghost town near Prescott, Arizona, and was rebuilt to house the Covered Wagon Show. Part of the old mine survives in the entrance to Ghost Rider. About half of the mountain was torn down during the construction of Ghost Rider in 1998. It was the original home of the gold panning attraction. The Gold Mine area behind you opened in August 1948, just in time for the centennial of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. This building, and the adjoining storefront later became the Book and Rock Shop, founded by Ray Hetherington, and still in operation in the 1980s. The “Mules for Hire” building was the original home of the Ghost Town News, which also published a weekly souvenir edition during the winter of 1941-42. The first buildings completed in “Ghost Town Village” (as it was originally called) were on your left, along Gold Mine Road. Start at the foot of Main Street across from the entrance to Ghost Rider (did you know that all the streets in Ghost Town have names?). There’s still plenty of old Knott’s Berry Farm to see if you take a walk around Ghost Town. Just south of the 1928 building, behind the Berry Market, you’ll find one of the original rock gardens and the George Washington Fireplace, a replica of one Walter Knott saw at Mt. Virginia’s original gift shop opened here the same year the building was completed. To the north is the 1938 restaurant building, which is still in use.

The Knotts’ home was directly behind it, and the household kitchen served both the restaurant and the family. This was the location of Cordelia Knott’s original tea room. Just south of the Chicken Dinner Restaurant you’ll find the 1928 Knott’s Berry Place building (with a second story added), now home to the Bakery and the Chicken-to-go counter. And the berry farm grew from roadside attraction into a true theme park, as tourists came from all over the world to visit Knott’s Berry Farm.Ī few relics of Knott’s earliest days still survive – if you know where to look for them. What began as a one-time construction project stretched over the next two decades, as Ghost Town continued to grow. It opened on Washington’s Birthday in February 1942. The Covered Wagon Show that started it all actually took a little longer. Our thought is to collect a town but as that is impossible we try to do the next best thing – build or reconstruct a ghost town that will be authentic and show life as it was lived in the early days.”īy the time berry season rolled around again in the summer of 1941, the first street was ready for the crowds. We are not collecting museum pieces nor is it the intention to build a museum. By securing a building here, part of another there, an old bar in one place or something else somewhere else we add to the picture we are attempting to portray – a composite picture of the ghost towns of the west as they appeared in ‘49 and the early ‘50s. “We are continually seeking materials with which to reconstruct the ghost town here at Knott’s Berry Place. In 1940 – probably just after berry season – Knott set his construction crew to work building a ghost town out of buildings and materials salvaged from all over the western United States. But why just one building? Why not a whole Western town? And so Ghost Town Village was born. And to house the show, he would build a replica of an old time Western building.

He decided to build a “cyclorama” – a curved painting with set pieces in front of it that would use sound and lighting effects to tell the tale. He wanted to celebrate the story of the pioneers crossing the desert by covered wagon, just as his own family had done back in 1868. By 1940, there was a lake, a rock garden, an old stage coach, and even a rumbling volcano.īut Walter Knott wanted more. Knott’s Berry Place was becoming a roadside attraction. It proved to be a winning combination, and as the crowds grew, the Knotts began beautifying the area and adding little displays out back. But the Depression was still dragging on, so that same summer Cordelia Knott added chicken dinners to the menu of her little tea room, just to help make ends meet. That was the year he introduced the Boysenberry to the world.

1934 was a big year for Walter Knott – even if it didn’t seem like it at the time.

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