On Saturday May 4th we rolled into Charlestown State Park in Charlestown Indiana to begin our weeklong stay in the Louisville, Kentucky area. Louisville was the first stop that we made when we first began our Tiny House journey back in the fall of 2022 so it is kind of a special place for us. We also have friends there! My best friend from high school now lives there with his wife and son and I actually made a solo trip to visit them a few years before we started traveling full time. John also has a friend that he met online playing Fortnite many years ago who also lives in the city with his family who we met in person for the first time during our visit in 2022. We were really excited to see our friends while we were there.
We somehow managed to arrive in the Louisville area the same weekend as the Kentucky Derby. We don’t really follow horseracing but we were excited because we had been invited to a Kentucky Derby Party! A very sweet lady named Karen who we met at Buffalo Trace State Park during our prior visit to the area had been following us on social media and was staying at the same park as us for this visit invited us to stop by her campsite for a party. I always get nervous hanging out with people that I don’t know and there was quite a crowd gathered at Karen’s camper but they made us feel so welcome! We were immediately greeted upon pulling in to the campground and as soon as we walked over we were offered drinks and food. We talked about our travels and things to do in the area, met a ton of hilarious and wonderful people, and watched a few races. After the party, almost everyone followed us back to our house for a tour and to meet Harley. Karen and her friends made us feel like celebrities with all of the attention!
On Sunday evening, we had dinner at Shirley Mae’s, which had recently been visited by celebrities that were in town for the Derby – including Bruno Mars! We figured if it was good enough for Bruno then it was good enough for us. The restaurant is a little hole in the wall and is carryout only- you give your order and money to a man in a doorway and he brings your food when it’s ready. They have a few patio tables to sit along the road but that’s it. It was HOPPING! We had to wait about an hour for our food but we passed the time sipping on sweet tea and kool-ade. We ended up getting ribs, chicken, chitlins and a variety of sides. Sadly, the food didn’t really live up to the hype for us. We also discovered that we do NOT like chitlins- but it was worth trying something new.
On Tuesday night, we met with my friend Nick, his wife Stephanie, and their son Blake for dinner at one of the El Nopal locations near us, then came back to the house to hang out and chat. It was amazing to physically sit down to dinner with people that we have known for so long. Our life on the road has really made us miss those face to face connections.
On Wednesday, John took a vacation day so that we could attend a baseball game with John’s friend David. We met him at Louisville Slugger Field to watch the Bats play. We got awesome seats in the second row along the first base line and enjoyed a great view of the game. The Bats ended up winning and I was able to add a new foam finger to my collection. We followed up the game with lunch at one of our favorite Louisville spots- Yummy Pollo.
We ended the week with a guided hike right in Charlestown State Park where we were staying. We had visited this park during our first trip to Louisville because, hidden inside this park, are the remains of an abandoned resort from the 1930’s! (The rest of this post will be about the Rose Island Amusement Park – I think it’s incredibly cool but anyone not interested can stop reading how).
On our first visit back in 2022, we arrived a little late in the afternoon because we were expecting a nice, short hike of less than a mile to the Rose Island Park location and then a .25 mile loop of the site, then less than a mile back to the car. What we DIDN’T expect was the short trail to the park was down a SUPER STEEP hill. We made it down the hill just fine but really struggled to hike back up to the car before it got too dark to see. We were huffing and puffing for sure and, while I wanted to visit the site again, I was NOT looking forward to that uphill trek. Thankfully, on this visit, the park was offering a shuttle to take guests down to the Rose Island site and bring them back up.
For this visit, we arrived for the guided hike and decided to walk down to the site on our own and we enjoyed the walk down. We definitely took the shuttle back to the top at the end, though! The guide met us with the rest of the group that had opted to ride down in the shuttle and we picked up a few more hikers at the bottom of the hill and began the tour.
The location of the park is actually in Indiana but was intended as a getaway spot for people wishing to escape the hustle and bustle of life in the city of Louisville, Kentucky. The park itself sits not on an actual island as the name Rose Island would imply but rather on a narrow peninsula. In the beginning, the park was accessible by boat, by pedestrian bridge that ran over Fourteenmile Creek from what is now the main part of Charlestown State Park, or by driving a very long and bumpy road through the peninsula. White the park was known as Rose Island Amusement Park, by today’s standards we would probably classify it as a summer resort-think about the resort from the movie Dirty Dancing for the closest comparison I can come up with.
The park was originally called Fern Grove and was a well manicured city park established in the late 1800’s. The park was originally only available to local churches for picnics but eventually opened up to allow large gatherings from various community organizations as well. In the early days, the park was made up of rolling lawns with picnic spots but as more people started to visit and more events were held here more attractions were added. When the park was finally opened to the general public it included a dance hall, dining hall, and a small hotel.
In the 1920’s, the land was purchased by David Rose who had grand plans for this property. He put in a powerplant, running water, and amusement rides making this park a more luxurious vacation destination. Naming the park after himself and taking a bit of creative license with the definition of “island”, Rose Island opened in 1923.
In its heyday, the park included some amazing features including the dance and dining halls, picnic spaces, a hotel, guest cottages, a small zoo and even a roller coaster! At one time, a large cone-shaped fountain was built that actually housed baby alligators in it that were imported from the south for the summer each year! And perhaps one of the greatest attractions was the Olympic sized swimming pool which was quite the rare amenity during the 1920’s and 1930’s. The pool ranged from 4ft to 10ft in depth and also offered nearby shower/changing rooms, concession stands, and even a bathing suit rental stand (kind of gross sounding but hey, whatever worked for them).
People from Louisville wishing to escape the noise and smell of the city would often rent out a cottage for their family to spend the entire summer with wives and children staying at the park full time and the husbands coming to join them on the weekends. Records from 1926 show that the nearby city of Jeffersonville, Indiana held their community picnic at Rose Island there and had between 2,000 ad 4,000 guests in attendance.
Yes, business was definitely booming for Rose Island….until January of 1937 when the skies let loose and a heavy rain fell on the area for 15 straight days. The water level rose so high that it destroyed the park. Even the hotel was completely demolished but the unbelievable floodwaters. All of the cottages, the dance hall, the dining hall, the rides – gone. Thankfully, being the off season, the park was empty and no one was hurt but the glory days of the beautiful Rose Island Amusement park were over.
With so much damage to the park and the recent downturn in the economy (we were headed for the Great Depression), the park wasn’t able to be revived and it closed down permanently. During the war, a munitions plant was located nearby and workers would spend their lunches walking across the questionably stable but still standing footbridge and loot the park for any valuables they could find or any bits of metal that might be useful towards the war effort. The bridge was eventually torn down in the 1950’s and the old access road became overgrown. For the next 50+ years, the park would see no visitors aside from the occasional daring hiker or a few adventurous boaters.
Then in 2011, a new bridge was constructed and employees of the Charlestown State Park started to explore the area. By this time, the “island” was overgrown with grass, trees and weeds and anything that had remained of the wooden structures had rotted away. Metal and other artifacts had been carted away during the war years and most of the records of the park had been destroyed by either the flood or exposure to the elements over time so all that was left were stone and concrete foundations and walkways. Using these few remaining clues along with old photos and newspaper articles and interviews with anyone still living that had visited the park, researchers were able to piece together a good idea of what the park had once looked like. Much of this information came from a man named Marvin Bernhart (I might have bungled the spelling on the last name) who had lived at the park several summers during his childhood with his father who was employed there. His memories were the key to unlocking many of the island’s mysteries.
One of the most astonishing things, to me, was the fact that when they cleared the area around the swimming pool in 2011, the pool was in such good shape that it was still holding water! Sure, it was full of nasty mucky gunk and a few animal carcasses, but it had not cracked or leaked even after over 80 years of neglect and exposure.
A few pieces of the architecture have been restored, including several arches along the “Avenue of Roses”, to give modern day visitors a clue as to what the original visitors would have experienced 100 years ago and the park has done an amazing job of putting up information about what Rose Island was like but for the most part, it feels like walking through a lost world. The park is incredible to visit on your own (the signage that I mentioned above makes it really easy to learn about this site) but we definitely recommend catching one of the guided tours if possible because the guides really make the history come alive.
