For decades, Ken Means had imagined this day. When organ music began to play, a platform started to spin, and the animals he had carved over the last thirty years began to move, he was overcome with emotion.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” says the woodcarver and painter who designed the new Carousel of Dreams that recently opened in Franklin, Tennessee. “As an artist, I wanted to create something that would be useful instead of hanging in a gallery. To see little kids just running all around, having a great time and the folks laughing. It’s just what we meant for it to do.”
The merry-go-round, which opened over Memorial Day weekend in the Factory at Franklin, has generated excitement far and wide.
“This is a phenomenal feat: the first hand-carved carousel produced by one person in over one hundred years,” says Abigail Bassett, a carousel scholar and former employee of the Carousel Museum in Bristol, Connecticut. “People don’t understand what goes into a hand-carved animal.”
Merry-go-rounds, she notes, flourished during what has been called the Golden Age of Carousels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when thousands operated across the country. Since then they have been steadily disappearing, with only about two hundred still in use today.
Most modern carousels feature fiberglass figures, and it’s not the same. “They lack soul,” Bassett says. “It’s totally different on a real carousel. You can feel the artistry when you touch the animal. It’s not a hollow piece of plastic. It’s a real thing you’re on.”
Indeed, Means’s thirty-two animals, which are mostly carved from basswood, stand out for their intricate details, from bejeweled horses with flower garlands to tropical foliage decorating his tiger. His giraffe mother and baby tower above the menagerie, while his eight-foot-long lion, which took a year to carve, poses in mid howl.
There’s also a braying donkey and leaping jack rabbit, joining a bear, deer, dragon, goat, husky, rooster, seahorse and zebra. But the artist’s six-year-old grandson’s favorite character is the toad. “We can’t talk him into riding anything else.”
For Means, who is eighty-four, the ride was decades in the making. He started his career painting billboards and theatrical sets in Los Angeles. More than thirty years ago he carved a rocking horse Christmas present for his children, which inspired him to make more. Eventually he had created a stable of more than two dozen carousel animals. But they needed a home.
The dream started to take shape in 2019 after he moved from Oregon to Tennessee to be near one of his daughters. He settled into a glass-enclosed studio in the Factory at Franklin—a former stove manufacturing plant that’s now a shopping and entertainment complex—and continued to carve. Visitors were so fascinated that the Factory eventually asked him to build a carousel.
It was a way to honor his work and support the community, says Allen Arender, chief development officer with Holladay Properties, which owns the Factory. He helped create a nonprofit to manage the ride, with proceeds from the $5 tickets supporting local charities. In its first month, thousands of customers have already taken the merry-go-round for a spin.
“People are overwhelmed when they see it for the first time because it’s so much more spectacular than you can envision,” he says. “It is quite remarkable that something was created in pieces over thirty years, guided by a dream but no detailed plan, and it all fits together so perfectly.”
Means’s biggest supporter has been his wife, Betty. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. On their first date he took her to Los Angeles’s Griffith Park—to ride a carousel.
Over the years, she worked on the ride, helping shape animals and fashioning the stained glass that’s part of the carousel structure. And she too is overwhelmed by the finished project. “It’s the kind of thing where you pinch yourself,” she says. “You see it going around and it’s amazing.”
