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Lake Compounce in Bristol, Connecticut is a really great park that I couldn't wait to get back to after my previous east coast visit in 2009.



Lake Compounce is a classic traditional amusement park tucked up against Compounce Mountain that looms nine hundred and forty-five feet over the park and the lake that it is named after.



Lake Compounce holds the distinction of being the oldest continually operating theme park in America.  It barely holds that record as in the early 1990's the park was not surviving.  Saddled with huge debt from an owner that was concentrating on holding concerts more than running a park most of the rides were inoperable and in 1991 on Labor Day the owners filed for bankruptcy and closed the park.  A group of locals purchased the park and while trying to secure funding to resurrect the defunct park they opened the park and a few rides for Labor Day weekend in 1992, 1993 and 1994 so they could keep the record as oldest continuously operating amusement park.



Eventually Lake Compounce came back from the edge and has gone quite a long way from being run down, bankrupt and on deaths door as it was in the first half of the 1990's.  Since that time the park has changed hands a few times before being purchased by the people behind Pittsburgh's Kennywood.



Kennywood Entertainment purchased Lake Compounce in 1996 and as they appreciate and know how to run a classic amusement park Lake Compounce's fortune started heading up.  The parks fortunes really started heading up, well straight up Compounce Mountain in 2000 when the park added the long desired "mountain coaster" that had been dreamed about for decades.  That coaster became Boulder Dash.



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Paul B. Drabek