1971 · Walt Disney World, Florida
The STOLport
BUILT / ABANDONED
Disney built it, and the future went another direction.
Disney World briefly had scheduled airline service almost at the front door.
What Walt encountered
Planners expected short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft to become part of a broader Florida transportation network.
What Disney built
The Lake Buena Vista STOLport opened in October 1971. FAA history describes it as the first officially designated STOLport solely for STOL aircraft and part of a projected intrastate system.
Where it reaches Walt Disney World
- Connection
- Direct — the runway still exists
The old runway sits just southeast of the Magic Kingdom and Transportation and Ticket Center area, near World Drive. The transportation future did not develop as expected, and the physical trace remains.
Pictures the house holds
Every picture below is held by this house. Each one says what it shows, why it belongs to this story, and which document and page it came from, so a reader can go and look at the sheet rather than take the caption's word for it.
A Walt Disney World fact-sheet page. Under TRANSPORTATION it gives the monorail figures and then: 'STOLport ... is the first officially designated public-use STOLport for exclusive use by Short Take-Off and Landing air-craft ... a 2,000 foot paved and lighted strip ... terminal connecting major Florida airports ...'. The photograph at the head of the page is Main Street horse cars, not the STOLport.
Mouse Museum scan img145.jpg · single sheet
The record carries no date for this artifact, and none is assigned here.
Mouse Museum scan, harvested 15 Sept 2026, local file ...\uploads\2017\06\img145.jpg. OCR of this exact file is indexed in the house vault (corpus 'mousemuseum'); the OCR is clean and matches the page, and the ellipses are the document's own typography, not OCR damage.
It is the Disney-side counterpart to the FAA history already cited in the page's written ledger: the same 'first officially designated' claim, in Walt Disney World's own words, plus the 2,000-foot dimension and the connection to major Florida airports that matches the Marc Davis / John Hench brochure line about service from Tampa and Daytona. It is a document page, not a photograph of the runway -- caption it as such.
The map captioned 'WALT DISNEY WORLD IN FLORIDA': the state outline with Pensacola, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, Cape Kennedy, Ft. Meyers, West Palm Beach and Miami marked, and a drawn corridor running from the Tampa area through Orlando to the Walt Disney World property. The heading 'OCTOBER, 1971' sits at the top of the same printed page.
master planning for Walt Disney World · PDF page 8 (the book's printed pages 10-11); the map is on printed page 11
Dated 1971-10. READ OFF THE PAGE. The printed heading on this same page reads 'OCTOBER, 1971'. The date is therefore the page's, not an inference about the volume, which carries mixed internal dates.
'master planning for Walt Disney World', in the house archive as Master Planning WDW.pdf, PDF page 8.
The story's evidence is that scheduled short-haul service to the property was planned from other Florida cities -- the Marc Davis / John Hench brochure names Tampa and Daytona. This is Disney's own 1971 map drawing exactly that statewide relationship, so it illustrates the planned network rather than standing in for the runway. It replaces a generic crowd-sourced aeronautical chart that depicted no part of this story.
What the house holds
The house holds the airstrip inside Disney’s own 1971 guest literature, in two separate documents, listed beside the boats and the monorails as ordinary transport. Auto-transcribed video about the STOLport also sits in the corpus; it is a lead and is not cited here.
“Lake Buena Vista STOLport — Initial air service planned from airports in Tampa, Daytona and other Florida cities directly to Walt Disney World.”
QuotedMarc Davis John Hench WDW Brochure · corpus disneydocs · no date in the record
No date in the record. The brochure carries the 25 October 1971 dedication plaque text, which dates the content but is not a date of printing.
Two documents in the corpus share this title; this passage is in the longer of the two. The word Tampa is broken across a line as Tam-pa on the sheet.
“sailboats, steam-powered launches, 200-passenger sidewheel steamboats, a 450-passenger, rear paddlewheel steamboat, sloops, pedal boats, canoes, catamarans, trams, six monorail trains, and a STOLport (an airport for Short Take-Off and Landing aircraft).”
Quotedimg493.jpg · Mouse Museum scan · corpus mousemuseum · no date in the record
An undated scan. No date is assigned to it here, and none is inferred from the filename.
The airstrip is listed as part of the ordinary transport fleet, between the trams and the monorails.
Cited, not quotedWalt Disney World: Background and Philosophy · page 122 · corpus buzzprice, UCF Harrison Price Papers · 21 September 1967 (STARS cover page)
Too degraded to quote: the reading stops at an abbreviation, not at the end of the sentence
“STOL (Short Take-Off and Landing) planes leave Walt Disney World every day for short trips to other cities in Florida.”
QuotedWDW Vacationland Winter Spring 1972 · page 19 · corpus disneydocs, disneydocs.net · 1972 (curator caption)
“Short-takeoff planes from McCoy Jetport are dropping down like big insects onto a landing strip.”
QuotedOrlandoland Magazine · corpus disneydocs, disneydocs.net · no date in the record
“It will be landing and operating from the WALT DISNEY WORLD Stolport.”
QuotedWDW Tencennial · corpus disneydocs, disneydocs.net · no date in the record
Cited, not quotedimg145.jpg · corpus mousemuseum, Mouse Museum scan · no date in the record
Too degraded to quote: the reading opens in the middle of a clause
7 passages carried out of 7 found, across 18 rows the corpus matched. 2 of them are the same passage as a holding printed above and are folded into it rather than counted twice. Date order. Nothing here ranks and nothing is called important.
On the ground
- Walt Disney World, Florida
- 28.39612, -81.5659
- Lake Buena Vista STOLport
- 28.39612, -81.5659
The map is drawn by a mapping library loaded from another host. Every point it shows is printed above it as text, so with scripts off this page loses a picture of a map and nothing else.
Sources
- https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/37596/dot_37596_DS1.pdf ↗
- https://www.florida-aviation-database.com/dotsite/publications/2010Airportdirectory-final.pdf ↗
- https://d23.com/featured-photo/lake-buena-vista-stolport/ ↗
Held locally, named so a reader can ask for the sheet
- Marc Davis John Hench WDW Brochure · corpus
disneydocs - img493.jpg · corpus
mousemuseum - Walt Disney World: Background and Philosophy, page 122 · corpus
buzzprice, UCF Harrison Price Papers - WDW Vacationland Winter Spring 1972, page 19 · corpus
disneydocs, disneydocs.net - Orlandoland Magazine · corpus
disneydocs, disneydocs.net - WDW Tencennial · corpus
disneydocs, disneydocs.net - img145.jpg · corpus
mousemuseum, Mouse Museum scan
Every public story stays tied to its evidence. Research links are kept here, and documents held locally are named with their page so a reader can ask for the sheet. Crowd-sourced encyclopedias are not a source in this ledger.
How to read the evidence
- Documented
- Strong primary or authoritative evidence supports the connection.
- Conflicting chronology
- Multiple credible accounts disagree on date or sequence.
- Open question
- The visit or object is real; the claimed influence still needs proof.
- Built, then abandoned
- Disney built it, and the future went another direction.
Quotations from scanned documents close line-end hyphens and render line breaks as spaces. Nothing else is altered. Passages that do not read cleanly are cited rather than quoted. The raw on-disk reading is printed beside every one of those quotations so the repair can be checked rather than trusted. A passage carried straight out of the corpus is printed exactly as it sits on disk and nothing is closed up: a word broken across a column stays broken.
The corpus read for these pages is F:\DEEPVAULT\_index\vault.sqlite (FTS5 table 'vault', 23,961 rows, read-only). quote_ok is true only where the reading is clean enough to put in front of a reader. No passage is ever tidied up, because a corrected quote is an invented one. A passage that is not quotable is still cited — document, date, page — and the reader is told the sheet is a scan.