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National Harvest & Cowboy Festival
Arkansas Bev Hambry (left) and her husband
donated this 1880s stagecoach to Silver Dollar City
‘Journey’ Stagecoach Finds Its Way
Back Home to Silver Dollar City
Text and photo by Pat Lindsey
Back in the early days of Branson’s Silver Dollar City, the Herschend family purchased an authentic 1880 stagecoach for their Butterfield Stage Line in their theme park. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, children enjoyed taking stagecoach rides through Silver Dollar City, but the coach was eventually retired and presumed lost.
Cowboy Rick Hamby remembers taking one of those stagecoach rides in 1964 when he was a little boy and his parents took him on vacation to Silver Dollar City. That ride marked the beginning of his lifelong love of the American West and his dream to be a real cowboy.
In the late 1990s when Hamby was searching for stagecoach parts, he learned that a blacksmith in Arkansas had some pieces for sale. It was by accident that Cowboy Rick found a whole stagecoach behind the blacksmith’s barn almost hidden by tall weeds. He immediately recognized the stagecoach as the one he had ridden in Silver Dollar City 50 years prior and bought it on the spot.
After spending a couple of years restoring the old stagecoach, Hamby and his wife, Arkansas Bev, decided to use their stagecoach as a Pony Express-type vehicle to deliver mail from Missouri school children to their pen pals in eight other states. Arkansas Bev coordinated the schools’ participation and Cowboy Rick planned their journeys along historic trails. They named the stagecoach ‘The Journey’ and hitched it to four magnificent bay horses as the couple embarked on their new western adventures. For 15 years, Cowboy Rick and Arkansas Bev and their 10-person crew sought out historic sites as they delivered the mail to thousands of school children.
‘The Journey’ completed its last trail ride in May of this year and recently found its permanent retirement home in Silver Dollar City when Hamby donated the stagecoach to the Herschend family, its former owners. It is proudly being featured during the National Harvest and Cowboy Festival running through Oct. 29 at the Branson theme park.
