Where Is Walt Disney World?
It was 1964, and someone was buying land in Central Florida—a lot of land, for cheap. Much of it was cow pastures or swamps. Land like this was nothing special and only cost about $180 an acre. Who would want so much of it? Maybe a big business was coming to Florida and bringing jobs. Rumors flew. Would it be Ford? General Electric? NASA?
On October 24, 1965, a local newspaper called the Orlando Sentinel solved the mystery. It blasted this headline: “We Say: ‘Mystery’ Industry Is Disney.” This was great news. Everyone knew about the famous Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, on the West Coast of the United States. Walt Disney must be planning to build an East Coast Disneyland, too!
This turned out to be true, sort of. In fact, Walt Disney and his brother Roy had decided to build a bigger version of Disneyland in Florida. There would be lots of changes. The official name would end up as Walt Disney World® Resort, commonly called Disney World for short.
Back in November of 1963, Walt had chosen Central Florida for the new theme park. The area had sunny weather, with average temperatures in the 60s in winter and 80s in summer. It was near the crossing of Interstate 4 and Florida’s Turnpike, and there was a regional airport about a half hour away. Getting to Disney World would be an easy trip by car or airplane.
However, if anyone had guessed what Walt was up to, land prices would have soared sky-high. Many people knew what Walt looked like from the TV show he hosted on ABC. So he and Roy, who were business partners, had to be clever. They didn’t personally contact landowners and ask to buy their property. They had other people do that. Besides the Disney brothers, only five others were let in on the plan, which they called “Project X” or the “Florida Project.”
Using made-up company names like Tomahawk Properties, they quietly began buying land. If Walt or Roy went to Florida during this time, they used fake names like Walt and Roy Davis. These initials (W. D. and R. D.) matched the ones that were monogrammed on their suitcases.
Such tricks worked—for a while. That was lucky, because after the news got out that Disney was the buyer, land prices in the area shot up to $1,000 an acre. In all, the company had bought about 27,440 acres (forty-three square miles) in Florida by then. That’s almost twice the size of Manhattan in New York City!
There was no doubt about it. Walt Disney was thinking big!
Where to Find Disney World
