PUTNEY — When Santa’s Land opened in this town in 1957, the Christmas-themed amusement park offered fair-weather visitors the chance to step into a wintry forest seeded with picnic tables, playground swings and clapboard cottages blanketed in Styrofoam snow.
“The project is designed to appeal to children and their elders alike,” the local newspaper reported of the 40-acre site promising homegrown products such as maple syrup and an on-site post office with its own cancellation.
Then the interstate and internet pulled everyone elsewhere. In 2003, an out-of-state man considered turning southern Vermont’s North Pole into a $6 million “Silverado” cowboy attraction. A decade later, a local woman announced plans to revive the pine-covered park, only to face animal cruelty charges and file for bankruptcy when authorities discovered more than a dozen dead, underfed reindeer.
Santa’s Land closed five years ago. But the Christmas season is known for miracles. Enter Connecticut magician David Haversat, a childhood visitor who bought the site in 2017.
“Considering its condition, the park could easily have been wiped away by a purchaser hoping to redevelop the large property,” the Preservation Trust of Vermont notes.
Instead, Haversat has restored much of the original 1950s architecture and artifacts as well as added a historic 32-horse carousel from Coney Island’s Astroland.
“To many who have loved the place over the decades, the reopening was a thrill only matched by the delight of children seeing it for the first time,” the trust said in granting the new owner a preservation award.
Such wide-eyed wonder was the goal of the park’s founder, the late Jack Poppele, a broadcasting pioneer who developed the first directional radio signal and portable speaker and made stereo available for AM stations. The local paper reported his plans next to a photo of Vermont officials viewing blueprints of the state’s first stretch of interstate highway that promised to cut travel time and cultivate tourism.
Santa’s Land flourished under Poppele and the succeeding Brewer family, which operated the property from 1970 to 1998. But the turn of the current millennium brought rising expenses, reduced attendance and a series of unexpected challenges. Take the 2003 plan to bulldoze the property for a “Silverado” cowboy attraction featuring a Wild West saloon, staged high-noon shootouts and live buffalo.
Upon the idea’s unveiling, skeptical neighbors noted the prospective buyer had yet to file permit paperwork and, after a bar fight, faced court charges. Even so, residents of Putney, population 2,621, could see the need to do something at the park full of peeling paint and persnickety petting-zoo animals that required the sign, “We bite, please do not feed us.”
In 2013, Vermonter Lillian Billewicz purchased the property with hopes of restoring it.
“It was maternal instinct,” she said at the time. “I couldn’t see capitalism destroying family tradition and family values.”
But a year later, Billewicz filed for bankruptcy as authorities found 16 dead reindeer at the site and confiscated a remaining menagerie of underfed donkeys, goats and ponies.
The park sat unattended for three years before its purchase by Haversat, who was undeterred by the fact vandals had smashed every single window.
“They probably figured the place would never reopen again,” Haversat says. “But it just needed some care.”
The restored property, four miles off Interstate 91’s Exit 4 and in the shadows of national attractions packed with thrill rides and name-brand costumed characters, may seem quaint to first-timers. But no pizzazz is no problem for adults who visited as children. They find comfort and joy in what hasn’t changed.
Walk under the canopy of towering trees and you still can smell the evergreens, hear the whistle of the miniature train and see the same tracks circled by the same plywood candy canes. The fact it all seems smaller and simpler only adds to its stature.
“We’ve been coming for years,” says one mother escorting three generations of family. “It’s relaxing.”
Santa’s Land will be open the Saturday and Sunday before Christmas from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then shut for its traditional break until summer, with more information available at its Facebook page.
Haversat, for his part, hopes the storybook ending is only the beginning.
“The internet has changed a lot of things,” he says. “Sometimes people don’t spend as much time together as a family. This is something that may remind you of the past. An iPad or an app will never take that place.”
