HEY! If you grew up anywhere between Chattanooga and Dalton, you went to Pine Hollow Park. Don't tell me you
didn't. Everybody did.
I'm Timmy Tidwell. I'm 31, I manage a tire store in Chattanooga, and from 1974, when I was six, until the day it
closed for good on Labor Day 1987, I went to Pine Hollow every single summer, usually about fifteen times. My
grandparents met in the ballroom. My dad took me on the coaster when I was too short and lied to the man about it. I
had my first job interview there (I didn't get it) and my first kiss there (I'm not saying who). There are houses on
it now. This page is so it doesn't get forgotten.
Pine Hollow was about forty minutes south of Chattanooga, outside Ebbert, Georgia, on the shore of Pine Hollow Lake.
The Hardesty family built it in 1924 and ran it for sixty-three years. It wasn't big and it wasn't fancy. It was ours.
I don't have any pictures scanned yet. My mom has about two shoeboxes full of them and I'm working on her. For now
you'll have to use your imagination, and if you went there, you won't need much.
My ratings are out of five boxes of popcorn. Heights and numbers are from the signs, the old park brochure my mom saved,
and my own memory, which I'd put up against anybody's.
THE PINE TOP FLYER
Wooden roller coaster · built 1928 · 62 feet tall
The king of the park. A white wooden out-and-back coaster that ran along the lakeshore, about 2,400 feet of track. The
lift hill clacked so loud you could hear it from the parking lot, and the first drop went down 58 feet toward the water,
so for one second you really thought you were going in. Then the camelback hills, where your rear end left the seat,
and the turnaround out at the far end, and back again over the hills even faster. The whole ride took under two
minutes. You had to be 48 inches tall to ride, and there was a wooden pine tree by the entrance with a line on it. I
was 46 inches in 1975, and my dad stood behind me and kind of lifted me by the collar. The man knew. He let us on.
My rating:
Sit in the back car. Hands up on the second hill. Trust me.
THE CAROUSEL
Hand-carved, built 1926 · 48 horses and 2 chariots
Three rows of horses, the outside row standing still and the inside two going up and down, plus two chariots for
grandmas. Every horse was carved out of wood by hand and every one had a different face. There was a band organ in the
middle with drums and little bells, and if you sat on the outside row you could reach for the ring arm. Get the brass
ring and you rode again free. I got it exactly once, in 1979, and I still remember the feeling better than my high school
graduation. My favorite horse was the black one with the gold mane on the outside row, third from the chariot. Everybody
had a favorite horse.
My rating:
The most beautiful thing in north Georgia, and I'll fight you.
THE TILT-A-WHIRL
Added sometime in the 1950s
The cars spun around on a platform that went up and down over little hills, and depending on how you leaned, your car
would whip around or just sort of wobble. My cousin and I figured out how to make ours spin like a top, and one time in
1981 we spun so hard that my cousin lost a whole snow cone onto the man in the next car. Sorry, man in the next car.
My rating:
Do not eat first.
THE BUMPER BOATS
Added 1979 · on the lagoon by the beach
Big round rubber boats with a little motor in the middle and a stick to steer. The whole point was to ram your little
sister. The boats were slow and the water got everywhere and on a hot day in July there was no better place on earth to
be. You had to be 42 inches to drive your own.
My rating:
Bring a towel. Bring two.
THE BALLROOM
Built 1925 · out over the water on pilings
A big white wooden building with windows on three sides and a wraparound porch over the lake. In the thirties and forties
it was a real ballroom with bands on Saturday nights, and people drove from as far as Atlanta to dance. My grandparents,
Ezra and Rosemary Tidwell, met there at a dance in the summer of 1941. Grandpa asked her to dance and stepped on her foot,
and she said that was how she knew he was nervous and therefore serious. They were married fifty-one years. By the time I
came along it was a roller rink, with a mirror ball and a DJ booth, and on Friday nights in the summer of 1983 it was the
center of the known universe.
My rating:
Without it, I literally would not be here.
AND THE REST
The Ferris wheel (about 50 feet, and from the top you could see the whole lake).
The Scrambler (the one that slammed you into whoever was on the outside).
The Pine Hollow Railroad (a little train that went all the way around the lake, with a tunnel that was mostly
for kissing).
The Spook House (a dark ride in little cars, with a skeleton that dropped down at the second turn, and everybody
knew it was coming, and everybody screamed anyway).
Kiddieland (little cars, little boats, little airplanes, and the pony ride).
The beach (sand trucked in every spring, a roped-off swimming area, and a high dive that took me until 1980 to
jump off).
The arcade (skee-ball and pinball, and later Pac-Man, which ate about forty dollars of my money in 1981).
From the brochures my mom kept in a kitchen drawer, plus 1987 from my own memory, because I paid it.
| Year |
Gate |
Ride tickets |
Ride-all-day armband |
| 1974 | 50¢ | 15¢ each, coaster 3 tickets | $3.50 |
| 1977 | 75¢ | 20¢ each, coaster 3 tickets | $4.50 |
| 1980 | $1.00 | 25¢ each, coaster 4 tickets | $5.95 |
| 1984 | $1.50 | 35¢ each, coaster 4 tickets | $7.50 |
| 1987 | $2.00 | 50¢ each, coaster 4 tickets | $8.95 |
Wednesday was Family Night, half price on everything after five. The Fourth of July had fireworks over the lake, free, and
people parked along the highway for a mile to watch.
A little green building between the carousel and the beach, with a window that propped up and a line that never got
shorter. Corn dogs. Funnel cakes with powdered sugar that got all over your shirt. Snow cones in blue raspberry and
cherry, which turned your tongue colors your mother noticed. Cotton candy, spun right in front of you. Boiled peanuts,
because this is Georgia. And the fried pies, apple or peach, made every morning by the same lady from 1950 until it
closed. Nobody in the history of the world has ever made a better fried pie, and I'm including my grandmother, and
she'd say so herself.
They announced it in the paper in the spring of 1987: this would be the last season. Mr. Joe Hardesty, who'd run the park
since his father handed it to him after the war, was 75. His kids had moved away and didn't want it. The insurance on the
rides had gone sky high, people were driving to the big theme parks instead, and a developer had offered good money for
the land. Nobody could blame him. Everybody did a little anyway.
So that whole summer everybody came back. People who hadn't been in twenty years. Old couples who'd danced in the ballroom.
My grandparents came out one Saturday in August and sat on the ballroom porch and held hands and didn't say much.
The last day was Labor Day, Monday, September 7, 1987. I was nineteen. I went with my little sister and my best friend from
high school and stayed from the minute the gate opened until the very end. The line for the Pine Top Flyer was over an hour
all day. At ten o'clock they announced the last ride, and about three hundred people stood around the coaster station and
watched the train go up the lift hill one more time, and when it came back into the station everybody clapped, and the ride
boy rang the station bell, and Mr. Hardesty, who was standing on the platform, took his hat off.
Then the lights went off on the coaster, then the Ferris wheel, then the carousel, one at a time, and everybody walked out
slow. Mr. Hardesty stood at the front gate and shook hands with people until the last car left. He shook mine. I didn't know
what to say, so I said thank you. He said, "Thank you for coming, son." That's the last time I was ever there.
The auction was Saturday, February 13, 1988, in the cold, and it took all day. Here's where everything went, as best I know.
If you know more, write me.
| The carousel | Sold whole, horses and organ and all, to a collector from up north. I've heard it's in storage, I've heard it's in a shopping mall in Ohio, and I've heard it's been split up and sold off a horse at a time. I don't know which is true and I'm afraid to find out. |
| The Pine Top Flyer | Nobody bought it. You can't really move a wooden coaster. It was torn down that spring. A man from Ebbert hauled off a truckload of the lumber and built a barn out of it, and I've driven by. It's a nice barn. It looks wrong. |
| The Tilt-A-Whirl | Sold to a traveling carnival. I swear I rode it at a county fair in Tennessee in 1991. Car number 4 had a dent shaped like Texas, and so did that one. |
| The Ferris wheel and the Scrambler | Carnivals, too. |
| The train | Bought by a city park in Alabama, I've been told. I mean to go find it. |
| The bumper boats | A miniature golf place over toward Atlanta. |
| The ballroom | Torn down in 1989. Some of the floorboards went to people at the auction. My grandmother has a piece of it on her mantel. |
| The coaster station bell | Me. Forty dollars. It hangs on the wall behind the counter at my tire store, and I ring it every time somebody buys four tires. Customers think I'm crazy. Customers from Pine Hollow understand. |
The land is a subdivision now, Pine Hollow Shores, with about sixty houses and a boat ramp. The streets are named Carousel
Lane and Flyer Court and Ballroom Drive, which I guess is somebody's idea of being nice. I drove through once. Where the
carousel was, there's a two-car garage. I haven't been back.
DO YOU REMEMBER? >>
Memories sent in by readers, from the 1930s to the last summer
P.S. If you love this kind of thing as much as I do, Dwayne and Rhonda Peabody's Roadside
Attraction Log rates giant fiberglass men, mystery spots and the world's largest things. Pine Hollow never had a giant
fiberglass man, but it should have.
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