National Amusement Devices was a Dayton, Ohio company that built wooden roller coasters in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Most of their work is gone now - demolished as the amusement parks they served closed or modernized. Only three of their coasters still operate. Two of them are at Camden Park in Huntington, West Virginia: the Little Dipper, and the bigger one that opened in 1958 and is the reason most coaster enthusiasts visit. The Big Dipper rises fifty feet above the small park near the Ohio River, runs a complete circuit in one minute and forty seconds, and has been giving West Virginians their first roller coaster experience for sixty-seven years.
Camden Park's previous coaster was called Roller Coaster - a side friction design that had operated since the park's earlier era. Side friction was an early twentieth-century technology that used flanges on the outside of the rail to keep the cars on the track, rather than the more modern up-stop wheels underneath. By the 1950s side friction coasters were aging out of safety norms, and the genre as a whole had become rare. Park owner John Boylin closed Roller Coaster in 1957 and contracted with National Amusement Devices to build the Big Dipper as its replacement. The new ride opened in 1958 - a fully modern wooden coaster with the kind of design vocabulary that defined post-war American amusement parks.
The Big Dipper is not large by modern coaster standards. The chain lift hill rises just 50 feet from the loading station, and the total ride time is one minute and forty seconds. But the layout is denser and trickier than the modest dimensions suggest. After cresting the lift, the train dips, rises, and turns left into the main drop. Another hill leads to a left turn over the station - the kind of return-over-itself layout that compresses a lot of track into a small footprint. A second large drop sends riders into a tunnel, where another turn awaits in the dark. Two small hills follow, then a manual brake run brings the train back to the station. The whole experience is built for repeat riding rather than for thrill-seeker headlines.
On May 12, 2019, the American Coaster Enthusiasts designated the Big Dipper as a Coaster Landmark - their highest formal recognition of historic significance. The ACE designation is selective. It is given to coasters that have made important contributions to the industry, to design history, or to regional culture. The Big Dipper qualified on multiple grounds. It is the largest and oldest roller coaster in West Virginia. It is one of only three surviving National Amusement Devices coasters. It has operated continuously at the same park for nearly seven decades, surviving the period when smaller American amusement parks were closing in waves. For a state and a region not normally on the national coaster map, the designation matters.
The Big Dipper does not exist in isolation. Camden Park, the small Huntington amusement park that operates it, is itself one of the oldest continuously running trolley parks in the United States, dating to 1903. The park has fewer than two dozen rides, occupies a modest footprint along the Ohio River, and runs on a budget that does not begin to approach Six Flags or Cedar Fair operations. Working-class families in Cabell County and the surrounding tri-state area buy season passes that put summer afternoons within reach. The Big Dipper anchors the experience. For many West Virginia kids, it is the first real roller coaster they ever ride. For many adults, it is still the coaster they remember best.
From the air, Camden Park reads as a small cluster of bright colors and curving lines pressed against the south bank of the Ohio River west of downtown Huntington. The Big Dipper is identifiable by the rectangular footprint of its wooden structure - a network of vertical beams and horizontal ties forming the support for the track that winds back and forth across it. Wooden coasters are visible from above in a way steel coasters often are not, because the wooden lattice provides a denser visual signature. The Ohio River runs north of the park, and on a clear day the West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio shorelines all come into view at once. The Big Dipper has been visible from the sky here since 1958.
Located at 38.397 degrees north, 82.532 degrees west, at Camden Park in Huntington, West Virginia. Recommended viewing altitude 2,500 to 4,500 feet AGL for clear views of the coaster's wooden structure. Nearest airport is Tri-State (KHTS), about 6 nautical miles east. The park sits on the south bank of the Ohio River, west of downtown Huntington, easily spotted by the cluster of amusement-park colors against the river bank.