From the bottoms of our caves to the tops of our hills, the Ozarks is packed with a huge selection of attractions both natural and man-made. Long before there were automobiles and airplanes, folks came on horseback and in wagons to see the rivers, caves, and wildlife. Thanks to a little modern technology, now you can see our oldest attractions from our newest attractions. Railway cars will take you through tunnels and over natural bridges deep into the Ozarks outdoors. Paddle-wheel boats will take you down Lake Taneycomo and across Table Rock Lake. Hot-air balloons will take you 2,000 feet above the hills. Ducks (World War II amphibious vehicles) will take you across both land and lake. And from the 230-foot-tall Inspiration Tower, you will see a far wider view of the Ozarks than Harold Bell Wright ever did.
Not only do our attractions let you see the Ozarks from all possible angles, but at the same time you can see a live music show, enjoy a meal, or sit in a high-tech IMAX movie theater. Our two largest theme parks will show you a view of the Ozarks’ past. Silver Dollar City and the Shepherd of the Hills Homestead have preserved turn-of-the-20th-century pioneer life in their shops, live shows, crafts, music, and hospitality. These two world-class attractions offer much more than a history lesson. Silver Dollar City has sensational thrill rides, full production shows, fine gift items, and great water attractions for kids. At Shepherd of the Hills you can watch the outdoor drama with its pyrotechnical special effects, and modern sound and lighting systems.
Although many of the area’s attractions are deeply rooted in the Ozarks’ past, places such as the Hollywood Wax Museum and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum rely on the appeal of their bizarre contents and wax movie star figures to attract visitors. These places, along with the IMAX Entertainment Complex, are real hot spots with the younger generation. You might want to flip to the Kidstuff chapter for other great attractions for kids. You’ll find a listing for White Water, Cool Off Water Chute, and the Track in that chapter. Nearby Springfield also has a number of great attractions, such as Bass Pro Shops, the Discovery Center, the Wonders of Wildlife Museum, and Dickerson Park Zoo. You’ll find them listed in the Day Trips chapter.
The attractions listed in this chapter range from a free stop at the Shepherd of the Hills Historical Evergreen Cemetery to a $180 hot-air balloon ride and everything in between. Many of the places offer season passes, combo tickets, and group discounts. The hours of operation can change during the year, as can available space. Be sure to call in advance before your trip to town so you won’t wind up like Clark Griswold at Wally World in National Lampoon’s Vacation.
Most of the attractions publish their ticket prices excluding tax. We have noted those that include tax in the published price. While Branson is still a seasonal town, many of the attractions are extending their winter hours, and some of them even stay open year-round. They often close earlier in the winter, however, so again, call ahead.
Plant a seedling of an idea in a child’s mind, give him or her the tools to cultivate it, the time to nurture it, and the confidence to weather it, and a child can create a vast garden of dreams and convictions strong enough to withstand the world’s most turbulent storm. What starts out as a simple family vacation can grow into a life-changing experience for a child. A trip to a zoo, a stroll through a theme park, or an early-morning horseback ride through the Ozark hills may be all it takes to sow new life in a child’s mind. The tri-lakes area is as good a place as there is to set a child’s imagination loose in the world. With our balanced mix of high-tech attractions, performance arts, history museums, wildlife centers, and natural playgrounds, children have fertile ground in which to cultivate their ideas.
The listings in this section by no means make a complete list of the interesting or appealing things available for children in the Branson area. We hope that you will consider flipping through the Lakes and Rivers as well as the Recreation and the Outdoors chapters as you begin your quest to find activities for children.
The attractions you’ll find at Silver Dollar City combine the best of nature, history, technology, science, and art. The National Children’s Festival, held each year during the summer months, showcases exhibits by Crayola, Hallmark, the Smithsonian Institute Traveling Exhibition Service, and the National Geographic Society. Even before the Children’s Festival began in 1995, Silver Dollar City was a perennial favorite among children. Many other outstanding activities for children are listed in the Attractions chapter. Ride the Ducks, IMAX Entertainment Complex, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum, the Hollywood Wax Museum, and the area’s caves (including Fantastic Caverns) are hot spots for kids. There are also plenty of free and inexpensive things to do in Branson. With three lakes and a fish hatchery as well as a public playground on nearly every corner, kids have plenty of room to get out and explore the Ozarks. Many of the area music shows now admit children at no charge. Lodging facilities are also stepping up their efforts to attract families by letting children stay for free in a parent’s room.
Nearby Springfield offers a number of interesting as well as educational kiddy attractions, including Discovery Center, portions of the Bass Pro Shops, Dickerson Park Zoo, and the Wonders of Wildlife Museum. The Day Trips chapter contains other attractions, such as Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield and the Springfield Art Museum, that are popular destinations for school groups.
The list of activities in this chapter runs the gamut from arcades to zoos. You will undoubtedly find some treasures we left out. This listing is meant to serve only as fertile ground for your children’s growing imaginations. Who knows what may come of their ideas? Maybe they’ll decide to grow up to be country music stars or fishing guides. Or they’ll do what a few native Ozarkers did and become both.
Missouri has produced its fair share of our nation’s artists and writers. Scott Joplin, George Caleb Bingham, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Kate Chopin, Robert Heinlein, Howard Nemerov, Maya Angelou, and—oh, yes—Mark Twain. And many of them—Thomas Hart Benton, Vance Randolph, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose O’Neill, Harold Bell Wright, Zoe Akins, Janet Dailey—have had connections to that little area of our state known as the Ozarks. There is something about the Ozarks that has nourished the individual artist. Maybe it is the beauty of the hills, the many greens of trees in the spring, the riot of color of those same trees in the fall. Perhaps it is the strength and endurance of the hills themselves, or perhaps it is our great oral storytelling tradition. Others would say simply that it’s because of “something in our pure spring water.”
In any event, the Ozarks area has produced art and artists from an environment that did not offer the best support system for the artist. There has always been an anti-art element in the Ozarks. Many schools did not allow school plays to be produced, even until fairly recently, and prohibited dancing (some still do). The fiddle was sometimes looked upon as “the devil’s instrument.” That was part of our early settlers’ puritan heritage, and it still is strong, as evidenced by controversy over Missouri State University’s production of The Normal Heart and the banning of a large photographic reproduction of the Venus de Milo in Springfield’s Battlefield Mall some years ago. That heritage of an innate suspicion of the arts may explain why so often local public schools practice a benign neglect of the arts and humanities. They without question will buy uniforms for sports programs but insist that the music program conduct fund-raisers to buy new uniforms for the band. But that’s changing—if only gradually and grudgingly. The artists and performers on The Strip have been a positive influence. The new Branson High School has an acoustically perfect stage and 750-seat intimate auditorium that would rival many Branson theaters, one that can even mount traveling off-Broadway productions.
But equally strong has been the faction that has pushed for arts education and encouraged development of the individual in the arts. As soon as crops were planted and cabins built, some settlers organized amateur theatricals, Friday-night literaries (declamations, debates, and readings), and “kitchen sweats” (in-home dances). A remnant of these gatherings can be found in “mountain jam sessions,” gatherings in homes, old rural schoolhouses, and community centers where Ozarkers gather to play “just for the fun of it.” Music and storytelling are part of our folk culture. The traditional hardscrabble Ozarks existence, a general independence, and isolation from outside influences have developed a crafts tradition. The individual desire for perfection and decoration have produced utilitarian objects that border on fine art. Writers from Harold Bell Wright in the past and Janet Dailey and Jory Sherman today have found solace and seclusion in the hills around Branson.
As contact with outside influences has increased with better roads and travel, there has been change in the arts as well as attitudes toward the arts. The music of old-time barn dances has evolved into a new country style “that built The Strip.” Branson may not have fine examples of old architecture like Eureka Springs, Springfield, and Carthage, but we have some fine new buildings as a result of becoming a tourist town.
The development of the tourist industry has created a greater appreciation of art and design because theater owners, banks, and businesses recognize that architecture and decor are important for satisfying the aesthetic eye of visitors. For example, the bronze Freedom Horses monument created by world-famous artist Veryl Goodnight of Santa Fe, New Mexico, greets visitors in the circle drive at Mansion America Theater. The Moon River Theatre and the Moon River Grille feature some of modern art collection of Andy Williams. Sculptures by Frederic Remington can be viewed in the lobby of the Remington Theatre, and ceiling murals by Arthur Congero and wall murals by Antonio Arechega can be viewed at the Branson Variety Theater. Even plantings and landscaping are being used more artistically to catch the eye of the tourist. Many theaters and businesses have landscaping displays that are artistic delights. Blossoms of Branson is a program that encourages planting flowers to brighten up the scene and give Branson more “eye appeal.”
The old has not been abruptly replaced or obliterated by the new. Instead, there has been a melding, a flowing together that’s incongruous but not infelicitous, rather like the unique blend of nectars that makes Ozarks wildflower honey so tasty.
Today, Branson is home to well-known country and pop artists, who lure hundreds of thousands to a small town that has more theater seats than New York City. What other town in the nation the size of Branson can claim so many artists and so much entertainment? In a sense, the area’s performance art, as well as its history and natural beauty, is what brings people here. Increasingly, the local theaters are offering music that can hardly be called strictly country, and there are now more variety and theatrical entertainment than ever. More people has meant changed entertainment; it has also meant more galleries and more artists—not just musicians, but also writers, dancers, and directors moving to the area. These artists find they feel welcome, comfortable, and inspired by the area. Consumers of the artists’ products are finding quality, an exciting blend and evolution, as well as an increasing variety in the artistic culture of the area. Branson is a great place for the artist and the art lover—and it’s getting better all the time.
Branson may be the reason and the focus of your visit to the Ozarks, and we’d be the first to admit that there are more than two weeks’ worth of exciting things to do just in town. We’ve lived here for years and haven’t seen it all, and with the way the area is growing, we probably never will. However, there are only so many shows you can take in before becoming satiated. (Still, we know of folks who have seen two or three shows a day for a week and not gotten tired!)
Branson is an ideal center for exploring Ozark Mountain country, that area roughly within a 100-mile radius of Branson. We stress that that’s not all of the Ozarks, and we encourage you to trek beyond and discover what the rest of the Ozarks have to offer—country lanes, meandering creeks, small-town general stores—the best of bucolic rural America. We had to limit ourselvesto keep this book from becominga travelogue encyclopedia! Our day trips are just that: trips that will fill your day, often from daylight to past dark. In some areas you might want to spend the night or even longer, as you’ll find that towns that do not have Branson’s fame offer their own uniqueness for the adventuresome traveler.
Better roads in the area have made travel faster and exploring easier in the local environs, but remember that once you get off the main arteries, the roads are much more meandering and thus slower. That’s often their beauty and charm, a virtue high on the list of some visitors but low on a highway engineer’s. We’ve organized such trips according to the name of the surrounding communities, and we provide you with a bit of history and background on some of our near neighbors. For some areas we’ve listed area attractions, and you can pick and choose as your time allows. For others we’ve provided a suggested itinerary.