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A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Bill Evans



By Dave Shute

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians and author of Jim’s Gems in The easy Guide, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT DISNEY WORLD: BILL EVANS

By Jim Korkis

In the spring of 1985, I got a chance to interview landscaper and Disney Legend Bill Evans about his work on the Disney theme parks.

In 1952, Bill and his brother Jack landscaped the grounds of Walt Disney’s Holmby Hills home. Walt then asked them in 1954 to landscape Disneyland. Jack passed away in 1958 of a heart attack.

Bill stayed on as a consultant, drawing landscape plans, installing materials and supervising maintenance of the Park. He was hired as the Director of Landscape Design and was responsible for the landscape design of Walt Disney World.

(c) Disney

(c) Disney

Although he officially retired in 1975, Bill consulted with Imagineering on the landscaping for every other Walt Disney theme park until his death. Today, his methods of plant propagation, plant relocation, and recycling are widely used everywhere.

To continue our celebration of WDW’s 45th Anniversary, here is a short excerpt from that interview I did with Bill:

“In Florida we had a perfectly miserable experience in the theme park area down there because of the Florida terrain. The site of Disney World is a big piece of real estate, almost fifty square miles. Walt wanted that kind of dimension in order to separate himself very thoroughly from the neon jungles that surrounded Disneyland. That was the plus side.

“The minus side was most of that site had an elevation of, I think, the fall in ten miles was only ten feet. There weren’t any hills on the property although they were described as hills by the local surveyors.

“As an example, I wanted to start a tree farm to start producing some of the material we needed. A surveyor said, ‘There is just the place for it. There is a hill over on the West Side that would be just fine. Not that many trees on it.’ He drove me over. There wasn’t a bit of road. It was all pasture land and swamp, and exceedingly poor pasture land at that. We finally arrived at the spot and he said, “What do you think of that? It’s a hill”.

“Boy, you could have fooled me. There was a place out there about maybe six or eight feet of freeboard before you ran into the water table.

“I’ll walk up there but catch me if I fall. I don’t want to roll all the way to the bottom.” (Laughs.)

“That’s where we put the tree farm.

“When we built the theme park, we had to lift the elevation of a hundred acres a maximum of 15 feet and a minimum of 10 feet. In order to get some freeboard to build the biggest basement in Florida, you had to raise the elevation. The process was to dig a 250 acre lagoon and the yield from that soil is what built that site.

“If you look at the soil profile in that part of Florida it is kind of like a Danish pastry. There is a skinny layer of sand on top and then there’s some peat muck, maybe something else and underneath all of that some blue clay and underneath that pink clay and then brown clay and gray clay. All the colors of the rainbow but all clay.

“When you move the earth you take off this layer and put that over somewhere else and this layer on top of that. All of this abominable soil. You could dig a hole in that and it would fill with water. You’d drain it and you had just as much water in there a week later.

“When we built Epcot, we were able to convince the engineers that no matter what it cost it would be a great economy to ignore that kind of source and go find a sandy source for soil. We have a very congenial environment for the landscaping at Epcot. No clay.”

*  *  *  *  *

Thanks, Jim! Bill Evans was named a Disney Legend in 1992.

And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew, which reprints much material first written for this site, and The Vault of Walt: Volume 4, and his contributions to The easy Guide to Your Walt Disney World Visit, all published by Theme Park Press.
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