In 1888 in Richmond, Virginia, Frank Sprague revolutionized American travel with his invention of the electric trolley, ushering in fast and economical transportation and opening suburban communities like Glen Echo along many trolley lines. With this transportation revolution came trolley parks, usually owned and operated by transit companies to encourage evening and weekend travel. At first these parks offered a picnic grove, dance hall, and swimming or boating area, with free admission, lower trolley fares for children, and bans on alcohol to encourage family trips while generating profit for the trolley companies. In the early 20th century, trolley use exploded in America, and by the time of World War I trolley companies employed over 100,000 workers and had become the fifth largest industry in the nation. As trolley systems prospered, these picnic parks modernized, and after the ferris wheel appeared at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, parks added attractions such as ferris wheels, shooting galleries, carousels, penny arcades, fireworks displays, and free concerts. By 1919 there were more than 1,500 trolley parks in America, including Glen Echo Park, Chevy Chase Lake, Marshall Hall, Suburban Gardens, Bethesda Park, Braddock Heights, and Luna Park in Arlington in the Washington area. In 1902, Day Allen Willey observed in Cosmopolitan that trolley parks, though only a few years old, were already found on the outskirts of nearly every city in the land. Attendance during the first three years of operation averaged 400,000 people per season, but the parks declined sharply during the Depression, and their numbers fell to around 400. The remaining parks provided diversion during World War II, but after the war they faced competition from theme parks such as Disneyland, which opened in California in 1955 with five themed areas, and from the growing automobile industry, which made trolleys and the parks tied to them less necessary. Today only 11 trolley parks still operate in the U.S., while their glory days survive in stories, pictures, and preserved parks like Glen Echo.
