Main Street History
What is a Main Street?
Main Street is the name often given to the street of a village, town or small city where most of the shops are. Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, as the population grew and new towns spans up all over the country, Main Street was a very important place in the community. As well as shops, there were often churches, courts, and city halls, and Main Street was also home to many people who lived in apartments above street level. It was a place where people socialised, and it sometimes even had parades like Disney does today
Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland Park.
Walt and Roy Disney return to Marceline, 1956.
Disney's Main Street U.S.A.
Believe it or not, Main Street U.S.A. that you can find in the Disney Parks is actually based on Walt Disney’s boyhood town of Marceline, Missouri. Walt lived there from when he was 5 years old until he was 9. He described his time here as the ‘happiest days of my life’ and said that he could ‘clearly remember every detail’.
However, I’m not so sure Walt’s memory was as good as he thought it was. The Main Street he built at Disneyland was very different from the Main Streets of days gone by. The one he built was perfect, but in reality Victorian Main Streets weren’t that nice. To find out what they were really like, let’s take a look at Marceline in the early 1900s.
Victorian Main Streets
Taken in 1905, this photograph shows Marceline’s Main Street as it would have been when the Disney family arrived in town the following year. It doesn’t take Mickey Mouse to realise that Disneyland’s Main Street is very different from this one. For a start, Marceline’s street is just a dirt road — it would have been a a river of mud and smelly horse poo during the rainy months. The buildings are long, uneven, and detached, and the street is lined with ugly power lines. This miserable appearance is a world apart from Disneyland’s version, where all the unpleasant bits of the Victorian past are not included. So, next time you visit the Disney Parks and walk right down the middle of Main Street, just remember — if you did that on a real Victorian Main Street, you’d probably get covered in horse poo!
Marceline, Missouri, 1905. Missouri Historical Society.
