A farm family, a roadside stand and a tea room.

Knott’s Berry Farm began as a working farm, not a park. English Wikipedia says Walter Knott and his family settled in Buena Park, in Orange County, California, in December 1920, and the Los Angeles Times, reporting in October 1997, described a business that started in 1920 making jams and jellies before adding chicken dinners and then a theme park. That sequence — fruit, food, then entertainment — explains much of how the name still sounds: it is a farm name, with a family name in front of it.

The early steps are dated in Wikipedia’s account. In 1923 the Knotts and a partner, Jim Preston, began selling berries, preserves and pies from a roadside stand. In 1928 Walter Knott put up a permanent stucco building holding a plant nursery, a berry market and a small tea room, and called the business Knott’s Berry Place. In June 1934 the tea room began serving fried chicken dinners, which became Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant.

The restaurant is where the brand found its voice. The Orange County Register, marking the restaurant’s 75th anniversary in June 2009, described how word spread after Cordelia Knott started serving chicken to beach-bound visitors in 1934, how queues formed along Grand Avenue in the 1940s, and how Walter Knott built a ghost town to entertain the people waiting. Its photo record shows the queues, the patio dining room and the fryers — a reminder that a family’s cooking, served at scale, was the first thing visitors associated with the name.

For a designer, the early record is useful because it shows a brand built from ordinary farm-stand material: hand-lettered signs, jar labels, pie boxes and a menu. In the dated record, the name was attached to whatever the family sold.

Ghost Town, an art director and a new name.

The theme-park part of the story begins with a replica town. English Wikipedia says Walter Knott began building a replica Ghost Town on the property in 1940 and opened it the following year, dating the opening to July 1941; over time it gained a restaurant, shops and attractions for the growing crowds. The same source says the business was renamed Knott’s Berry Farm in August 1947, the name it still uses.

Ghost Town gave the brand its look. Wikipedia names Paul von Klieben as Walter Knott’s key employee in creating it: he joined Knott’s as a staff artist in 1941 and served as art director from 1943 to 1953, and his art was used widely in Knott’s newspapers, menus, brochures, catalogues and other publications. Wikipedia also credits him with work on the restoration of the real ghost town of Calico, California, a name the park later used for its Calico Log Ride, opened in 1969 and now called the Timber Mountain Log Ride. For a designer, it is a documented link between the park’s buildings and its printed matter.

The Western theme was extended with collections and exhibits. Wikipedia says that in 1956 Walter Knott arranged with Marion Speer to bring his Western Trails Museum collection to the park, with Speer named curator, and the museum still sits in Ghost Town. In the 1950s, it adds, Knott opened a “summer-long county fair,” the start of the amusement-park side of the business. Later areas brought other moods: Wikipedia describes a Roaring Twenties area in the 1970s and an airfield-themed area with dance hall and rides.

The name itself kept the farm in view. Berries, a family surname and the word “Farm” stayed in the title of a business that, by the 1950s, also ran rides, a museum and a Western town.

Signs, maps and characters.

A theme-park identity is read on the move. Visitors meet it first on a highway sign or a car-park pole, then at the entrance gate, and the same name has to work at the size of a building and the size of a ticket stub. That is why park marks tend to be built from bold, simple shapes that survive distance, glare and a quick glance from a moving car.

Inside the gates, the park map becomes the identity’s busiest document. It has to sort themed areas, paths, food stops and facilities into something a family can follow with one hand, so colour coding, numbered keys and a small set of pictograms usually carry more weight than the logo itself.

Characters and mascots add a second layer. A costumed figure, a cartoon on a cup or a face on a plush toy gives the brand a personality that a wordmark alone cannot, and it travels well onto merchandise.

Ride and area signage then borrows the theme of each zone, from rough timber lettering to bright fairground type, while souvenir packaging, bags and photo folders carry the main mark home. For designers, the lesson is a system that flexes by zone but still reads as one place.

From family business to Cedar Fair and Six Flags.

The family kept the park for most of the century. The Los Angeles Times reported on 22 October 1997 that the Knott family had tentatively agreed to sell the park to Cedar Fair LP, the publicly held partnership that owned Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, for cash and stock. Under the agreement, the paper said, the family would hand over the Buena Park attraction, Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant and the marketplace shops, and also sell its interest in Knott’s Camp Snoopy, the indoor park at the Mall of America outside Minneapolis. The paper added that the family had sold its food unit — the jams and jellies — in 1995, and quoted Cedar Fair’s president, Richard L. Kinzel, saying the company would “keep the theme park going the way it is.”

That split matters for anyone working with the name. The jam and preserves side and the park side have followed separate paths since the mid-1990s. English Wikipedia says the park was sold to Cedar Fair in 1997 and that Cedar Fair merged with Six Flags in 2024; Six Flags has owned and operated the park since that merger.

The 1997 sale put the park in the same group as Cedar Point. In 2009 the Orange County Register marked 75 years of Mrs. Knott’s chicken with interviews with long-serving staff, including a server who had worked there since 1975.

For a design guide, Knott’s Berry Farm shows how a park can carry a farm name, a family surname and a Western town in one identity. Compare Cedar Point, its sister park under Cedar Fair, and Disney, its neighbour in Orange County. For this guide we use berry red, old gold and parchment with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Knott’s Berry Farm’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.