Vintage 1960s Canobie Lake Park Postcard 🎡 Salem, New Hampshire (NOS)

Remember Canobie Lake Park? 🎡 Vintage 1960s Postcard, Salem, New Hampshire, NOS

Size: 5 1/2" x 3 1/2"

🎡 A packed summer day on the midway at Canobie: families in capri pants and sneakers streaming past the ARCADE with its big yellow letters on the roof, the sky ride swinging by overhead and the roller coaster peeking through the pines. These postcards sat factory banded and unused for some sixty years, and they still look like you could step right in.

🔍 What's On It

The front is a color photo of the Arcade and the crowd in front of it, with flower beds, picnic tables and the other rides behind. The back is an unused divided back that reads CANOBIE PARK, Salem, New Hampshire, and then "The Arcade continues to be one of the most popular attractions at this beautiful park." It has PLACE STAMP HERE, MADE IN U.S.A., the card number K-15172, and up the side, PUB. BY: WAKEFIELD TRADING CO., P. O. BOX 13, WAKEFIELD, MASS., with the publisher's little round mark. There's no date on it, but the clothes and the hairdos look right out of the 1960s.

🚋 A Trolley Park That Made It

Canobie opened on August 23, 1902, owned by the Massachusetts Northeast Street Railway Company. It was a trolley park, the kind the streetcar companies built at the end of the line so people would ride out on the weekends, and in the early days it was all flower gardens, promenades and gentle rides. Then the automobile took over, the crowds thinned out, and the park closed on St. Patrick's Day in 1929. Wages had been cut, ridership kept dropping, and when the town of Salem wouldn't help pay to keep the line running, the trolley company let it go - and the park went with it. It sat silent and untended for three years.

It came back thanks to Patrick J. Holland, a construction contractor from Ireland, who bought the place in 1931 for $17,000, fixed it up with new gardens, rides and electricity, and reopened it in 1932. And here's the twist: the same automobile that killed the trolley park is what carried the new one. The tracks never came back, so Holland's Canobie was a park you drove to, and the families who used to ride the streetcar out to Salem came by car instead. In 1936 a wooden roller coaster that had opened at Lakewood Park in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1930 was moved to Canobie, and it's still running today as the Yankee Cannonball. In 1958 three close friends from New Jersey bought the park, and their families still run it. Later rides came and went too, like the Canobie Corkscrew, a looping steel coaster that ran there from 1990 until 2021, when part of it went to the National Roller Coaster Museum. Canobie is one of only thirteen trolley parks left in operation in the country.

And here's a fun one. Stephen King based the amusement park in his novel Joyland on Canobie Lake Park, and he came by in 2012 to photograph the Mine of Lost Souls dark ride for the book.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1960s Canobie Park postcard, the Arcade, Salem, New Hampshire
• Pub. by Wakefield Trading Co., Wakefield, Mass., card K-15172
• About 5 1/2" x 3 1/2", unused, never mailed, New Old Stock
• You'll get one postcard like the ones shown

🖼️ It's a perfect little piece for anybody who grew up going to Canobie, or for a frame in a summer camp, a game room or a beach house.