Celebration: Seminole Cattle Country Becomes Disney's Model Town

The land beneath Celebration was Seminole territory until the three Seminole Wars of the eighteen hundreds drove most of the nation west to Oklahoma. Those who remained retreated deep into the Everglades, leaving central Florida's flat wetlands largely unpopulated. By the mid-eighteen hundreds, cattle ranchers moved in along the Kissimmee River valley, and Osceola County became Florida's cow capital, named for the Seminole leader who had resisted removal.

For a century the land around what is now Celebration was divided among ranchers running beef cattle across open prairie and shallow cypress swamp. In nineteen sixty-three Walt Disney began secretly buying up parcels through dummy corporations, acquiring nearly twenty-seven thousand acres at an average of about one hundred eighty dollars per acre, most of it former ranch land. Disney died in nineteen sixty-six before his community vision materialized.

Three decades later The Walt Disney Company broke ground on Celebration in nineteen ninety-four. The planned town of five thousand homes opened in nineteen ninety-six, its neo-traditional streets designed by a roster of celebrity architects including Philip Johnson and Michael Graves.