Did You Know Lagoon Was Built to Sell Train Tickets
Before Lagoon roller coasters, there was Lake Park — a resort the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad opened on the shore of the Great Salt Lake in 1886. For a few summers it was the place to be. Then the lake betrayed it: the water receded so far that the “lakeside” resort was stranded on dry ground, and Lake Park closed after the 1895 season.
One man saw an opportunity in the wreckage. Simon Bamberger — a coal and railroad entrepreneur who was building his own Salt Lake–to–Ogden rail line — bought up most of Lake Park’s buildings, hauled them about three miles east to a spot near Farmington, and reopened the resort on July 12, 1896. He named it for the small body of water on the property: Lagoon.
Bamberger’s motive wasn’t nostalgia — it was ridership. A popular destination along his tracks meant more passengers buying tickets every summer weekend. The strategy worked so well that the line, electrified in 1910 as the Bamberger Electric Railway, carried crowds to Lagoon for decades. Bamberger himself went on to become Governor of Utah in 1917.
More than a century later, Lagoon is still running on the same Farmington ground — one of the oldest amusement parks in America, and living proof that a good idea and a rail line can outlast the lake that started it all.
Sources: Utah History to Go (Utah Division of State History); Wikipedia, “Lagoon (amusement park).” Historic photo: Shipler Commercial Photographers, courtesy Utah State Historical Society (1920).
