Children's amusements at Sacandaga Park tended to be buccolic- swimming, or riding burros and the Sport Island canoes. The few mechanical rides included a roller coaster, a miniature steam train, and a carousel, built by the Gustav Dentzel Company of Philadelphia in 1902.

Dentzel, a German immigrant cabinet-maker, traveled the Pennsylvania backroads with a horse-powered carousel before shifting to manufacture just after the Civil War. Dentzel perfected the managerie carousel, which combined jungle beasts and mythological animals with traditional horses and chariots.

The Dentzel Company employed a workforce of immigrant master craftsmen who, like its founder, had served long apprenticeships in Europe. Its carousel animals were famous for their lifelike poses and great sense of animation, as well as for vivid color and dramatic presentation. Dentzel carousels, each of which typically included 30 to 40 hand-carved animals, were found at major amusement parks, municipal parks in big cities, and worlds' fairs. By the turn of the twentieth century, they were steam-powered and frequently gleamed with patterned loops of hundreds of electric light bulbs.

The Dentzel Carousel was Sacandaga Park's most magnificent attraction. Housed in its own barn-like building, its steam propulsion system also operated its pipe organ. Its small staff posed proudly and rather formally on a series of penny postcards, at least one of which fancifully floated a disembodied tower above the carousel's roof. The miniature steam train, the park's other notable children's attraction, shared top billing with the carousel.

The miniature train was lost when the park grandstand burned in 1919. The roller coaster was demolished with the rest of the midway as the waters of the Great Sacandaga Lake were rising in 1929. But the carousel survived, migrating to a private amusement park at Piseco Lake through World War II. In 1952, it was purchased by Electra Havemeyer Webb for her Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

Originally, the museum planned to operate the carousel on its grounds. However, the quality of the Dentzel animals is so great that they were instead placed on gallery exhibition as folk art.

Today the tiger, which is attributed to Dentzel's master carver Daniel Mueller (1876-1952), lion, prancing goats, and their circus companions greet visitors to the museum's Round Barn. Astoundingly, the animals are still resplendent in their original paint. A second carousel, built in the 1920s by another firm, operates outside the barn during the summer months.

 

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