Disney World was originally planned in 1955 to be in Northeast Georgia!

In 1955, while filming the blockbuster film, “The Great Locomotive Chase,” on a 21 mile long section of the Tallulah Falls Railroad in Habersham County, GA, Walt Disney came up with the idea of developing a linear, and much larger, version of California’s Disneyland along its route. Had this occurred, the Gainesville-Cornelia, GA area would today be a metropolis the size of Orlando, FL and Metro Atlanta would probably be two millions persons larger. We will tell you what actually happened.

During the years 1999, 2000 and 2001, I was the Architect for the restoration of the Adairsville, GA Western & Atlantic Railway depot, which was the actual starting point of the race between the locomotive General, taken over by Union agents . . . and the locomotive, Texas, occupied by railway employees and Confederate militiamen. In doing research, for my portfolio book, Lessons Learned . . . A Native American Architect’s Visual Journey Through Five Decades, I stumbled across an astonishing fact that is left out of the history books. Walt Disney had originally planned to build the second Disneyland in Northeast Georgia, but moved his focus to Florida, when greed persuaded Florida state officials to forego a certain Southern tradition, while Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin refused to back down from the state’s “Christian principals.”

This is the version of history told you by some anonymous author on the Tallulah Falls Railroad article in Wikipedia, but it is partially fiction: “According to railway employees, Disney was quite fond of the railway and expressed interest in purchasing it for use as an excursion line. However the Southern Railway management refused, citing an accumulated debt of $300,000 (equal to $3,277,267 today) on the part of the railway. On March 10, 1961, The Tallulah Falls Railway was ordered to be sold as scrap.”

The Tallulah Falls Rail Depot in Tallulah Falls, GA was slightly remodeled to be Adairsville, GA depot in the Disney movie. The Tallulah Falls Depot still exists. Individual historic structures in Cornelia and Clarkesville, GA became the towns of Marietta and Big Shanty, GA, where the Union spies hatched their plot.

I first became aware of a much more accurate version of events in the 1950s, while preparing a history of the Adairsville Depot and Western & Atlantic Railway in 1998 for the National Park Service and Georgia Department of Transportation. However, at that time, I was living in Cartersville, GA . . . in the northwestern part of the state. I didn’t dream that I would someday be living in Habersham County. In 2022, I contacted the archivists at The Walt Disney Company to fill in the gaps.

Way down South in Dixie

In 1954, Walt Disney was already shaking up the world of Hollywood moguls. No matter where the actual location in the world, Hollywood films and TV shows were typically filmed in southern California. “Gone With The Wind” was filmed in a Hollywood studio.

Disney created the concept of a TV movie series then filmed the original three TV shows of the Davy Crockett series on location in North Carolina . . . the Great Smoky Mountains and Fontana Lake . . . plus a short segment in the Florida Everglades. He used real Cherokee Indians to portray the “bloodthirsty” Redstick Creeks of Alabama and Florida Seminoles to portray the “wise” Friendly Creeks of Georgia. This was in a era in which Hollywood rarely hired any Native Americans to portray Native Americans.

Walt Disney did something else that showed true genius. He filmed all of the Davy Crockett series in Technicolor even though there were no color TV sets or color broadcasts in the United States. There was no thought initially of Davy Crockett being shown in movie theaters. It was only an afterthought, when coonskin caps and Davy Crockett school lunch boxes were the rage. The color film, shot in North Carolina and Florida was easily repackaged into a full-length movie.

Walt Disney traveled several times to the beautiful locations where Davy Crockett was filmed. This required him and his assistants to fly to Atlanta then either drive a rental car up to the Great Smoky Mountains or take the Southern Railways train to Cornelia then take the Tallulah Falls Railway to Franklin, NC then take a rental car to the Smokies.

On those trips Disney, corporate executives and the film crew quickly noticed that:

1. The weather was ideal during the summer in the Georgia and North Carolina Mountains, while the heat and humidity of the then-air conditionless South was insufferable for visitors from most other parts of North America.
2. The Southern Appalachians contained some of the most beautiful landscapes and vegetation in North America.
3. Much of the developable land in Northeast Georgia had been abandoned during the Great Depression and was extremely cheap, when compared to California real estate prices.

After Disneyland opened in 1955, these same Walt Disney personnel returned to Northeast Georgia to film “The Great Locomotive Chase” on the Tallulah Falls Railway. This famous Civil War event actually occurred on the Western and Atlantic Railway in Northwest Georgia, but that route was now part of the L&N system and had been modernized. The Tallulah Falls Railroad utilized steam engine locomotives, plus wooden trestles and quaint depots, dating back to the 1800s.

Walt Disney planned to develop 1000 feet deep (304.8 m) Tallulah Gorge into a world-class tourist destination. In his trips back and forth from the Atlanta Airport, he sketched specular hotel towers rising up from the edges of the gorge, which was adjacent to the historic Tallulah Falls rail depot.

Walt Disney quickly discerned that the Tallulah Falls Railroad had been financially ill, practically from its inception. The entire corporate assets could be bought cheaply. Labor costs in rural Georgia were minuscule compared to the operating costs of Disneyland in California.

It was at that point that Walt came up with the idea of a linear entertainment park, stretching 21 miles from the Southern Railways depot in Cornelia, GA to the edge of Tallulah Gorge. Each town and village along the route would become a distinct theme park. In a presage of what has actually occurred in Georgia during the 21st century, Disney anticipated shifting much of the filming of TV shows and movies from Hollywood, California to these theme parks. Tourists staying in Walt Disney hotels, overlooking Tallulah Gorge, could then take excursion trains from there into the mountains of Rabun County, GA and western North Carolina.

Tallulah Gorge became a 2,689-acre state park in 1993.

Oops!

From the promotion of “Gone With the Wind” onward, the State of Georgia and its local officials have done everything possible to make any movie, filmed in Georgia to be a box office success. There was a long list of “winners,” such as “Swamp Fever,” “Song of the South,” “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain,” “The Great Locomotive Chase,” “Deliverance,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” and “Forest Gump” before Georgia became a world center for movie and TV production.

Walt Disney expected the same cooperation with his grand Tallulah Falls Railway project. In particular, he was asking for an expressway to be built from Atlanta to Cornelia. Its economic impact on the state and the region would have been incalculable. Disney was also toying with the idea of a later stage being the construction of a high-speed monorail train to interconnect all of the Northeast Georgia theme parks with Atlanta.

In 1955, Georgia’s population was still larger than Florida’s! After Disneyland – East got going, Georgia probably would have been competing with Texas for being the most populous southern state. That was not to be, however.

Disneyland was racially integrated from the first day. Persons of all races were welcome as guests or employees. However, during the early days of park, whites dominated the better paying jobs . . . as was case throughout the nation. It was clearly stated by Walt Disney that the new Mega-Disneyland in Georgia would also be racially integrated.

At this time, newly elected Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin was fighting integration of the school system in any matter possible. The KKK regularly held televised cross-burnings on top of Stone Mountain. In 1956, the Georgia General Assembly added the Confederate Battle Flag to the state flag. Throughout all 12 years of my public education, all films for schools began with the song Dixie and the portrayal of the Confederate Battle Flag.

Governor Griffin considered it his Christian duty to block Communist ideas like integration from entering his state. He let Walt Disney know that a racially-integrated recreational complex would not be tolerated. He pressured the Southern Railway System, which was headquartered in Atlanta, not to sell the 58 mile long Tallulah Falls Railway to Walt Disney. The $300,000 asking price for 58 miles of rails, depots and real estate was a pittance, but Southern Railway reneged on the offer. Walt Disney walked away from the concept.

The 1961 Civil Rights Act made racial integration the law of the land. The large scale manufacturing of residential air conditioning systems made life in Florida tolerable. The Interstate Highway System was under construction. Orlando, Florida was 520 miles (837 km) farther away from major northern metropolises than Cornelia, GA . . . but it offered mild winter weather. So, when Disney executives continued their search for a second Disneyland site, to Florida they went.

In 1963, Floridians were probably more extreme in their opposition to integration than Georgians, but its elite could smell gold . . . lots of it. Political leaders officially did not condone Disney’s then “liberal” social policies, but “overlooked them.” The corporation got the expressways and airport expansion in the Orlando area that it needed. The rest is history.

Walt was right all along

Today, the majority of movies and TV programs, produced by Walt Disney or its subsidiary, Marvel Studios, are filmed in Georgia. That list includes most of its major box office hits. Each time that Georgia legislators tried to prove that they are just as wacko as their peers in Florida and Texas, Disney threatens to pull its filming operations out of Georgia, but doesn’t.

Fortunately, the Fortune 500 CEO’s in Georgia are some of the most progressive and best-educated people around. These leaders keep a low profile, but they are NOT happy about the repressive laws being passed in Sunbelt states. They are not going to allow wacko politicians, especially a narcistic governor such as Florida is stuck with, to harm commerce. Don’t be terribly surprised, if the Walt Disney Company moves many of its corporate offices from Orlando to the new Hollywood, just south of the Atlanta Airport.