One month after Disneyland in California opened, The Enchanted Forest, a park with a literary theme, debuted in Ellicott City. Together with many other crowd favorites, park visitors delighted in sights including Cinderella’s Castle, Humpty Dumpty, Willie the Whale, and the Three Bear’s Home.
The park expanded to over 52 acres after over three decades of existence, and at its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it attracted up to 400,000 summer visitors per season. The amusement parks with roller coasters that were being constructed in the Baltimore region started to pose a serious threat to the Enchanted Forest. In 1989, the park was demolished to make way for the construction of the Enchanted Forest Shopping Complex.
Two persons had the idea for the park. The ambition of Howard E. Harrison, Sr. and his son of the same name was to construct a significant family tourism destination. The Enchanted Forest helped the Baby Boomer generation’s fantasy come to life from 1955 until 1989. Almost 20 acres of cheerfully colored concrete rides, buildings, and characters made the park and its guests happy.
The park was largely shut down in 1989 when the Harrisons sold the property to a developer of a shopping development. The land was bought by a development business when the park closed in 1989. 1992 saw the construction of a retail complex with the same name, but the subsequent years saw the padlocking of the Enchanted Forest Theme Park.
The Friends of the Enchanted Forest was founded in 1999 by committed locals who wanted to find ways to save the theme park. In 2004, the farm in Howard County started to recover its components. The abandoned Enchanted Forest landmarks have been moved over time to the farm’s grounds by Clark’s Elioak Farm in Ellicott City. The castle and dragon at the entryway, along with the final salvageable pieces of the abandoned Enchanted Forest, were transported to Clark’s as of 2016, however Cinderella’s Castle and the Gingerbread Mansion were demolished.
According to reports from January 2022, virtually all of the sculptures from Maryland’s abandoned Enchanted Forest have been relocated from their original locations. An abandoned amusement park, The Enchanted Forest in Maryland became the stuff of urban explorers’ fantasies.
