Disney's Secret, How the Mouse Bought Central Florida

In the autumn of nineteen sixty-three, Walt Disney flew low over Central Florida in a small plane and looked down at a flat, lake-dotted landscape of pine scrub and orange grove south of the town of Orlando. He had been searching for land for a second park, a corrective to Disneyland in Anaheim, which had been hemmed in almost immediately by motels and fast-food restaurants that Walt considered embarrassments, parasites feeding on his creation without contributing to the experience. What he wanted this time was control.

He wanted enough land to build not just a park but a buffer zone so wide that no honky-tonk strip could ever reach his gates. What he saw from the plane was roughly twenty-seven thousand acres of land so cheap and so thinly settled that a man with the right lawyers and the right level of secrecy might actually acquire it all. The secrecy was essential.

If anyone knew Walt Disney was buying, the price would triple overnight. The operation that followed was one of the most audacious land assemblies in American business history. Disney's agents created more than a dozen dummy corporations with generic names: Ayefour Corporation, Latin American Development Company, Compass East Corporation.

They approached landowners one at a time, quietly, with cash offers that were generous enough to close deals but calibrated not to raise suspicion. By the time the first newspaper broke the story in October of nineteen sixty-five, the Walt Disney Company had purchased over forty-three square miles of Central Florida for an average of roughly one hundred eighty dollars an acre. The going rate the day the story ran was over one thousand dollars an acre, and climbing.

The state of Florida was so eager for the economic development Disney promised that the legislature created for Disney an extraordinary political entity: the Reedy Creek Improvement District, established in nineteen sixty-seven, which gave the company essentially all the powers of a county government over its own land: the right to build roads, issue bonds, set zoning, maintain its own fire department, even to build and operate a nuclear power plant if it chose. It was a sovereignty within a state, created by the state, as a gift. Walt Disney died in December of nineteen sixty-six, before the park opened.

Walt Disney World opened on October first, nineteen seventy-one. The orange groves and cattle ranches he had flown over eight years earlier were gone. In their place stood a kingdom.