A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Disney Springs and its Stories
By Dave Shute
Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.
DISNEY SPRINGS AND ITS STORIES
By Jim Korkis
Florida has one of the largest concentrations of freshwater springs on Earth, with more than 900 natural springs. Springs served as locations for Spanish missions, steamboat landings, gristmills and more, including reservoirs for irrigating crops. A few springs gave birth to towns, including Silver Springs in Marion County, Green Cove Spring in Clay County, and De Leon Springs in Volusia County.
Inspired by small Florida towns that developed in the early 1900s around these bodies of water, the storyline for Disney Springs–the shopping, dining and entertainment area of the far east side of Walt Disney World–is that Disney Springs also attracted its first settlers “more than a century ago”.
That original group of settlers discovered a natural spring and a wonderful piece of land near it to settle on in the mid-1800s. They built the Town Center where the residents lived. They even built a water side promenade where they could gather to relax after a busy day.
As the population grew, the town branched out to towards the water with The Landing, which was the transportation hub (for planes, trains and more), and then continued to expand, on either side of the Town Center, with the Marketplace and the West Side.
In the West Side there are remnants of an elevated train trestle that was supposedly built for the fictional 1950 Springs Centennial Expo that is shown on a poster in D-Luxe Burger and at Guest Relations. That Expo had hot air balloons and a big distinctive central structure like most World’s Fairs that later became Characters in Flight and the Cirque du Soleil building.
According to the back story, a Florida cattle rancher named Martin Sinclair and his wife Clara first discovered the water source of the Springs in 1850 and settled there. Sinclair shifted from just being a dealer in beef cattle after he attended the St. Louis World’s Fair and discovered a new treat: a hamburger.
That inspiration resulted in the Glowing Oak Ranch evolving into a small family restaurant. Glowing Oak Ranch became Glowing Oak Restaurant officially on July 24, 1921. The restaurant provided the refreshments for the Springs Grand Centennial Expo in 1950.
Officially, the “current owner, Martin Sinclair VI” re-branded the Glowing Oak Restaurant to D-Luxe Burger on May 15, 2016.
Blaze Pizza took over the space in Town Center at Disney Springs that used to be occupied by the town’s lumber mill – The Buena Vista Timber Company established in 1868.
The restaurant design includes elements reminiscent of the workings of a sawmill, from a prop wood planer to the layout of the dining room where the tables and benches are arranged in rows to suggest logs that have been pulled up to the mill from the springs.
The Ganachery Chocolate Shop used to house the town’s only apothecary shop that supplied the necessary medicines for the inhabitants to cure their ills.
The space was taken over by a South American couple (their photos are on the wall) who turned their love for the cocoa bean, a major South American crop from which chocolate is made, into a chocolate shop adapting the existing pharmacy shelves and equipment to their needs.
An old billboard advertises the passenger train that used to stop in the town. There are some stray rails still embedded in the pathways. STK Steakhouse is the home of the old railroad station and is a reference to a 1889 train station in Downtown Orlando. The Imagineers didn’t need to reference old photos because the station still stands today. It’s Church Street Station.
The Polite Pig was the location of the original farmer’s market for the area. Ancient machinery sits unused next to a weathered sign, which indicates that the apparatus was used for a spring water ice works operation that now houses Sprinkles. The bottling plant was a building reclaimed to house Morimoto Asia.
Many more stories behind the various buildings were created by Imagineers and are awaiting to be rediscovered.
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Thanks, Jim! I don’t much cover Disney Springs on this site, but our book is rich in overviews and dining reviews. See below for how we start.
And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!
In the meantime, check out his books, including his latest, Disney Never Lands, and about planned but unbuilt concepts, and Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew
, which reprints much material first written for this site, all published by Theme Park Press.
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