‘MYSTERY INDUSTRY’
Fake companies, secret deals secured land for Magic Kingdom
In 1964, Walt Disney used fake companies and secret deals to begin quietly snapping up the land in Central Florida that would later become Walt Disney World. Those shenanigans allowed him to purchase acres upon acres of swamp without suspicion, while keeping prices low. In the Magic Kingdom, the windows from stores on Main Street reflect some of the names of those original “companies.”
Walt Disney’s brother Roy O. Disney supervised the massive Walt Disney World project and also made personal visits to inspect the land. He and several representatives
can be seen in these historical photos making a voyage around the soonto-be drained and re-filled Bay Lake and walking the surrounding area.
Orlando Sentinel reporter Mark Andrews wrote this story May 30, 1993 detailing Disney’s secret land purchases:
Working under a strict cloak of secrecy, real estate agents who didn’t know the identity of their client began making offers to landowners in southwest Orange and northwest Osceola counties in April 1964 — shortly after Walt Disney chose the site for his new theme park.
Careful not to let property owners know the extent of their land-buying appetites, the agents quietly negotiated one deal after
another — sometimes lining up contracts to buy huge tracts for little more than $100 an acre.
Walt Disney Productions attorney Paul Helliwell had set up dummy corporations — with such names as Latin American Development and Management Corp. and Reedy Creek Ranch Corp. — in Miami to act as purchasers of the land. To make the deals, Helliwell worked through Roy Hawkins, a Miami real estate consultant.
Hawkins contacted Nelson Boice, president of Florida Ranch Lands Inc., an Orlando realty firm, and “expressed a casual interest in a ‘super-sized’ parcel of land,” according to
a November 1965 news account.
Swearing their office staff to secrecy, the realtors began assembling information from Orange and Osceola county tax rolls on the ownership of land in the area in which the “mystery industry” was interested.
Next came the job of securing options to buy the property. The deal-makers made telephone calls to the owners — many of them out of state. Most were delighted to sell. Some, who had received their land through inheritances, had never even seen it.
Because they knew that recording the first deeds would trigger an intense wave of public questioning about what was going on, Disney’s representatives waited until they had a large number of parcels locked up through options before filing their paper work.
Most of the land transactions were handled in cash to eliminate a paper trail.
The first purchases, recorded on May 3, 1965, included one for 8,380 acres of swamp and brush from state Sen. Ira Bronson at a price of $107 an acre. The deal had been made seven months earlier.
The first newspaper account of the largescale interest in Orange and Osceola county property ran the next day. The May 4, 1965 Orlando Sentinel story said the transactions
“will undoubtedly increase rumors already afloat for the past year to the effect that a new and large industrial complex is about to locate in this area.”
Indeed it did.