There is simply more to Walt Disney World. I don’t mean in terms of size – I mean that there’s more “stuff” to what makes it tick, more obscure corners and weird dead-ends of history. Walt Disney World is bigger, deeper, and weirder. Disneyland is about rides, but Walt Disney World is about infrastructure. Consider that in order to get Disneyland built, Disney asked the city of Anaheim to run a sewer line and allow them to demolish part of Cerritos Avenue… and that’s about it. Walt Disney World involved such matters as land reclamation, mass transit, hotel operation, urban planning, drainage, waste treatment…

It was an insane venture, a leap out into blue sky.

History of Bay Lake

At the heart of all this work was Bay Lake. It’s a natural lake, densely forested along its shores with Florida pine scrub. If you go boating on Bay Lake, you may notice that the boat transportation boat docks are stationary, not floating. Unlike in a non-Disney lake, the water level of Bay Lake does not rise or fall. It wasn’t always this way, but it is a subtle reminder of how much work Disney put into the property that’s meant to be invisible. Long before there was a magic kingdom, Disney was digging miles of drainage canals to regulate water flow and ensure what nature put there remained “good show”.

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Bay Lake’s drainage canal. 1969 WDP Annual Report

It’s said that Walt Disney chose the location of Walt Disney World based on Bay Lake and its natural island. In the 1969 press conference announcing the first phase of Walt Disney World, Roy Disney remarked: “I remember when we walked out there one day – we had looked at the land from the air, from the ground, tramped a lot of it, and Walt stood alongside of Bay Lake and he said, ‘This is where we’ll put the park’.” And they did.

Bay Lake… what is up with Bay Lake? I’d wager that despite its incredible importance to the development of Walt Disney World, most visitors never even see the darn thing. But it’s the sole part of Walt Disney World that Walt Disney actually saw: the forested shores of Bay Lake, the natural mangroves and water reflecting the blue Florida sky, the island just off shore. Soon, the bulldozers and steam shovels would arrive and change central Florida forever.

Yet this weird little corner of the “world” has been home to more failed projects, bizarre schemes, and unlikely adventures than any other at Walt Disney World. It defeats all challengers, having remained defiantly underutilized while Walt Disney World groans with expansion around it.

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Source: Orlando Sentinel

So what is up with Bay Lake? Its defiant weirdness long pre-dates the arrival of Disney on the scene.

Riles Island

If we crack open the history books we discover that Bay Lake and its signature island had been owned by the Plant Railroad Company, which it acquired as part of Florida’s aggressive land sell-off to investors after the Civil War. Henry Plant’s company divested itself of the island in 1887, and the property went through multiple owners before landing in the possession of one Joel Riles. The name “Riles Island”, sometimes incorrectly distorted to “Raz Island’, has marked the island ever since.

There’s always just been something about that darn island. Joel Riles neglected to pay taxes on it, and it was reclaimed by the state of Florida, but not before Riles slipped everyone a Mickey and sold the island to a man named Jim Geer – presumably laughing himself silly on the way to the bank. Since the state had already gone and sold Riles Island to somebody else named Reams, this was a real problem, and Geer ended up buying out Reams to own the island he already bought!

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Bay Lake in its untouched state, mid-60s. Source: Florida Memory

The Geer family may have regretted the choice, because this set off a chain of property disputes within the family that lasted for twenty years. The sun glistening on the waters of Bay Lake must have spelled out m-o-n-e-y to everyone who beheld it.

Idyl Bay Isle

Susan Geer, the widow of Jim, finally sold the whole real estate property to Delmar Nicholson, who has gone down in legend as Radio Nick. Radio Nick was something of a local legend in the sleepy Orlando of the 1930s; he had studied radio technology in Philadelphia and opened “Central Florida’s Most Beautiful Radio Shop” at 24 Wall Street downtown. He also sponsored bowling teams, staged snake fights, and helped found Central Florida’s first zoo- which enraged local residents because animals kept escaping from it. On Christmas Eve he liked to tromp up and down Orange Avenue with an enormous porcelain duck filled with whiskey and pour drinks out to passersby and shoppers. I swear I’m not making this up.

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“Radio Nick” with his tropical fruit on ‘Idyl Bay Isle’. Orlando Sentinel, 1948

Radio Nick bought the island, built a little cypress shelter there, and began promoting it as “Idyl Bay Isle”, where he relaxed and apparently kept a pet Sand Hill Crane. In the mid-40s he was growing limes, mangoes, avocados and papayas, a complete novelty in Orlando.

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“The Most Beautiful Radio Store in Orlando”, 1938. Source: Orlando Sentinel

Radio Nick sold the island in the late 40s and dissolved his “Idyl Bay Isle” business interests in 1952. The island sat there apparently uninhabited, but not necessarily unused. In 1971, Orlando Sentinel writer Charlie Wadsworth recalled of Disney’s first fireworks show: “There hadn’t been a noise like that since some of the young bucks of the community used to get together on old Riles Island years ago. Only in those days they called that kind of activity “howling at the moon”.

Fort Wilderness Beginnings

Walt Disney must have peered down out of his airplane at the dapple waters of Bay Lake and seen money too. Riles Island would have to wait until after the opening of Walt Disney World, but a nearby site – once part of the Radio Nick parcel – had been selected as the location for a campground, Fort Wilderness.

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Magic Kingdom under construction in 1969. In the background, a drained Bay Lake.

In the madness of the nation’s largest construction project, the campground was a distant priority. Dick Nunis called up a Disneyland Cast Member whom he was acquainted with, Keith Kambak, in 1969. “We need to open a campground at Disney World, and we’ve kind of forgotten about it. Do you have an experience at campgrounds?

Kambak had not, and Nunis promptly sent him on a six-month tour to get ideas. Upon arriving in Florida with mere months to build the thing, Kambeck discovered that resources were few. He and his construction crew would literally steal unattended company vehicles and equipment to knock the 131 campsites into shape. They became known as “Kambeck’s Raiders”. The overwhelmed executive team looked the other way.

The campground would open as little more than paved roads and pull-in campsites in December 1971; it was a wild success. Campsites were sold for $10 a day with a $1.50 parking fee; since there was no formal airport in Orlando, most visitors were arriving by car anyway and the campground was expanded quickly. There was so little at Fort Wilderness in terms of infrastructure that Disney bought an antique truck and drove it around the campground to sell produce and supplies. Early campers perhaps looked across the water from the white sand beach at the silhouette of Riles Island and wondered what Disney was planning to build over there. In 1972 the earth-movers came and tore out all of the trees, leveled the earth, and began to build up new hills and dales.

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Before there were trading posts, there was the Fort Wilderness “Pedlar Truck”!!

Disney decided to christen the place “Treasure Island”; the model of Walt Disney World on display at the Preview Center included such piratical details as a fort flying the Jolly Roger, a shipwreck, and Captain Flint’s blockhouse. It opened in 1974 as a nature sanctuary featuring birds and some absolutely gorgeous landscape design, with bubbling waterfalls, moody secluded ponds, and boardwalks through mangroves. What this attraction was actually supposed to be was something the company could seemingly never quite decide on.

Those pirates. What it was missing was the pirates.

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One Treasure Island, hold the treasure please!

Company literature of the era consistently calls out three planned features: the Benbow Inn (probably a restaurant), Ben Gunn’s Cave, and the Wreck of the Hispaniola. Concept designs for the latter two were produced by Colin Campbell and Marc Davis, but the attractions never got off the ground. For years the only real hints to the intended theme were the cast member costumes and a genuine shipwreck, hauled up out of the Gulf and placed on the southern shore of the island. This was said to be the Walrus, the ship of Captain Flint.

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The ship is still there, if you can believe it

What put the kibosh on the buccaneers was the OPEC oil crisis; in an era when most Disney visitors arrived by car the shortage of gasoline was a real problem. Disney canceled everything that hadn’t already begun construction. After several years of promoting the island with a pirate theme and probably enduring some guest complaints at the lack of timber-shivering, Disney threw in the towel and re-named it Discovery Island in 1978.

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Discovery Island was a mini version of Animal Kingdom before there was an Animal Kingdom

Disney’s most immediate goals in the early 70s were extending the length of the guest stay, and the Treasure Island / Fort Wilderness area seemed the most promising place to do this. Pioneer Hall had been built in 1973 as the first of a planned entertainment complex. The 1972 WDP Annual Report speaks of “the new Fort Wilderness Stockade and Western Town where complete, dining, shopping, and entertainment facilities are being built in phases.” Also announced but never built: a Winnie the Pooh miniature golf course (???). Disney’s intention was to build up enough attractions at the campground to bundle all of them into a ticket book, effectively making Bay Lake’s kingdom of wilderness into a second Magic Kingdom. Oh, but the best-laid plans…

In order to transport guests around the sprawling Wilderness campground, Disney built a custom narrow gauge railroad which began rolling in 1974. This set of 4 full-scale steam engines are actually the only steam trains ever built by Walt Disney Productions; the first few Disneyland engines were built using Walt Disney’s personal money and all other trains have either been purchased ready-made or outsourced. Roger Broggie did the design engineering and Bob Gurr helped design the passenger cabs; he used stock school-bus windows to replicate the nineteenth-century drop-down window style of the time.

The fatal flaw of the operation was the track. In order to save on costs, Disney let Buena Vista Construction install the track. Instead of building up a bed of rock and then laying the rail atop this, they installed the tracks directly on the ground and then dumped gravel over the top. Keeping the track from buckling was a constant problem.

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“WDW Vacationland” magazine, Spring 1973

Disney went to all of this trouble because they intended on making riding the rails the best option of getting through the campground to the rear of the complex. The same year, the original Hoop-Dee-Doo Revue began playing in Pioneer Hall. But the rest of the planned “Western Town” never materialized; even now, five decades on, the “Settlement” area of Fort Wilderness consists of Pioneer Hall, a trading post, and a small parking lot for Golf Carts… which is pretty much what it was in 1973.

Disney did manage one last big blowout for Fort Wilderness in 1976 with the opening of River Country on the western edge of the fort. River Country was fairly innovative by mid-70s standards, with body slides, a tube ride, and an innovative fresh-water pond that spilled naturally into Bay Lake.

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The only remotely comparable thrill to be found in Central Florida was the old rubber slide into the pool of the Polynesian Village, built in 1971. River Country was very much a harbinger of the development of a real water park. For a time, this was a major draw for vacationers and unlike anything most of them had ever experienced.

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River Country model, 1976 WDP Annual Report

In 1976 the company was still beating the drum for the Fort. In the 1976 Annual Report they breathlessly announced “Fort Wilderness itself is slated for further expansion in the near future. Plans call for a Frontiertown, a new recreational complex and still more campsites.

As it turns out, plans were very much underway to bring something special to this corner of Walt Disney World. Marc Davis and Wathel Rogers were designing a walk-through funhouse attraction which they described as “an indoor Tom Sawyer Island”… it’s also something of a spiritual sequel to the Haunted Mansion. If you’d like to find out more about this fascinating forgotten bit of Disney history, I did an entire article on Adventure House on my personal blog back in 2018. When we pull back and look at the whole package of offerings being developed around Fort Wilderness at the time, we can see the piecemeal full day being brought together. A morning boat ride to Discovery Island, an afternoon dip at River Country, a lap through Adventure House and dinner at the Hoop Dee Doo is indeed a full day of varied Disney adventures – and honestly, had they built the pirate elements on Discovery Island or moved forward with Adventure House it probably would have worked.

But Bay Lake would not be so easily tamed and the late 70s would turn out to be the golden age of Disney’s big plans for Riles Island and its environs. With no shopping and dining complex built at Settlement, with no Adventure House to be the area’s signature E-Ticket draw, the Fort Wilderness Railroad – built to transport guests from the parking lot to the rear for the campground – made no sense. It cost money to ride the rails, and it was inefficient for Campground guests who just wanted to get to Settlement, so they tended to treat it as a once-per-trip treat instead of a viable form of transportation. The buses and trams that ran through the campground were free, after all.

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Card Walker took over as CEO of Disney in late 1976, and Card was all-in on EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland. Fort Wilderness was pushed once again to the back burner, and the Railroad was closed for good in 1980. By 1980 it was clear that Disney would have to tear up all of the original track and rebuild it properly, and the cost was simply too great. Dick Nunis ordered that a vehicle from the Mine Train Thru Nature’s Wonderland be shipped to Florida and tested on the rails; the old 1956 attraction vehicle was so slow a full lap of the campground took an hour.

And so things settled into a sleepy way of life at Fort Wilderness, which is pretty much the way they’ve stayed in the 40 years since.

Fort Wilderness – Recent History to Today

In the early 90s the construction of Wilderness Lodge momentarily threatened to wake Fort Wilderness from her slumber. Plans called for a new rail line running from the Lodge to Fort Wilderness, where an amphitheater housing a new version of the Buffalo Bill show created for Disneyland Paris would be built. This would be part of a new 600-room hotel complex called, appropriately enough, Buffalo Junction. Land was actually cleared for this line, but today the route is home only to a very long walking trail that will take you from the Lodge to the Fort. This author rode their bicycle along it years ago, if you’d like to see just how much untouched Florida wilderness still separates the two complexes:

By all rights Wilderness Lodge, the crown jewel of Walt Disney World, should have revitalized Fort Wilderness – but that’s not the way it happened. In 1999 Disney finally shuttered Discovery Island, relocating all of the animal inhabitants to Animal Kingdom.

For about a decade Disney had been bundling together admissions to Discovery Island and River Country, which is how I saw them both as a kid in the early 90s. With her sister attraction shuttered and newer, more elaborate water parks available elsewhere on Disney property, River Country only lasted a few more years before being closed. This occurred about a month after the September 11th attacks in 2001 and River Country was part of a whole slate of other closures that occurred in response to the sudden disruption of the travel industry.

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Standard Stealth

Port Orleans and Dixie Landings would return in time, and the Disney Institute was torn down and turned into Saratoga Springs. But River Country just sat there, abandoned, all of its gorgeous Fred Jorger designed rocks slowly crumbling apart in the hot Florida sun.

And there it sat for nearly two decades.

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Standard Stealth

Disney announced in 2018 that they would be moving ahead with a new DVC resort, ponderously named Reflections: A Disney Lakeside Lodge. Concept art showed an unremarkable modern blob of high-rises, and the theme was said to be a mash-up of Pocahontas, Brother Bear, and Princess and the Frog. But like so many plans going all the way back to Radio Nick’s Idyl Bay Isle, they would only get so far. River Country was demolished, as was the horse barn for the Tri-Circle-D Ranch.

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Reflections would have been located on the shoreline of Bay Lake located between Disney’s Wilderness Lodge and Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort & Campground at Walt Disney World Resort.

The travel shutdowns of 2020 halted construction before it had really begun, and in April 2021 Disney hauled away all of the construction trailers. While I was writing this article, Disney announced they would be expanding the Polynesian Village with a hotel that looks suspiciously like Reflections, meaning that once again a resort to connect the Lodge and the Fort has been derailed by outrageous fortune. Just one more mad dream on the shores of Bay Lake washed away in the tide of circumstance.

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Today, Fort Wilderness sits untouched by the hands of time. RVs sit amidst old-growth Florida scrub, and families drive garishly decorated golf carts to and from their campsites in lieu of riding a narrow-gauge railroad. At Christmas, the place becomes a do-it-yourself paradise, with homegrown light displays that feel like the sort of thing Disney would put an end to if they could take the time to notice it’s happening. It all feels exactly like it’s preserved from its original state.

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It’s hard to get there; you either have to take a boat or park and take a set of busses to arrive at the destination. You have to really want to get to Fort Wilderness to ever see it, which lends it an air of mystery, of secrecy. It’s a place that time passed by, and it’s the last such place left at Walt Disney World.

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Abandoned Florida

Across the way, Discovery Island sits abandoned, nature slowly undoing what Disney paid so much money to create. The wreck of the Walrus still sits on the island’s southern side, more often than not so overgrown with the jungle-thick that it looks like nothing more than a large bush. The carefully crafted white sand beaches have become a mess of reeds and weeds, their natural state. It’s very much how it must have been in the decades after Radio Nick moved out, and local kids from Windermere rowed out there on hot nights to “howl at the moon”.

It’s all so bizarre, so unlike Disney. Having one abandoned attraction anywhere is already weird, but when Discovery Island and River Country sat rotting away in the torpid humidity just yards away from each other, the effect was truly uncanny. It was like riding a boat to an alternate timeline where Walt Disney World closed in 1985. Rumors have swirled since the 90s of the fate of Discovery Island, claiming the construction of everything from honeymoon cabins to a full-scale recreation of the island from the 1993 game “Myst.” As the Myst connection demonstrates, these rumors have been dormant for quite some time.

Riles Island has defeated all challengers, even corporate owners. It’s a secluded island paradise that nobody can actually use. Every so often urban explorers and extreme campers find their way across the water and explore before being summarily ejected; like generations before them, the lure of that island is impossible to resist.

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Pioneer Hall in younger days

The Bermuda Triangle of Walt Disney World

So what is it about Bay Lake?

Talk to enough old-time Cast Members and you start to hear the same stories. Walt Disney World was a smaller place back then. They’d ask me if I know about the plane. In 1969 Disney drained Bay Lake and scraped its bottom clean. At the same time they dug out Seven Seas Lagoon, connected the two bodies via the water-bridge, and laid white sand beaches. Some whisper that while scraping out the bottom of the lake, construction crews uncovered something big and metal. It could have been an old single-passenger airplane. Or maybe not. Given a choice between alerting the authorities – and possibly delaying construction – or just ignoring it. Disney chose to ignore it. The earth-movers scooped it up and ground it back down into the muck. It may still be down there.

I’m not sure I believe that story.

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Radio Nick’s “Idyl Bay Isle” looking very much how it does today

Still others have told me about the old Disney Reservations Center, on the north side of Bay Lake where the ferry boats are hauled out of dry dock. They said sometimes they’d arrive in the morning and the teletype machines had been running all night in the empty office. They told me sometimes they’d be typing “HELP ME” over and over.

I’m not sure I believe that one either.

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spirits or not, Bay Lake is an abnormality. Walt Disney World has grown and grown and grown, but somehow this massive natural resource has remained untouched. It makes no sense. It’s lakefront property, dry, buildable, and valuable. Bay Lake is probably the single largest piece of lakefront property in Orlando that isn’t currently ringed with developments. It’s not like Disney doesn’t want to build there, but every attempt fails. If it’s not the energy crisis, it’s terrorist attacks or worldwide plagues. There’s just something about the timing never being right.

Bay Lake is Walt Disney World’s Bermuda Triangle, where ambition sets sail across the water for Riles Island and is never seen again. And as we have seen, this quality it has predates even Disney’s purchase of the land. Radio Nick briefly tamed it and grew mangos, and Disney briefly tamed it and displayed parrots. In just a few years, Discovery Island will have been closed for just as long as it was open. It has come full circle from its start as a reciprocal land holding by the Plant System Railroad; it’s private property and you are not invited.

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So next time you’re at Disney World, ride a little blue boat across the water and look across to Riles Island, or Idyl Bay Isle, or Treasure Island, or Myst Island. “Why don’t they build something there?” you may say to yourself, as generations before you have said, as Walt Disney said.

All efforts have failed. If the island is an enigma, it’s at least a benign one – a secluded patch of nature that just wants to be left alone.


, The Mystery of Walt Disney World’s Bermuda TriangleIf you read this far then you’d definitely like my book Boundless Realm: Deep Explorations Inside Disney’s Haunted Mansion, which is 350 pages of dense historical goodness just like this! You can grab it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Books-A-Million, and your local indie book store will be able to get it for you, too. Thank you for supporting independent Disney writers!

 



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