HEADING FOR THE HILLS
BY PETER OLIVER
In the tourist mecca of Branson, Shepherd of the Hills finds a space to shine.
When it comes to entertainment, Branson, Mo., could probably borrow the famous line from “New York, New York”—if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Inarguably one of the entertainment capitals of the country, Branson is a city aswarm with activities to keep roughly 10 million annual visitors entertained— live shows, museums, golf courses, countless recreational outlets and amusements, and on and on. There is a lot going on. One website lists the top 145 things to do in Branson—the top 145, presumably implying that there are at least a few more.
other things to keep visitors entertained already at Shepherd of the Hills itself— live shows, a dinner theater, a petting farm, guided tours, miniature golf, tubing. History. But Johnson and Faria figured they had a few things going for them. For starters, Shepherd of the Hills was a well-established entertainment brand in Branson. The property had entered the national consciousness more than a century earlier, in 1907, when Harold Bell Wright, a Christian pastor who lived briefly in the area, wrote a novel, “The Shepherd of the Hills,” depicting rural life in the Ozarks. After the novel became a bestseller—later to be made into a movie starring John Wayne— Shepherd of the Hills, the site of the novel, became a well-known entity on the national tourism map. Visitor attractions began to appear on the property: A wooden tower was built in the 1940s to provide visitors with sweeping views of the hilly surround- ings; in 1960, a theater was opened to stage reenactments of scenes from the novel. It can be claimed that Shepherd of the Hills was what jumpstarted a Branson tourism boom that really hit its stride in the 1980s. Attractions added. With the passing years, other attractions were added to the Shepherd of the Hills mix: historical reenactments; a farm; special events. In the late 1980s, Inspiration Tower, a Shepherd of the Hills has something for everyone, helping it to thrive in the ac- tivity-rich tourist mecca of Branson, Mo.
be fierce. So, when Jeff Johnson and his partner Steve Faria, owners of the Shepherd of the Hills entertainment complex, decided in 2017, shortly after purchasing it, to add to the city’s enor- mous menu of attractions by sinking what would become more than $10 million into adventure-park features, their sanity might reasonably have been questioned.
AN ESTABLISHED BRAND
For the family audience they hoped to attract, the Branson area was already chock-full, with a water park, jet boating, amusement parks, go-karting, a re-cre- ated frontier town at Silver Dollar City, and much more. There was even another adventure park. And there were plenty of
It would seem, then, that the competi- tion for the entertainment dollar must
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