Biography | Walt Disney — The Santa Fe Depot Where the Family Came Off the Train

People treat Main Street, U.S.A. as if it were invented on a drawing board in Burbank.

Walt Disney later pointed to this town.

In April 1906 Elias and Flora Disney brought five children from Chicago to Marceline, a Santa Fe division point in north-central Missouri.

Walt was four.

He later described arriving by train, a wagon meeting the family, and weeping willows in the front yard of the Crane farm just outside the city limits.

Elias had bought William E. Crane's forty acres on 5 March 1906 for three thousand dollars, then an adjoining five acres from the widow.

The farm lasted until 1911, when Elias's health failed and the family sold out and moved to Kansas City.

The standing depot on East Santa Fe Avenue is the 1913 Santa Fe rebuild, not the wooden station of 1906.

It is still the right pin. The tracks that delivered the family still run behind it.

In 2001 the restored depot opened as the Walt Disney Hometown Museum, stocked in part with papers and objects given by Walt's sister Ruth.

The farmhouse itself is not a public interior. A replica barn and a sign mark the field west of town.

This pin stays on the public station at 120 East Santa Fe Avenue.

Photo: Mitchazenia, 13 February 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Boy Scouts of America, 1946, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.