Lakeside Amusement Park punctuated Roanoke Valley summers for more than 60 years.
Written by Clayton Trutor / Photo above: Lakeside Amusement Park was built in 1920 on Mason’s Creek., Courtesy of Roanoke Public Libraries.
For more than 60 years, Lakeside Amusement Park was the Roanoke Valley’s destination for summer fun.
Located near Mason’s Creek at the intersection of US 460 and State Route 419 in Salem, Lakeside was small by modern amusement park standards, covering just 47 acres at its peak. Nevertheless, the small amusement park packed in dozens of rides, games, and curiosities in its tight confines.
Lakeside started as a massive swimming pool, which opened in 1920. The pool was 300 feet long, 125 feet wide, and said to contain 2 million gallons of water. Lakeside was the first public pool in the region. It quickly became a summer fixture in the Roanoke Valley. For 10 cents, customers could cool off in the football field-sized pool.
Initially, the pool was surrounded by concrete. Later, a sandy beach was created around the pool, which kept customers much cooler and added significantly to the experience.
By the back half of the 1920s, rides and other attractions were built near the pool as Lakeside evolved into an amusement park. The park added several roller coasters, a Ferris Wheel, and a tilt-a-whirl.
In 1934, Roanoke entrepreneur H.L. Roberts purchased Lakeside. He kept it in the family for the next 50 years, eventually incorporating the business as Mountain Park, Inc.
Chris Robbins grew up in southwest Roanoke and remembers Lakeside fondly.
“We usually had to sneak in through a gap in the fence near the Leonard truck cap dealer. We would then take turns going up to the ladies who worked at the park ‘crying’ because our admission bracelet string ‘broke,’” said Robbins.
Summer trips to Lakeside were an annual highlight for Sandi Jones of Radford.
“Our vacation each summer was going to Lakeside,” she said. “My best friend would go with us and then I would go with her family. It was so much fun.”
During the 1950s, the Roberts family added a concert pavilion to the park. It became one of the region’s hubs for live music. Major stars of country music, jazz, and big bands performed as well as animal acts and magicians. For years, a magician named the Great Magello would borrow from Harry Houdini’s playbook by escaping from a padlocked coffin that was thrown into the park’s swimming pool.
Country music was typically the centerpiece of the pavilion’s concert calendar. Virtually every big name in country music between the 1950s and the 1980s performed at Lakeside.
“I remember going to the stage when Conway Twitty was there. I was maybe 8 years old,” said Bobbi Jo Cress-Robbins, Chris’ wife. She remembers Twitty’s fancy duds, dark brown shoes, and pompadour.
“He made eye contact and winked while all the ‘moms’ and women screamed,” Cress-Robbins remembered.
“When [Conway Twitty] sang ‘Hello Darlin’ all the women went wild, yelling and shouting and you could barely hear the rest,” Chris Robbins said. Chris’ most memorable night at the pavilion came when he saw Loretta Lynn perform.
“Watching Loretta Lynn, I was so infatuated that I couldn’t stop staring,” Robbins said. “She was beautiful and her voice was completely natural and addictive. I remember the sun going down while she sang, and the park lights coming on. It was a truly enchanting experience for me.”
At one point, the park drew customers from a roughly 100-mile radius, often topping 200,000 in annual attendance. The park was arguably at its peak popularity in the mid-1960s. At roughly the same time, signs of trouble started to set in.
The desegregation of public accommodations in the South contributed to the end of Lakeside’s massive pool. Sadly, many white patrons in the region proved unwilling to swim in an integrated pool.
The pool would be filled in for the 1967 season and replaced with a wide array of new rides. The centerpiece of Lakeside’s 1967 expansion was the Shooting Star, a wooden roller coaster which rose more than 120 feet off the ground and could reach speeds of more than 80 miles per hour.
“The Shooting Star terrified me,” Robbins said. “It was years before I conquered my fears because of a long-haired brunette who wanted to ride with me.”
Cress-Robbins said of the Shooting Star, “The wood crackling sound as it climbed the first hill is unforgettable.”
For a time, it was the world’s tallest and fastest roller coaster. Other additions included bumper cars, a giant slide, a children’s ride called the Mary Mixer, and the peanut, which spun two capsules around in all directions for a simultaneously exciting and terrifying experience.
Another obstacle emerged for the park during the 1970s as massive new theme parks both near and far started to open. Disney World opened in Florida in 1971 while Busch Gardens and Kings Dominion both opened in Virginia in 1975. The Roberts Family planned to build a massive competitor of their own, but it never came to fruition.
In 1971, the Roberts family announced that they would be replacing Lakeside with a much larger theme park on Route 58 called Sugartree. The new theme park would be a pseudo-Disney World with a luxury hotel, massive theme park, shopping mall, and golf course. It never came into being. Battles over zoning and financing prevented the project from ever breaking ground. Little old Lakeside would remain little old Lakeside.
Attendance at Lakeside dwindled between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s. A pair of tragic events in the mid-1980s proved to be the end for Lakeside. The Election Day Floods of 1985 killed 62 people in Virginia and West Virginia. They were the deadliest floods in Roanoke Valley history. Lakeside sustained more than $1 million in damage from the November 1985 floods, which put many of the park’s rides out of commission for much of the 1986 season.
In Spring 1986, tragedy struck the park as a maintenance worker was killed while trimming weeds by the Shooting Star, which was inexplicably doing a test run while the man was working.
Citing low attendance, the Roberts family closed Lakeside abruptly in fall 1986. Its final day of operations was October 19, 1986. The site would be sold to developers who transformed it into a strip mall called Lakeside Plaza.
“It’s sad for any of us that have been involved with the park for any length of time, but it’s a business decision,” park general manager Wayne Saunders told WDBJ on Lakeside’s last day. He had started working at Lakeside as a teenager in the 1960s.
“I remember my friends going ‘one last time’ a few weeks before it ended up closing,” Robbins said. “We rode the Shooting Star all night, running from the exits back around to get in line again like we were back in grade school.”
Cress-Robbins said: “Closing Lakeside was very difficult to swallow. It made all of us teens look for other things to keep us busy. The mall, riding bikes, or hanging out in the park.”
Robbins said: “I was actually very angry when I came home from the Marine Corps to visit a couple years later and saw that ugly strip mall being built. It was very disheartening to me, like a part of my childhood didn’t even matter.”
Salem Fair is the closest thing in the area to the heyday of Lakeside Park.
A group of local businessmen in Salem had the idea of creating a week of agricultural field days combined with classic fair attractions as a replacement for Lakeside. Salem Fair opened in 1988 and quickly became a fixture of the summer season in the Roanoke Valley. Each year, the late June/early July event draws as many as 300,000 visitors, making it one of the more attended summer festivals in the state.
For those who loved Lakeside, it’s apples and oranges.
“There is no comparison of Salem Fair to Lakeside,” Cress-Robbins said. “The Roanoke Valley lost a gem when Lakeside closed.”
The story above first appeared in our May/June 2026 issue.
