I first visited Farwells Dinosaur Park in 1970, when I was four years old. For almost 40 years, it was one of the more bizarre tourist attractions near Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

My parents had bought a tiny one-bedroom cabin on Table Rock Lake a couple of years earlier in Orville Farwell’s Sunset Heights, and his father’s Dinosaur Park was a half-hour drive away in northwestern Arkansas, or only nine miles across the Missouri-Arkansas state line if one were a pterodactyl.

The park was filled with dozens of folk art sculptures of dinosaurs, cavemen, and the like. It began after Ola Farwell befriended Emmet Sullivan, who a year earlier had created the seven-story milk jug with arms known as the Christ of the Ozarks statue in nearby Eureka Springs. That had been created for the raving white supremacist and antisemite Gerald L. K. Smith, who retired in Eureka Springs in 1964. The statue was the first of Smith’s “Sacred Projects”, which grew to include a gallery, Bible museum, Passion Play, and a Great Wall of Jerusalem before that minister of hate expired in 1976.

Ola and Maye Farwell, who owned a grocery store in Eureka Springs, also owned 60 acres near Beaver Dam. Ola Farwell had been born in Barry County, Missouri, in 1893, so he was a contemporary of my paternal grandfather and grandmother, who were also born at that time in Barry County.

He hired Sullivan to build his Dinosaur Park, which was originally open year ’round from 7 to 7 with an admission of $1 for adults and 50 cents for children over six. Orville Farwell later said his family never lost money on the park while they owned it.

Two local men, A. C. “Mac” McBride and Orvis Parker, handled the actual construction of the dinosaurs. Mac had been the “Chief Mortar Artist” on the Christ of the Ozarks and his tombstone is adorned with an image of his handiwork. Orvis was an old-time country evangelist who lived until 2018. Abandoned Arkansas has many 2013 photos of their works.

I always found the park to be a hoot. Emmet had died in 1970, but Ola Farwell kept on going. His favorite hobby was collecting rocks, and in 1972 he said he was building a large “authentic” replica of the moon to house his rock collection. What a character!

Ola even brought one of the dinosaurs home for his own yard in Eureka Springs. After he retired, he was fixture on the resort town’s Spring Street, sitting in a metal chair surrounded by concrete bunnies and his own personal Styracosaurus albertensis. He would pass out brochures about the Dinosaur Park, even though he no longer owned it.

In the late 1970s, he had sold the park to Ken Childs, and Childs renamed it “John Agar’s Land of Kong” and had a 40-foot King Kong statue added. Childs was a friend of John Agar, who had a minor role as a mayor in the 1976 version of King Kong, although I remember him best as Dr. Matt Hastings in 1955’s Tarantula. Agar had famously married Shirley Temple in 1945, when she was 17 and he was 24.

Agar was an alcoholic, and his career suffered for it. He had multiple drunk driving arrests, and when he tried to explain to one judge that his troubled marriage contributed to his drinking, the judge shot back, “Don’t try to blame this on Shirley Temple!”

People presumed Agar had a financial interest in the park, but he had merely let his friend use his name.

In the late 1980s I treated various college friends to tours of Land of Kong, and we had great fun gawking at the ridiculous sculptures. My last visit was with some friends on spring break in 1993. The facility later became Dinosaur World, and it finally closed in 2005.

When Wendy and I have stayed at the Sugar Ridge Resort near Beaver Dam, we have driven by the old Dinosaur Park. I respect private property, so I never trespass, but I do enjoy catching glimpses of that Ozarks Land of the Lost through the trees.