Walt Disney Hometown Museum

Marceline was made by a railroad. The Santa Fe founded it in 1888 as a division point on its Kansas City to Chicago line, and in 1906 Elias and Flora Disney moved their five children, Herbert, Raymond, Roy, Walt and Ruth, to a farm outside town. Walt was four when he arrived by train. His Uncle Mike was a Santa Fe engineer who passed through often, and the museum dates Walt's lifelong love of trains to those years. In 1911, with Elias in failing health, the farm was sold and the family moved to Kansas City.

Walt kept returning to Marceline in his work and in person. He said So Dear to My Heart, released in 1948, was the life he and his brother grew up with in Missouri, and the museum describes Main Street, U.S.A., which opened with Disneyland in 1955, as inspired by the town. He and Roy came back in 1956 to dedicate the municipal park and pool, The Great Locomotive Chase had its premiere on Main Street, and he began buying the old farm and the land around it for a living history park that was never built.

The museum opened in 2001 for his 100th birthday, built on the personal collection of Ruth Disney Beecher. It fills 10,000 square feet of the depot with more than 4,000 objects, among them family letters from the 1900s to the 1960s and pieces of the Midget Autopia ride he gave the town in 1966. It is a nonprofit, not part of the Walt Disney Company.