Most trolley parks were built at the end of a line, drawing riders away from the city for a day in the country. Camden Park is unusual in that it was built at a junction. The Camden Interstate Railway carried passengers between Huntington and the surrounding towns of Ceredo, Kenova, Ashland, and Coal Grove, with the park sitting near the mouth of Twelvepole Creek where riders changed lines. The placement turned what was originally a picnic spot into a natural waiting area, and over time the picnic spot accumulated amusements. A carousel appeared around 1903. The first roller coaster, called simply Roller Coaster and described in the contemporary press as the new sensation, opened around 1912. Other attractions followed at a steady pace through the early twentieth century.

Eustace Via bought the park from the Ohio Valley Electric Railway in 1916, operating it through World War II and adding attractions along the way. A group of investors including Harry Nudd took over after the war. It was park owner J. P. Boylin Sr. who decided in 1957 that the original Roller Coaster had become unsafe and needed replacing; Nudd, who managed the rides, worked with National Amusement Devices to design and construct the Big Dipper. That wooden coaster opened in 1958 and still operates today, designated a Coaster Landmark in 2019 by the American Coaster Enthusiasts. The Boylin family has continued to run the park across multiple generations - an unusual continuity in the American amusement industry that goes a long way toward explaining why Camden Park has kept its character through decades that flattened so many similar operations.

Camden Park is a working museum of mid-twentieth-century amusement park rides. The carousel dates to the park's earliest years. The Whip, Tilt-A-Whirl, Paratrooper, Dodgem Cars, and Scrambler are classic flat rides that disappeared from larger parks decades ago. A vintage Pretzel Haunted House ride operates as a dark ride of the kind that was once common at every American park. A miniature railway crosses a covered bridge. Swan-shaped pedal boats glide on a small pond. The 18-hole West Virginia Adventure Golf course features animatronic figures and a Hatfield-McCoy shootout. None of this is high-tech. All of it is functional, familiar, and operated at a price point a Cabell County family can afford. The park is a kind of working-class memory machine.

At the center of Camden Park sits an Indigenous earthwork mound - the Camden Park Mound, built by the Adena culture some two thousand years ago. The mound predates the park, predates Huntington, predates everything around it. For decades it served as a picnic area. The Mound Builder Pavilion takes its name from this earthwork, hosting live music as part of the Hot Summer Nights concert series. The juxtaposition of a sacred Native American site at the center of a twentieth-century amusement park is the kind of layered American geography that exists in many places but is rarely so visible. The mound is now heavily grown over with trees, no longer formally used as a picnic spot, but still very much there - older than the carousel, older than any roller coaster, older than the United States itself.

Camden Park has accumulated an unexpected pop-culture footprint over the years. One of the rides appears in the opening titles of the TV adaptation of My Brother, My Brother and Me, the podcast hosted by Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy - all natives of Huntington who reference the park in their work. The park also appears in the opening credits of the found-footage horror film The Houses October Built. Bethesda's Fallout 76, set in a post-apocalyptic West Virginia, includes amusement-park-style locations clearly inspired by parks like Camden. None of this is brand-building of the sort larger parks attempt. It is the quiet kind of cultural penetration that happens when something has been a local landmark long enough to become a backdrop in everybody's growing up.