The dream began with a restaurant. Pixie Kitchen opened in nearby Lincoln City in 1948, serving what its slogan called "Heavenly Food on the Oregon Coast." By the 1960s, it had become a local institution -- the kind of place families associated with beach vacations and coastal charm. Jerry Parks and his wife Lu, who ran the restaurant, saw an opportunity to expand that brand into something bigger. In 1967, they announced their vision: a 57-acre "Fairytale Story of Oregon" that would bring the whimsy of the Pixie Kitchen name to a full-scale amusement park. The site they chose sat near the junction of Highways 101 and 18, three miles north of Lincoln City, along the Salmon River estuary. It was ambitious, it was optimistic, and it was built on a floodplain.

When Pixieland opened, it offered the kind of attractions that small regional parks relied on in the late 1960s. A narrow-gauge train called Little Toot -- later renamed Little Pixie -- circled the grounds. A log flume provided the requisite splash. The Blue Bell Opera House staged melodramas for families who had spent the morning on the rides. There was a Main Street Arcade, a Print Shop, something called The Shootout, and a Darigold Cheese Barn that tied the park to Oregon's dairy country. Fisher Scones and a Franz Bread Rest Hut fed the crowds. The park had charm, but charm alone could not overcome the fundamental problem: the Oregon Coast draws its biggest crowds in summer, and summer on this stretch of coast is short, foggy, and unpredictable. Four seasons of thin attendance bled the operation dry.

Bankruptcy came in 1974. The rides were sold off, and two of them -- the Little Pixie train, renamed Merriweather, and the log flume -- found second lives at Lagoon amusement park in Utah, where they continue to operate today. The buildings deteriorated. The site sat abandoned, then was partially converted to other uses, including an RV park. But the deeper damage had been done before the park ever opened. To build Pixieland, developers had surrounded the entire 57-acre site with a dike, rerouting Fraser Creek into a ditch between the highways and installing a tide gate with a massive concrete foundation. The estuary's natural hydrology had been severed. What had been functioning tidal wetland became landlocked and stagnant.

In 1976, the Siuslaw National Forest completed an environmental impact statement that established a long-term goal: restore the Salmon River estuary to a natural system free from human development. The mandate was clear, but the work took decades. Restoration of the Pixieland site began in 2007, when crews started dismantling the infrastructure that had kept the tide out. The second phase came in 2011, focused on hydrology. Workers removed 2,000 linear feet of dike, filled 2,300 linear feet of ditches, constructed a 2,400-foot tidal channel, and pulled out the last tide gate. Fraser Creek was rerouted through new stream channels that wound through the restored wetland. Today, the site contributes approximately 57 acres of recovered tidal marsh to the lower Salmon River estuary. Where melodramas once played and narrow-gauge trains once circled, the tide comes and goes as it did before anyone imagined a fairy tale here.