So I'm not a huge poster over here (mostly a lurker) but the one trip report I ever posted on here was from Santa's Land last October.
You guys should know, this park is literally run by only a husband and wife and three or four of their closest friends. You enter and exit through the gift shop, and the woman in there is one of the most friendly people you'll ever meet. The wife runs the bakery and the husband drives the train- then they have friends running the snack bar and the book shop, and their mechanic friend running all four kiddie rides.
Being that the park's only employees are elderly Vermonters, it's surprised they even knew what Facebook is. At least they kind of tried. They definitely could do a lot for themselves if they were to get someone to help them with that.
The current owners did just buy the park eight years ago, but the park was apparently in disgustingly bad shape before that. There's a trip report from Roadside America from this time. When we rode the train, the owner told us about how the previous owner (I believe the fourth in it's time) was terrible and let the park go to ruin, and abused the animals. The park improved a lot under the new owners.
Oh wait, I just remembered: I don't know about the "recession" and "theme parks not being popular anymore" but Vermont is in a really bad place right now. I'm there every weekend (including a few hours ago,) about forty minutes south of Putney. A lot of the southern part of the state was ravaged by Hurricane Irene, and now they haven't had any real snow yet to get the ski season started. All that on top of an already bad market can't be good for this park. I wonder how much damage they got from the storm in August.
All in all, the owners are getting old and don't really know what they're doing running a theme park, (if you even want to call it that.) Being that the park has been open since 1957 and there have been four owners before them, I'd like to think there's still a future for this park. Hopefully the State of Vermont might give them some help, and someone will come in and take over. It would be nice.