End of an era: Atlantic Beach Park carousel fades into history after nearly 100 years

The historic carousel at Atlantic Beach Park in Misquamicut, R.I., has closed after nearly 100 years of operation.

The 54-foot-wide Illions carousel, which is one of a kind and included three signature horses personally hand-carved, painted and signed by master carver Marcus C. Illions, was installed in a giant, circular building that was created to house it. Illions only made one signature horse per carousel, but Trefes’s carousel included three because it was built using horses salvaged from other carousels that had been wrecked by the Great New England Hurricane.

Those horses are now very valuable antiques. Because of their value they were eventually removed from service. Harry, his sister Sally Sorensen, and cousin Charles Trefes, the current owner of Atlantic Beach Park, each received one, and for several years all three were on display at the New England Carousel Museum in Bristol, Conn.

The carousel included sleds and horses in various poses, some stationary and some that went up and down on golden posts, each with its own unique, painted design. Its band organ was built by Artizan Factories Inc. in North Tonawanda, N.Y. It worked like a player piano, with music rolls that essentially programmed the instrument to play specific songs on a mix of instruments that included drums, cymbals, whistles and bells. The factory only produced band organs between 1922 and 1929 before going out of business.

At some point, coin-operated rides were installed along the perimeter walls of the carousel, including the Pony Twins ride, a Baby Tusko elephant ride, and the Musical Ferris Wheel, with a single chair that went up and around in a circle. To my knowledge the elephant ride is the last one in the country left, Trefes said, adding that the only other one he ever saw, in a New Jersey arcade, was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Eventually the main platform, rotation mechanisms, and center equipment began to show signs of wear and Harry Trefes’s sons, Elias, who went by Lou, and Charles, began searching for a replacement.

My uncle and dad removed the horses and started doing restorations on them while they looked for a different carousel to put them on, Charles Trefes recalls. In the interim a smaller, 36-foot wide Chance Rides carousel occupied the space for a time, and rental units filled in for one or two seasons. We even had a double-decker in there at one point.

Finally, in the 1990s, the brothers purchased a circa 1910 Herschell-Spillman menagerie carousel from the Rocky Point Park in Warwick, which had gone out of business. And at some point the original band organ was replaced and moved to the side of the carousel, where it has stood for many years.

Other changes had to be made to accommodate the new carousel platform into the existing building. The faces you see above the center used to be along the outside of the carousel, but because of the way our building is we had to put them in the center. The panels, some illustrated, some in relief, include scenes and characters from fairy tales and nursery rhymes. There’s one panel that I made sure to purposely leave untouched because it was somebody’s prediction of the year 3,000, and it’s just a black image, Trefes says. I always thought that was kind of odd.

Then there was the strange story of the zebra that made its way into the carousel herd. Illions never made a zebra, but the Atlantic Beach Park carousel ended up with one after one horse was sent out for what was supposed to be a restoration.

We sent it to a company we hadn’t used before, and lo and behold it came back as a zebra. My father and uncle were less than thrilled that someone would take a valuable Illions horse and paint it as a zebra.

That ended up being a happy mistake, however, because once they put it back onto the carousel it became the most popular horse of all. It’s also my daughter Allie’s favorite, Trefes said. She worked on this carousel since she was old enough to start climbing and she knows as much about it and how it works as anyone.

Today the carousel sits empty, the horses disassembled from the rotating carousel floor. They sit along the interior walls of the circular building, mounted on racks, ready to be moved into storage safely away from the encroaching oceanfront. After 85 years, the carousel has stopped spinning, and the ornate band organ has played its last waltz.

Shut down during the pandemic, the carousel never reopened, a victim of changing regulations, increased storm activity, and the fearsome threat posed by coastal erosion to the beachfront attraction.

The carousel was the last of the many rides that once entertained children from all over New England at the