12 People You Need to Know in 2014: Peter Herschend

For Peter Herschend, business has always been a family affair.

He was just 16 when his north-side Chicago family acquired a cave just miles north of the Arkansas state line in 1950.

“We had no thought at that time that we would have anything approaching what the company has become today,” Herschend says.

That first year, the family hosted 5,000 guests through Marvel Cave. Now, Herschend, 79, helps oversee Atlanta-based Herschend Family Entertainment Corp’s. 26 business entities in 10 states, including Dollywood, Stone Mountain Park (Atlanta), Showboat Branson Belle and Silver Dollar City, the one that started it all.

In the early ’50s, the seed of the company began to take root under patriarch Hugo Herschend, Peter says.

“He was an amazingly imaginative man and an amazingly good salesman, and he had said, ‘I think visitors to the Ozarks would like to see the natives of the Ozarks doing what they had to do with their hands to be able to live here in the hills – the making of candles, the making of split rails, actually making their water jugs and lye soap,’” Peter Herschend says, adding his father died in 1955, never seeing his idea come to fruition. “That idea sat in the back of our heads, and in 1959, another gentleman walked into our lives: Russell Pearson. Russell was a designer and a showman. He came to us and said, ‘What you need to do is on the other side of the parking lot, you need to build an old Ozarks town and that would give people coming to the cave something to do before they went into the cave or after they came out.’ And, you know what, he was absolutely right.”

The formation of Silver Dollar City allowed Herschend to come back to the Ozarks after graduating from college and serving a stint in the Army.

Oil embargoes that began in the late ’70s triggered new plans after the brothers realized how dependent travelers were on cheap gasoline. The brothers diversified through a family-friendly water park, White Water, and later other entities such as the Harlem Globetrotters, the most recent addition.

Today, Herschend serves on the company’s board of directors with his brother, Jack, directing a management team they put in place.[[In-content Ad]]