"How did they get supplies onto Rose Island?"
The historians weren't sure. The tour guides had a few ideas. "There might have been an unpaved service road down Devil's Backbone," one offered, "but we haven't seen evidence of it."
There were many clues that hinted at the truth.
Rose Island wasn't the Fern Grove picnic grounds. Between 1924 and 1937, it was a full-scale resort. Hotel, dining hall seating 500 and, at times, 1600 in the outdoor overflow and dance hall, swimming pool, zoo, roller coaster, Ferris wheel. David Rose fed thousands of guests on summer weekends. He kept a bear named Teddy Roosevelt and a pack of wolves. He ran a farm that produced eggs, milk, butter, and produce for the kitchens.
All of those required trucks. Heavy trucks. Trucks loaded with beef and other perishables, not to mention construction materials and coal for the generators.
Now picture a 1920s delivery truck. High center of gravity, mechanical brakes, narrow tires, grinding down an unpaved switchback steep enough to make modern hikers catch their breath.
It didn't make sense.
The Steamboat Question
"What about the steamboats?" someone always asks.
The Idlewild…now the Belle of Louisville, carried up to fifteen hundred passengers from the Louisville Wharf to Rose Island. Ninety minutes to two hours upstream. It was like a floating city with entertainment. It carried more than twice Charlestown's population in a single trip. The journey to Rose Island was just the opening to the main show.
But it was a passenger boat. Not a cargo ship.
The excursion boats of that era were the primary transportation up and down the Ohio in those days. They'd ripped out staterooms and cargo holds to maximize deck space for paying customers. Every square foot was revenue. A crate of potatoes taking up space meant two passengers who couldn't buy tickets. A dollar in lost sales before you even paid the freight tariff and the roustabouts to load and unload it.
And then there's the cold chain problem.
You don't ship butter on a steamboat in July. Not in the Ohio Valley, where summer humidity turns the river into a steam bath. Ninety minutes on a hot deck with no refrigeration, plus loading time, plus the haul up the bank from the dock to the kitchen. That milk is sour before it reaches the cook. That meat is turning. That butter is pooling in the crate.
David Rose was selling class. He wasn't going to have fifteen hundred guests in their Sunday best tripping over leaking ice blocks and crates of chickens on the dance floor.
The boats brought the people. Something else brought the food.
The farm was my first clue that the accepted story had holes.
Almost everyone I asked told me Rose Island's farm was on the Louisville side of the river. The tour guides said it. Local historians repeated it. A few others said otherwise. But if it was Kentucky, that meant daily river crossings for perishable goods; eggs, milk, fresh produce, ferried across the Ohio every morning before the kitchens opened.
Then I found a 1930 photograph in the Jeffersonville Township Public Library archive. "Rose Island Egg Producers," the caption read. A flock of hens outside their coop on a summer morning. And in the metadata, one sentence that changed everything:
"They were housed in the farm located on the peninsula."
The peninsula. Not Louisville. Not across the river. Right there on Rose Island itself.
The oral history had drifted. Someone told someone who told someone else, and the farm floated across the Ohio River until everyone accepted it as fact.
But what were the documented facts…
The more I dug, the more I realized Rose Island wasn't just an amusement park.
It was a city. On many days, having a higher population than towns like Madison, Jeffersonville, and Utica are nearby.
David Rose built a fully self-sufficient operation on that peninsula. He pumped and filtered his own water. The swimming pool was the first filtered pool in the Midwest. He generated his own electricity. He manufactured his own ice.
Not bought ice. Made ice. Rose Island had its own ice plant, producing more than the resort needed and selling the surplus to the surrounding area. The man everyone said "died broke" was running an ice distribution business out of his amusement park.
Water. Power. Refrigeration. Food production. All controlled on-site. All independent of the mainland.
This wasn't a dreamer who got lucky for a few summers. This was an engineer who thought in systems and didn't overlook opportunities.
But even a self-sufficient city needs raw materials. Coal for the generators. Fuel for the ice plant. Supplies that the peninsula couldn't produce itself. And if you're selling ice commercially, you need a way to get it out.
That meant trucks. Trucks meant a road.
The Hidden Service Road
Sarah, a guide at Charlestown State Park, offered to show me something when I asked her about this.
We walked past the main trails, past the spots where tourists take pictures of the old swimming pool ruins. She led me to see something many visitors never notice. A boundary marker at the edge of state park land.
"STATE PARK BOUNDARY," the sign read. "NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING. ENTER ONLY AT PARK GATE."
Behind it, a dirt path disappeared into the woods.
"That's it," she said. "The service road."
I was looking at David Rose's back door.
The road now has a name: Patrol Road. But that name came later, 1940 or 1941, when the U.S. Army took over the land to build the Indiana Army Ammunition Plant. They needed to secure the powder plant's riverfront perimeter, so they paved the old service lane and sent armed guards in jeeps along it twenty-four hours a day.
The Army named it. They didn't build it.
The roadbed was already there. David Rose had used it since 1923, and likely the Fern Grove resort owners used it before him in the 1890s. The geography demanded it. You cannot run a commercial operation on that peninsula by hauling everything over Devil's Backbone or across the river. The creek valley route—flat, following Fourteen Mile Creek, avoiding the ridge entirely—was always the answer.
Rose just formalized it. Restricted it. Made it invisible.
That invisibility was intentional.
David Rose was a showman who understood logistics. He didn't want guests to park near the top of the bluff and try to walk down those dramatic switchbacks. He wanted them to cross the swinging suspension bridge, or arrive by motorboat, steamboat, or ferry after ninety minutes of an enjoyable, festive ride on the river. The journey was the first act of the show and created the illusion of an island destination.
But drama doesn't feed fifteen hundred people.
So, Rose built two realities. The public got the theatrical entrance…the reveal, the suspension bridge, the sense of crossing into another world. The staff, the vendors, the coal trucks got the practical entrance; flat, fast, invisible. Deliveries arrived before dawn. By the time the first steamboat whistle echoed across the water, the trucks were gone, the generators were humming, and a magical paradise was ready to greet visitors.
The magic stayed intact because no one saw the infrastructure that made it possible.
Today, Patrol Road is still there.
The historians who told me there was no evidence weren't lying. They just didn't know where to look or who to ask. I asked Sarah and got the answer. The evidence was behind a "No Trespassing" sign, down a path that leads to a road that leads to Highway 62, which once connected a forgotten amusement park to the outside world.
I stood at that sign and took a photograph. Proof that what they called a myth has a dirt path leading into the woods.
David Rose has been gone for more than eighty years. His park vanished in the 1937 flood. But his service road is still there, waiting for someone to ask the right question in the right way.
How did they get supplies onto Rose Island?
Not down Devil's Backbone. Not on steamboats full of excited guests.
But through a road hidden in plain sight. Before dawn. While the butter was still cold.
Martin Jones is writing a historical novel about Rose Island, the forgotten amusement park on the Ohio River that operated from 1923 to 1937. The Rose Island Story will be published in 2026.