The first two [Western Towns] to develop in the inappropriately tropical setting of Florida came about almost simultaneously along Panama City Beach's Miracle Strip. Both started out slowly, and then bloomed into carbon copies of each other. The process began in 1960, when Goofy Golf magnate Lee Koplin leased some adjoining property to two different concessionaires. One was a train ride, the other a sky ride. Neither went anywhere. Oh, the sky ride went somewhere, all right: to the end of its cable and back. Koplin's son Randy explains that the whole appeal of the sky ride has to be explained by the era in which it operated. In 1960 there were no two-story building on the beach, so a ride 100 feet in the air gave visitors a view that was unobtainable anywhere else. The train ride did make stops in a wooded area behind the Goofy Golf course, where other individuals operated a storybook park known as the Magic Forest (rather like an outdoor version of Fairyland Caverns) and a deer ranch not unlike Tommy Bartlett's. Meanwhile, a couple of miles down the strip, the Churchwell family, who were still operating Panama City's first attraction, the Long Beach Resort, also started a train ride to nowhere.Both entertainment complexes could see that they needed something more to entertain their train passengers. It is not recorded whether Lee Koplin was paying any attention to what was going on in the North Carolina and Tennessee mountains, but in 1963 he ditched the deer ranch and Magic Forest, and replaced them with his own Western town, which became known as Tombstone Territory (named after a popular TV Western of the late 1950s). Koplin's considerable talents at concrete sculpture, as evidenced by his miniature golf courses, came into play at Tombstone, where he built an authentic-looking Spanish mission and various statues to give the place some charm. Other buildings were appropriately rustic in appearance, except for the fact that their exteriors were surfaced with cypress wood...a building material that was no doubt scarce in the real western United States.
Down at Long Beach Resort, the Churchwells took note of what was shaping up at Tombstone Territory, and this spurred them into action themselves. They constructed an even larger Western town at the halfway point of their railroad's circle. Since Koplin had named his town after a TV show, they felt they could get away with the same thing, but what should it be called? Ah, but one of the Churchwells was a good friend of the crusty old actor Edgar Buchanan, who was enjoying great fame for his role as Uncle Joe in the successful television comedy Petticoat Junction. Never mind that the TV Petticoat Junction had nothing to do with the West at all; it spotlighted a train, and that was enough! Buchanan helped the Churchwells obtain the proper permission, and soon the name was being applied to the new attraction at Long Beach Resort. Because there was a large open space between the railroad depot and the "ghost town," amusement rides were added to grab the attention of passersby.
Now the competition got really ferocious. Petticoat Junction was larger than Tombstone Territory, and spent far more money on advertising and promotion, so Lee Koplin fought back in the way he knew best. The spot next to U.S. 98 from which his locomotive and sky ride departed was somewhat nondescript, with only a small depot for decoration. Concrete to the rescue! Koplin built giant roadside lures to round up stray tourists. His masterpiece was a gigantic cave containing an adobe Indian village. Housed within the village were souvenir shops selling "authentic" Indian wares imported from Cherokee, North Carolina, and a stage area in which Indian-style pageants could be performed. But Koplin didn't stop there. With welding torch and concrete spreader working overtime, he built a towering Indian statue holding the attraction's sign, a pair of longhorn cattle, a totem pole, several cacti, and, for some reason, a giant genie emerging from Aladdin's lamp, with a set of metal stairs leading up to his outstretched hand for a photo opportunity. The place couldn't be missed.
One has a vision of the ultimate outcome of this competition: a dusty Western street, with the cowboys of Tombstone Territory at one end and the cowboys of Petticoat Junction at the other, facing each other in a High Noon - style shootout. ("This resort ain't big enough fer the both of us") But this never had to take place. Time, a force more inescapable than Marshall Dillon, had its own effect on both attractions. The Tombstone Territory sky ride was effectively put out of commission in 1975 when Hurricane Eloise scattered its dangling buckets far and wide. Since it had been seeing less and less use anyway, the machinery was allowed to rust into picturesque decay. By 1979, the train ride to Tombstone Territory had made its final run, and the giant concrete figures sat by the roadside, staring out to sea with sightless eyes.
Petticoat Junction was also hearing a discouraging word. Whereas its location at Long Beach Resort had once been the center of the Panama City Beach strip, that center had been gradually shifting to the west, and now few people even made it to Petticoat's Junction. The 1970 cancellation of the TV show for which it was named also did not help matters any. On Labor Day, 1984, the trains stopped running, the stores and other buildings were boarded up, their contents and the amusement rides were auctioned off, and the park became as much a part of history as the Old West era it depicted. Today, a Wal-Mart superstore sits on its former site. As for Tombstone Territory, its roadside section, where the concrete giants hung out, is a string of fast-food restaurants. The Western town itself still stands, to a certain extent, slowly rotting behind a chain-link fence in a wooded area.