Frontier City
Official Logo of Frontier City.
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| Location | Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States |
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| Coordinates | 35°35′05″N 97°26′28″W / 35.584845°N 97.440990°W |
| Theme | Western "town" Theme Park |
| Owner | EPR Properties |
| Operated by | Premier Parks, LLC |
| Opened | 1958 |
| Operating season | April – November |
| Area | 55 acres (220,000 m2) 109 acres (0.44 km2) total |
| Rides | |
| Total | 28 |
| Roller coasters | 5 |
| Water rides | 3 |
| Website | www |
Frontier City is a western-themed amusement park in Oklahoma City. It is owned by EPR Properties and operated by Premier Parks, LLC.
Currently Frontier City is the only theme park in Oklahoma after the 2006 closing of Bell's Amusement Park. The park is the subject of the song "Frontier City" by the Nashville band Kings of Leon, as drummer Nathan Followill once worked there.
In 1958, Frontier City opened along Route 66, now Interstate 35. The park featured a haunted farm, mine train, robberies and jails. Initially, guests entered the park for free but paid a quarter to watch the gunfight shows. The park started out as Boomtown, a replica of an Oklahoma pioneer town that was built for the state's semi centennial celebration in 1957 at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds. Jimmy Burge, leader of the committee that built Boomtown, decided to open an amusement park with the same theme. Rather than a traditional ribbon cutting, Frontier City was scheduled to have an old fashioned six shooter aimed at a piece of rope stretched across the stockade entrance. The rope stretched across main street is the same manner used today for the opening of the park. The park added spinning rides, roller coasters and a log flume ride starting in the 1960s and 1970s.
Frontier City was originally owned and operated by OKC businessmen James Burge and Jack Williams. Mr. Burge had been a publicist in Hollywood, CA for twenty years for the likes of Joan Crawford and Robert Taylor. He visited Disneyland when it opened in 1955, and was very impressed with the theme park business. Being from Oklahoma City, he knew his hometown would be a natural location for a western-themed amusement park. Back in OKC, he was commissioned as the leader of the 1957 Oklahoma Semi-Centennial Celebration. After the 1957 event was over, Mr. Burge negotiated with the fair board to purchase many of the buildings and props at the "Boom Town" exhibit. He hooked up with Mr. Jack Williams and together they developed the park as a recreation of an 1880s Western town. The four square blocks of streets contained a Marshall's office, saloon, bank, post office, fire department, hotel and numerous storefronts. Attractions at the park included a train ride built by Arrow Dynamics, an authentic stagecoach ride, a donkey ride, and an indoor dark ride designed by Russell Pearson, a former Disney designer who later went on to Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO and Ghost Town In The Sky in Maggie Valley, NC.
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