With its authentic log cabins, tavern and blacksmith forge, you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd fallen through a time warp as you set foot in this strange village. However, it's actually an abandoned pioneer-theme park, built in the 1960s near the small town of Warsaw, Missouri. While the area is a popular holiday destination, located between two of Missouri’s biggest lakes, no one would expect to find a mid-century replica of an early American village hiding in the woods.

So what's the story behind this forgotten town? Click or scroll on to step back in time and explore this unique property... 

Former owner Marion Shipman, his parents Con and Hazel and his brother Ross built the replica village from scratch back in the sixties, using original lumber from the 1800s to fashion structures styled on the homes of early non-indigenous settlers.

The village sadly closed as a tourist attraction in the 1990s, but Marion lived on at the property until he sold it in August 2022. 

Now an eerie ghost town, the settlement consists of more than 20 different buildings including two authentic 1830's cabins, a creek-side trapper's cabin and a jailhouse with barred cells.

There's also a time-capsule schoolhouse, the general store, the 'Schiffman's mill', a tavern and a blacksmith, post office and wagon shop, plus a small cottage for the owner to live in.

Located way off the beaten track in beautiful woodland, the 20-acre pioneer settlement was once a living history museum and tourist destination.

It was set up to demonstrate what a working community would have looked like; children played pioneer games and ladies in 1800s clothes served traditional trail food to visitors. Marion held court in the blacksmith shop, demonstrating his skills at a blazing forge.

There are dozens of living history museums across America, offering visitors an insight into the daily lives of their forefathers back in the mid-1800s.

Many of those who came to the region were attracted by the offer of a piece of free land, which the US government began giving away as part of The Homestead Act of 1862 in the Midwest, the Great Plains and The West. The park celebrated this period in time.

Once they had the land, the first thing a settler had to do was to build a cabin, usually from logs, which could be easily held together without spikes or nails.

This authentic 1830s structure is an excellent example of lap keying, a style of joinery, typical of the time. To move it to the village, it was taken apart, the pieces of timber were numbered and then it was put back together on site by the Shipman family.

Two of the original cabins on the property, built in 1838 and 1841, were formerly located in the nearby town of Warsaw.

The early log cabins were mostly just one room with a dirt floor where the whole family would live, eat and sleep. They often lived miles from any other settlements and it was a daily struggle to survive, which is why they built so many amenities close by and lived as small isolated communities.

The interiors of the cabins are more comfortable than the outside might suggest, with a stone fireplace and two stoves for heating.

The women of the house would have been expected to make all the family’s clothes and furnishings and would often spin wool into yarn or flax into thread. They would also make soap from lye, water and ashes from the fireplace. 

As well as the household chores and cooking, women were expected to tend to the garden so the family had fresh vegetables to cook on a stove much like this one. They also helped their husbands in the fields at harvest time.

Children were expected to contribute too, by fetching water from the nearby stream, watching the fire to make sure it didn't go out, keeping the chickens and the cows from eating the crops, milking the dairy cow and churning cream into butter.

The chickens would have been kept in a slant-sided chicken house, like this one, which became popular in the Midwest in the middle of the 19th century. Its ingenious shape allowed the waste from roosting chickens to fall through to the outside, where it could be collected and used as fertiliser elsewhere on the farm.

The chicken house would be located close to the home so that eggs could be collected easily.

Elsewhere on the site, there are more modern-looking buildings as when it was fully operational in the 1960s, the park had a ticket booth and a gift shop.

As well as the original cabins, the everyday amenities town dwellers would have relied upon are spread across the park. Let's take a look around...

The park includes a small post office building, though communication in the 1800s was far more difficult than today. Early pioneers were lucky if their mail ever reached its destination, travelling across difficult terrain in covered wagons, often attacked along the way.

The first railroad tracks were completed in the mid-1800s but it was a long time before people could depend on anything like a reliable postal service. 

Another necessity, although possibly not as attractive as others, are the outhouses early settlers used as bathrooms.

Taking the term vintage bathroom to the extreme, these facilities were often little more than a five or six-foot hole dug into the ground with a shelter built on top and located at a distance from the main house. Toilet seats were basically a wooden box with a hole cut through and newspapers or corn cobs were used instead of toilet paper. 

Settler children would attend a local one-room schoolhouse with a bell, like this one. The children usually went to school in the winter and summer, but would stay home to help on the farm during the planting and harvesting seasons of spring and autumn.

Schooldays didn’t last too long, as older boys were expected to help on the farm, while older girls were expected to complete chores and take care of their younger siblings.

Inside the schoolhouse there was little room for any nonsense during lessons. There would usually be only one teacher, who taught all ages and all subjects.

Children learned the basics such as reading, writing, maths, spelling, and history. When writing, they used slates instead of paper, which were like small chalkboards they could hold in their hands, copying what the teacher wrote on the main chalkboard at the front of the class.

This is a typical woodworker's cottage and workspace. Woodworkers and carpenters were the lifeblood of growing communities, helping to create new homes, furnishings and anything else the community needed.

Using local woods, the carpenter produced all the furniture for the hastily erected dwellings plus doors, flooring, window frames and even churches.

Carpenters back in the 1800s used traditional hand and foot-powered tools and woodworking techniques to make items that were vital to day-to-day existence.

The park allowed visitors to go inside the workspace to see what the carpenter might have been working on, including beds, split-bottom chairs, a pine table, a cupboard and a spinning wheel. 

Due to the isolation of communities, they typically had their own undertaker, who would live and work in a building like this one. Known as a cabinetmaker, they used woods much like the carpenter but focused on crafting coffins and the distinctive hexagonal caskets that were popular in their day.

There is even a casket over the door on the customer’s way in – should they have forgotten the purpose of their visit. 

For those who recall Oleson’s Mercantile in the television series Little House on the Prairie, this general store might seem a tad modest. However it would have been an important part of the town. 

Coincidentally, the birthplace of Little House on the Prairie author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was played by Melissa Gilbert in the series is just a two-hour drive from Warsaw in Mansfield, where you can visit the writer’s actual home, Rocky Ridge Farm.

General stores of the time, like this one, would have sold everything from flour to nails, with everything in between. 

Marion’s mother Hazel used to run the store back in its heyday when the park was a bustling tourist attraction, selling homemade cookies and candies from behind the counter with its old-fashioned ledger. 

Although far from the dining out we know today, the cook shack was the local snack bar or diner for the village. When the village was a flourishing tourist attraction, servers in early settler costume would serve ham, beans, cornbread, and sorghum molasses (a kind of sweet syrup) to visitors.

The village mill was key to building and maintaining new homes in the community. Marion’s father Con used to cut shingles – the thin tapered cuts of wood used to construct the roofs of peoples’ homes, at the village mill to show how it would have worked.

The settlers would traditionally have used mallets and cleaving tools known as froes to hand-split shingles from the heartwoods (the inner part) of local trees, before switching to powered machinery in the latter part of the 19th century. 

As well as the replica buildings, the listing includes some old machinery and tools that pioneers would have used.

The power for sawing and edging the shingles at the mill would have come from a traction steam engine, like the one pictured here, which were used in the second half of the 19th century to drive threshing machines.

This little blue cottage was the blacksmith's shop and indispensable to the life of any 19th-century community.

Blacksmiths used skills passed down through generations to forge wrought iron and steel into a wide range of objects including tools, cooking utensils, chains and gates. They also repaired broken items. Marion used to demonstrate his own blacksmith skills at the park.

Inside the shop are the basic tools of the trade: forge, anvil, bellows, swages and fullers, mechanical blowers, hammers and tongs, a bin for the blacksmith’s coal and a quenching tub.

Suspended from the rafters were anything from twitches for restraining restless horses to short lengths of forge-welded chains.

Back in the day, the Shipman family employed a 'sheriff' to sit outside the village jail and explain how law and order was implemented back in the days of the Wild West.

New territories were notoriously lawless, but local jails, law courts and sheriffs, such as the legendary Wyatt Earp – who took part in the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral slowly established order and control.

There was very little space inside the jail and a guard would be present at all times so there was no chance of escape, although it would be unlikely to hold the likes of local boy, notorious outlaw Jesse James, who was born in Clay County, Missouri in 1847. 

Marion didn't give up his passion for living museums and he subsequently worked at Missouri Town Living History Museum, in Kansas City. He listed the fascinating property in May 2022, selling it for $295,000 (£231k) just three months later.

While we don't yet know what the latest owner has planned for the site, many of the buildings needed some serious TLC. However, the village does include a one-bed, one-bath cottage suitable for on-site living, should they fancy living in a ghost town.

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