Dogpatch USA

Dogpatch USA was a comic strip made of real logs — the 1968 theme park that turned Al Capp's Li'l Abner into 825 acres of Ozark tourism. A Harrison realtor looked at the Raney trout farm and saw the strip's landscape already there: Mill Creek Canyon as the bottomless canyon, the waterfall, Mystic Caverns down the road as Dogpatch Cave where the Kickapoo Joy Juice flowed. Capp, who'd refused every licensing offer, said yes to this one.

The park bet on authenticity — nineteenth-century log buildings bought across the Ozarks, each log numbered, dismantled, and reassembled onsite. Opening year drew 300,000 visitors at $1.50 a head; Al Capp's son married the actress playing Moonbeam McSwine; the town of Marble Falls legally renamed itself Dogpatch to help the promotion. The 'West Po'k Chop Speshul' railroad ran the valley, and former governor Orval Faubus ran the park.

The collapse was the ski resort — a winter-sports complex built uphill to make Dogpatch year-round, killed by warm winters and debt that dragged the park down with it. The last season was 1993; the strip itself had ended in 1977, and the hillbilly iconography it sold had already curdled. The park decayed for decades into Arkansas's most famous ruin — the sign on the hill still pointing at it, the logs of the numbered buildings rotting back into the forest they were bought from.

Dogpatch USA is the archive's defunct-theme-park file — the Li'l Abner park that renamed a town, married the cartoonist's son to Moonbeam McSwine, and died when the ski hill failed, now a forest of numbered logs.