Fantasy park Valley of the Moon celebrates 100 years of kindness and family-friendly fun 🧚

Tucson’s own fantasy park, filled with a wizard’s tower, fairy homes and other storybook-inspired abodes, is turning 100 this fall.

Valley of the Moon located at 2544 E. Allen Road near the Winterhaven neighborhood is hosting multiple events through October to celebrate its centennial. Events include a walking tour that discusses the history of the park and recent restoration efforts, along with a play honoring park founder George Phar Legler and the legacy he left behind.

The show “Haunted Ruins: Legler’s Legacy” kicks off at 6 p.m. during the first weekend of October. The show will have multiple showings throughout the night. Tickets start at $10 per adult and $5 for children ages 7 and up. Members and children under 7 get in free.

“For our shows, (we want visitors) to experience a piece of magic or learn (Valley of the Moon’s) morals from the story and have a good time and be entertained,” said Travis Deyoe, the park’s theatrical co-director and director of the 100th-anniversary production. “But, if you just come to the Valley of the Moon, in general, it has that sense of being just a little pocket of fantasyland that you can't replace, you can't find anywhere else. And it's just somewhere that you can be yourself. … We're kind of the land of misfit toys in our volunteer community.”

Much like the rest of the operations at Valley of the Moon, the production is completely volunteer-run. The park’s many volunteers range from kids to adults.

“The whole show is trying to tell a fun story about finding a chest but at the same time, using that as a lens to tell the history of Valley of the Moon and how it started and how it is now,” Deyoe said.

During the last 100 years, Valley of the Moon has seen many changes —becoming a nonprofit, an influx of visitors and volunteers, and preservation efforts throughout the park to protect the original infrastructure.

But something that hasn’t changed over the years is the park’s mission to help spark kindness, imagination and community among local children (including those who are children at heart) — a mission that Legler carried close to heart for several decades.

“Legler believed that kindness to all is the golden key to happiness,” Deyoe said.

Once upon a time...

Before Valley of the Moon became the large fairytale-inspired, almost mysterious, fantasy park it is today, it looked like what a lot of outer parts of Tucson looked like at that time: underdeveloped.

While the then-outskirts of Tucson looked a little barren, Legler saw an opportunity to create something magical.

Starting in 1923, he began building Valley of the Moon by creating paths, caves, ponds and buildings like the wizard’s tower, amphitheater and Spiritualist church on the property. 

Legler spent nearly 10 years creating the park’s infrastructure using cement he would order from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, along with chicken wire, rocks and other materials he had lying around, according to Jenni Sunshine, the president of Valley of the Moon’s nonprofit organization. (Yes, that is her actual name!)

Legler primarily built Valley of the Moon by himself with the assistance of a mule and the occasional help from homeless people passing through the area — a gesture to show that kindness applied to everyone.

By 1932, most of the park’s larger structures had been completed.

“He wasn't a wealthy man and this wasn't funded by anybody,” Sunshine said. “He basically used a lot of recycling, used the money that he had from being retired. He was first a railroad guy then was a postal clerk. He retired on disability and this is what he did with it, he went ahead and created this.”

The inspiration behind Legler’s creation of Valley of the Moon comes from his deeply rooted beliefs in Spiritualism — a faith that revolves around communicating with spirits. Legler’s Spiritualism also included believing in fairies and other mystical creatures.

So, when a local girl became ill with tuberculosis during the TB epidemic in the early 1900s, he decided to build a fairyland display in her window to help raise her spirits.  

“He told her, ‘If it ever, ever gets too much, you know, too much pain, you can always travel to the fairy town in your mind,’” Sunshine said. “He did go ahead and develop fairy houses for children all over the place, all over town. He would find sick children and he would go in and put a vignette in their window so that they would have something magical.”

When creating Valley of the Moon in the early 1920s, Legler included multiple tiny fairy homes throughout the park including in an enchanted garden.

While the small fairy houses have mostly remained intact, other structures in the park have been put through the test of time and many of them are currently undergoing restoration. Fun fact: You can find some displays from the old Magic Carpet Golf at Valley of the Moon!

Eventually, Tucson began to expand outward and places like the Winterhaven neighborhood were developed near the park in the late 1940s. 

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

After years of experiencing medical ailments, Legler died at 97 in the early 1980s.

“Legler died Monday after spending 97 years on this earth, a good deal of them dedicated to making children happy, to teaching them the difference between good and evil, and that kindness brings untold benefits,” the Arizona Daily Star reported in 1982.

Although Legler died over 40 years ago, his spirit and legacy remain around the park.

“It was intended to be kind of whimsical, all this stuff,” Sunshine said. “His goal was to be a hub, a place where children could be taught kindness.”

‘This is such a place that gives so much to so many people.’

For Tucsonans, Valley of the Moon has been a place for field trips, weekend fantasy shows and overall family-friendly fun over the decades. But for the volunteers who spend their days at the park, it’s like a second home. 

Deyoe began volunteering at Valley of the Moon in 2006 when he was 13 years old. As a shy kid, getting involved with Valley of the Moon’s theater helped him break out of his shell and make lifelong friendships.

“I think at this point, I've spent more time volunteering at Valley (of the Moon) than I have not volunteering at Valley,” he said. “And I was dragged there by one of my best friends at the time and the director just kind of roped me into doing a show. And I've been there ever since.”

One of his closest friends even got married at the park.

Deyoe says it’s been interesting to see how Valley of the Moon has changed over the years, especially in the theater department where nearly 100 years ago, it was primarily Legler providing shows and tours for locals.

Now, there are around 60 theatrical volunteers. 

“I have a full team and we're able to make these shows so much better,” he said. “Just from an acting point of view, I think we've really grown to make better productions. And because we have better productions, we're able to show that to more people, to inspire more people and to have more volunteers at Valley and they get to experience it week to week.”

Sunshine was introduced to Valley of the Moon around 40 years ago when she and her family moved to Tucson from New Jersey for graduate school. Her daughter at the time was 7 and had a hard time adjusting to life in the Old Pueblo.

“I didn't anticipate what a horrible disruption this would be for her and she hated Arizona,” she said. “She would remind me of that fact all the time, that we were in Arizona and everything was not as great as in New Jersey. Even the movies were better. She was in that little funk of ‘everything's bad’ and in this constant ‘I'm in distress.’ And I felt like I had broken my kid. She had been a happy kid. And I felt like I was the worst mom in the world because I took her away from her friends and her extended family.”

In an attempt to help her daughter find a shred of happiness again, Sunshine asked around to see if there was something here that could possibly help change her daughter’s mind about Arizona. Someone recommended they check out Valley of the Moon’s fall shows.

At one of the shows in October that year, Sunshine says she saw a shift in her daughter’s attitude toward Tucson and she once again seemed like her happy self.

“It was amazing. She just got quiet and she was seeing everything,” Sunshine said. “And she said something like ‘Tucson is the only place in the world that has Valley of the Moon, right?’ … Then the next day that she went to school, it was a Sunday, she went to school on Monday, she made her first friend. And it was just like, she turned a corner, she became happy again.”

After that moment, Sunshine swore she would volunteer at the park as a way to say thanks for giving the gift of happiness to her daughter, she says.

“I waited until I retired and now I've been the president for a while,” she said. “So I've been out here, probably 15 years, being a volunteer instead of an audience member.”

Since she started volunteering 15 years ago, Sunshine has worked diligently to maintain the mission of Valley of the Moon while helping provide family-friendly activities for individuals and families from all walks of life — just as Legler did a century ago.

In addition to the ongoing restoration efforts during Valley of the Moon’s 100th year, Sunshine hopes the park gets more volunteers and eventually has paid positions so it can be open more days throughout the month (instead of the typical first Saturday and third Sunday openings).

Along with the additional resources, she would like to see more creative programming at the park such as special events, clubs and other social-focused events for everyone regardless of age, race or creed.

“My goal is to have the human resources to be able to have it open and benefiting the community on a regular basis,” she said. “Every weekend, I think, but maybe not in the summer. … This is such a place that gives so much to so many people.”

For more information about Valley of the Moon and their upcoming 100th anniversary events, check out their website.