The owner of the Dogpatch USA theme park land in rural Newton County said he's "pretty sure" a fire that destroyed three buildings Sunday morning was the result of arson.
"What else could it be?" said Charles "Bud" Pelsor. "There was no electricity. There was no fireplace or stove, no fires going anywhere. Somebody had to light a fire."
Pelsor and his partners bought about 400 acres of the former theme park in August for $2 million. He intends to restore the structures and open the park as an "ecotourism" destination with artisans, a restaurant and a creek stocked with trout and freshwater pearl mussels.
Pelsor said the park had about 23 buildings before Sunday's fire, and he plans to rebuild the three that were destroyed.
Cree Ruckman, executive assistant for Pelsor and Dogpatch, said they won't be deterred by the fire.
"It's not going to slow us down any," she said.
Ruckman said trespassing has been a constant problem at the abandoned theme park.
"There's always trespassers down there," she said. "We can't stop them. There are just so many. They are vandalizing, stealing, obviously setting stuff on fire. Whatever mischief they can do, they're doing it."
Newton County Sheriff Keith Slape said the fire began in a building that had served as a photography studio. It jumped from there to a public restroom and a former ice cream shop.
"These buildings are pretty close together -- it wouldn't take much wind to put an ember on another building," said Slape.
Slape said the photo studio and restroom were about 20 feet apart. The restroom and ice cream shop were separated by about 10 feet.
Slape said investigators will begin sifting through the rubble of the fire today, looking for evidence of accelerants. He said they had to wait until the buildings "cool off a bit" before they could start going through the debris.
"Right now, it's kind of suspicious how the fire was set," said Slape.
Pelsor said the buildings were still smoldering Monday afternoon.
The sheriff's office got a call about 5:30 a.m. Sunday from someone who saw the fire. The Krooked Kreek Volunteer Fire Department, which is based 4 miles south of Harrison, was dispatched to the scene.
Slape said the three destroyed buildings had wood frames with metal roofs over older shingle roofs.
Slape said all that's left is metal and ashes. "Anything that was wooden was burned up," he said.
Pelsor said the three buildings were in good shape before the fire.
When asked about the possibility of transients, Pelsor said a nearby cabin had a working fireplace and would have been much more inviting as a place to spend the night.
Dogpatch USA is located in Marble Falls, off Arkansas 7 between Harrison and Jasper. It was a theme park from 1968 to 1993 and was based on Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" comic strip, which was set in a village called Dogpatch. The comic strip was published in more than 700 newspapers across the country.
Pelsor held a "river walk" at the park over the weekend of Dec. 6-7, inviting the people to tour the former Dogpatch site. About 5,000 people took him up on the offer, many of them seeing Dogpatch for the first time in decades.
Pelsor said at the time that he thought opening the park to the public periodically might be a way to reduce trespassing. He plans to have another "river walk" in May.
Pelsor, who invented a "spill-proof" dog bowl, plans to spend between $6 million and $8 million to make the former theme park an ecotourism destination called The Village at Dogpatch. The chief financial officer of his company, Great American Spillproof Products Inc., is his partner in the Dogpatch project.
Pelsor, a native of Indiana, is among those who visited Dogpatch when he was a child, around 1970, and made several more visits afterward. He has family roots in the Pope County town of Pelsor.
Metro on 02/24/2015