To supplement their income, Cordelia Knott started cooking. And cooking. And cooking. What started as a tea room that only sold about four meals a day eventually turned into a theme park that can hold 29,000 people at once. 

And it’s all because of fried chicken. 

“When Cordelia put her family fried chicken recipe on a dinner table in their existing tea room, they were trying to make ends meet,” Eric Lynxwiler told SFGATE. He describes himself as an “official unofficial historian” of the theme park, and has worked there in different capacities in design and marketing over the years.

“It was just unbelievable how it grew almost exponentially,” he explained. “It was something like four dinners turned to eight dinners, turned to 16 dinners, turned to 32 dinners, and it just kept multiplying from there.” 

The berry stand, and its small attached tea room, eventually became Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant, which is in the same location today that it started in 1934. Today, the berry fields behind it are a theme park, Knott’s Berry Farm.

The recipe is simple. When Knotts’ food and beverage director Wilf Seymour gave a demonstration on how to cook it at a theme park convention in 2020, he revealed the recipe. There are only four ingredients: chicken, oil, flour and salt. 

But the chicken is more than chicken: It’s a journey — and a destination. 

Many other restaurants in Orange County were serving fried chicken at the time Cordelia started offering hers on her wedding china. What set Knott’s apart was that it offered a full meal — with the same chicken soup, side of rhubarb, biscuits and mashed potatoes they still serve today — that included a slice of their famous boysenberry pie. 

“That meal was made with farm fresh vegetables,” Lynxwiler said. “It was literally farm to table from that same property. And I think that probably was the catch that made people go, ‘Well, we’ll go to this fried chicken restaurant as opposed to that one.’ I think it made a difference.” 

The restaurant exploded in popularity. On a Sunday, they’d feed something like 6,000 people. When all those people started coming to the restaurant, some had to wait three or more hours for a meal. All those hungry people needed something to keep themselves occupied. 

Walter Knott’s solution was to build something to entertain them. He started with a few small attractions to keep people occupied, one of which was a collection of Western memorabilia. As Walter bought up farmland around his property, he’d move the old buildings on those farms closer to the restaurant, then fill them with his artifacts, many of which were from Calico, a real silver mining town where the Knotts briefly lived before moving to Buena Park. (Walter Knott eventually purchased the real Calico and turned it into a ghost town attraction.)

That was the start of Calico Ghost Town, now the centerpiece of the theme park, which started in 1941. When farmhands weren’t busy on the farm, Knott would have them adding new structures to the attraction. “It kind of grew from real Western history,” Lynxwiler said, “and he added the folklore and tall tales of legends of fake Western history.” Among real historic artifacts were entertaining parlor tricks, like the grave where, if you step wrong, you can feel a heartbeat through your shoe.

“He built a volcano with lava rocks from the Mojave Desert, and he wound up telling people that he went out into the California desert, and he found California’s last active volcano, and he picked it up and he moved it to Knott’s Berry Farm,” the historian explained. 

In those early days, Ghost Town was free, a place for people to spend a few hours while waiting for dinner. Knott would give space to people to come sell their wares, and others would dress up as Western characters and get paid in a chicken dinner and whatever tips people would give them — kind of like Hollywood Boulevard today, but a lot cleaner.

Ghost Town was a collection of different vendors and stalls. One person would be fixing watches, one would be sharpening knives, another would be selling antiques. Walter was selling vegetables and preserves. “People would come to Walter with a talent and an ability, and he would, with a handshake, give them a building in Ghost Town, and they could just sell their wares with a percentage going to Walter,” Lynxwiler explained.

Some people lived upstairs in the buildings — and more people trying to live there is what actually ended Ghost Town as a free attraction. “Bud Hurlbut was the vendor who built the mine ride and the log ride,” Lynxwiler explained. “He had to have locks and doors on his tunnels because hippies would break in and sleep inside of his attractions.” 

Though they never intended to build a theme park, it’s eventually what they did. 

“Cordelia even said she never wanted to get into the restaurant business,” Lynxwiler said. “It just happened. One thing happened after another, and Walter didn’t want to lose his entire farm to a theme park, but money started coming in from the theme park. So it just kept growing and growing and growing. It’s rather amazing. It’s the only story of its kind in the world that I could find.”

It’s not the only wild story associated with Knott’s. Walter Knott didn’t invent the boysenberry, that was Rudolph Boysen in Anaheim, but he revived it in 1934. Boysen had discarded the combination of blackberry, loganberry and red raspberry, as an unsuccessful hybrid. In fact, according to the park’s blog, every boysenberry in the world can be traced back to Knott’s farm.

In 1968, the Knotts put up a fence around Ghost Town, and started charging $1 admission for adults, and $0.25 for kids. But once there was a price tag on the experience, crowds clamored for more and more entertainment. The Knotts added Fiesta Village, the adjacent Mexican-inspired land that’s about to reopen after years of refurbishment, in 1969. Along the way, the theme park invented the kind of Halloween theme park event popular around the world.  

Now in addition to the original theme park, Knott’s has a nearby water park, Soak City, and a hotel. The restaurant has gotten a facelift, but it’s still in the same spot, serving the same food as it did 90 years ago, no park admission required. 

“It’s the exact same recipe your grandparents ate,” Lynxwiler said. “The only difference is they don’t use lard anymore.”