Heritage USA

Heritage USA was the third-biggest theme park in America — the 2,300-acre Christian resort Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker built in Fort Mill that drew 6 million visitors a year, behind only the two Disney parks. It had a 501-room hotel, a Main Street USA of Bible shops, a water park, a TV studio, a campground, a skating rink, and the Jerusalem Amphitheater — the televangelist's Disneyland, where the PTL Club broadcast and the faithful bought timeshares in the ministry.

The fall was the scandal — Jessica Hahn's hush money came out in March 1987, Bakker resigned and handed the ministry to Jerry Falwell, who took the water slide's 163-foot plunge for the cameras while the empire collapsed. Bakker went to prison for fraud — the lifetime partnerships he'd sold for hotel stays were the fraud — and the park filed Chapter 11 and closed in 1989.

The ruins are what's left — the Heritage Grand tower standing empty for years, the water park drained, the Main Street gone to weeds while the property passed through a Malaysian investment group, a Radisson franchise, and finally MorningStar Ministries, which bought the core back for a Christian hub. The file keeps the rise-and-fall: the third-biggest park in the country built on donations, the scandal that emptied it, and the tower that still stands over the parking lot where 6 million people a year used to come.

Heritage USA is the archive's televangelist file — the Christian Disneyland that outdrew Knott's, the scandal that collapsed it in two years, and the ruins of the third-most-visited park in America on I-77.