📍Marceline, Missouri, USA
1901 – 1911“I grew up in Marceline, Missouri — a small town on the Santa Fe Railroad in the middle of the country — from ages four to eight, and those four years were the most formative of my life. The Marceline farm had a barn that my uncle Robert decorated with drawings of animals, and I began drawing on its walls myself. The town had a Main Street of the kind that was already beginning to disappear from America — a street of independent shops, of neighbours who knew each other, of a scale that was human and legible. When I designed Disneyland's Main Street, USA forty years later, I was remembering Marceline. The elm trees, the courthouse, the Santa Fe trains going through — all of it came back. Marceline gave me the American small-town childhood that millions of Americans were losing and that I spent my career recreating for them in animated form and eventually in physical space.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Gabler, N. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (2006), Knopf; Thomas, B. Walt Disney: An American Original (1976), Simon & Schuster; Disney, W. The Quotable Walt Disney (2001), Disney Editions