Chapter Seven
As the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close, the hard times that often come with farming finally caught up with the Disney family. While these struggles had been befalling farmers west of the Mississippi River for years, Elias’s experience working alongside labour unions at the World’s Exposition in Chicago made the challenge feel personal. Elias Disney counted himself as a disciple of Eugene Debs and American socialism, as well as William Jennings Bryan, an advocate of Prairie Populism, which attempted to advocate better conditions for farmers who’d felt victimised by the banking system and railroads, and ignored by the federal government.
Beginning in the days following the American Civil War, as the Transcontinental Railroad began its crawl to the west coast of North America, land grants began to be awarded or sold to those looking for new economic opportunities. While thousands took advantage of the land being given by the U.S. government under the Homestead Act, others, including immigrants like Kepple and Mary Disney, purchased land being sold for fundraising purposes from the various railroad lines expanding in the west. While some farmers lived in the area that would become Marceline prior to 1888, when the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe established the town as a division point, it brought an influx of individuals looking to purchase cheap land from the railroad to begin their own farms.
As more and more families established farms and began to grow crops throughout the west, including Marceline, the value of these crops began to decrease. With the railroad being the primary mode of transporting goods to markets in America’s largest cities, managers of the lines began to increase their fares, further reducing the profit turned by individual farmers. This resulted in the agricultural community often breaking even every year, or in some unfortunate seasons, losing money due to droughts or other environmental disasters.
When his farm took a hit due to the low value of apples nationwide in 1909, Elias devised a plan to hold on to some fruit until prices increased. He sent enough apples to market to pay off some debts, but saved the majority of his harvest. Enlisting the help of Herbert and Raymond, Elias removed his supply of autumn’s apple harvest from the family barn late in the season and brought them out into the orchard. The three men spent countless hours spreading straw on the ground between the rows of apple trees, and then piling the fruit into waist-high pyramids on top of the straw. After the piles were complete, they layered straw on top of the fruit, then covered the layers with earth, providing natural refrigeration and protection from the elements and pests.
Sure enough, as winter progressed, the price of fresh fruit dropped. Elias would go to the orchard a few days a week, sometimes in blistering cold and wind, and unearth his fruit, which had remained fresh due to the ground that had frozen over top of the piles.
While this plan was fairly ingenious, Elias also realised that it wasn’t sustainable to provide the income his family needed year after year. Taking a page from the teachings of Debs and the Populists, he decided to appeal to the greater agricultural community throughout Marceline to affect change for those in the region. At first, he attempted to become involved in state politics, running for a place in the Missouri state legislature as a socialist candidate. Unfortunately, like the federal government, the state government of Missouri didn’t have much interest in smaller groups outside of its standard two-party system.
Instead, Elias decided to appeal to those in his more immediate sphere of influence: his fellow farmers in Marceline. Looking for a centralised location to meet with his neighbours, he convinced the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal order that had a lodge located above Zurcher’s Jewelers on the corner of Kansas Avenue and Ritchie Avenue, to allow him to hold an event for his fellow apple growers in the area. In an effort to show his fellow struggling farmers how good life could be if not for the ‘evil capitalists’ that took advantage of them, he went by the store of Ed Hayden, a local grocer, and purchased several kilograms of oysters.
The farmers attending Elias’s dinner were impressed with the delicious oysters. Many of them had only heard of the delicacy, but due to the struggles of living in an agricultural community, they had never eaten food of this calibre. As the meal concluded, Elias surveyed the room and noticed smiles on the faces of many of his peers. He figured that, with their bellies full, this was the best time to make his appeal.
Walking to the front of the room, the farmer utilised the skills he had employed as a guest preacher at the family church in Chicago, requesting that the farmers unionise and collectivise their efforts as part of a Marceline chapter of the Society of Equity. This organisation, he explained, was a sort of union for farmers, which would fight against the injustices perpetrated by the railroads and bankers. The Society would provide grain elevators and cold storage warehouses in town so that all farmers could hold their surplus crops until prices stabilised, much like he had done the previous winter with his own bumper crop of apples. This plan would also give the farmers of Marceline the opportunity to carry weight to the negotiating table: when railroads set their rates too high, the farmers would simply hold their harvests in the community storehouses. When the railroads weren’t making money due to a lack of agricultural fares, they would be forced to lower their prices, making farmers the primary beneficiaries.
As he spoke, Elias was disheartened to find the smiles falling from the faces of his audience. The attention of many began to wander, and a few actually got up from their tables and left. As he cleaned up later that evening after his audience had left, the man who desired justice for other farmers reflected on what had gone wrong. He eventually realised that the town existed because of the railroad. Yes, railroad prices were unfair for Marceline farmers, but if not for the Santa Fe extension, none of the farmers would have the land that had been in their families for decades. The railroad brought business into town, and many of Marceline’s industries, such as the coal mines and newly-established oil fields, directly serviced the railroad, making the farmers’ relationship with the Santa Fe Railroad both positive and negative. If they came together to unionise against the railroad, Elias realised, they would literally be severing the hand that was feeding them.
After his attempt to improve the family’s financial well-being through creating an alliance with his fellow farmers fell through, Elias instead began to expect the rest of the family to help carry the weight and contribute more. While he already expected his four sons to work on the farm for free, he also asked that they do odd jobs around town to help offset the income lost due to the farm’s struggles.
Roy often visited town to do small jobs and took his little brother along with him to help. One sunny afternoon, the two took a job at the local undertaker’s to wash Mr Hutchenson’s hearse. Unfortunately for Roy, he did most of the work: while he scrubbed the buggy free of dust, Walter lay in the back, his hands crossed over his chest, pretending to be a corpse. Whenever someone walked by or stopped to speak with Roy, the boy would quickly sit up; while some were startled, others knew of young Walter and his antics and were unsurprised at his trick.
Roy also took inspiration from his father’s work on the family farm to dive into his own venture of making money. After talking Elias into giving him an acre of land, Roy planted rows of popcorn, working the field on his own. Over the summer months, he spent time in the field ploughing, sowing, watering, weeding, and finally harvesting the hard kernels. After packaging them in small bags he had saved from confectionery, the young man went downtown to the train station and sold his harvest to passengers milling around the platform or waiting for the train while it got serviced.
In addition to fulfilling her duties as a rural wife and mother, Flora also used her creative and culinary skills to help make additional money for the family. To offset expenses, Flora maintained her own vegetable garden. During seasons when she harvested a surplus, she would often sell the produce to neighbours and townspeople; she was particularly known for her excellent grated horseradish that was used in coleslaw and other midwestern recipes.
Flora Disney was also renowned throughout town for the butter that she churned. After purchasing sweet cream from the Marceline Creamery Company, the industrious woman would spend several days churning and methodically adding ingredients to ensure that her product was as creamy as possible, a perfect balance between sweet and salty. After moulding the butter, she would load up the family buggy and ride to the grocer’s, where she would trade the butter for groceries, as well as money to supplement the family’s income.
People came from the countryside and even from out of town to purchase Flora Disney’s sweet cream butter. Elias quickly recognised the value of his wife’s butter and forbid his children from partaking in their mother’s creation to ensure there would be more to sell. Pitying her children and tapping into her streak of mischief that had been passed on to her youngest son, Flora began to butter the underside of her children’s bread before passing it to them at mealtime to subvert her husband’s demands.
In an effort to make more money, Elias leased an additional 40 acres of land from his brother Robert, agreeing to allow 19-year-old Herbert and 17-year-old Raymond to work a piece of the land for some income. After a season of hard work in 1907, the two enterprising young men found that they’d earned $175 from the sale of their produce. The boys put most of the money away, deciding to treat themselves with a mere $20 each by purchasing a gold watch and watch chain from Zurcher’s, the new jewellery store that had opened just a few years earlier.
The boys proudly wore their watches and chains on their breasts all the way home, but when Elias saw what he considered to be their extravagant purchases, he was disgusted. He clearly made it known to his sons that buying the accessories was irresponsible when times were as hard as they were.
“And what are you going to do with the rest of your income?” the elder Disney asked, half-sarcastically.
“Well,” Herb began, looking at his brother. “We would like to purchase a heifer and a colt to help make our tract of land more sustainable.”
“Land o’ Goshen!” Elias sighed loudly. He went on to explain that, as members of the Disney family who were working on land that he’d leased from Robert and partook of the family’s resources, such as food and shelter, that their income was meant to help offset the debts incurred by the farm. As he spoke, Herbert and Raymond’s faces slowly transitioned from submissive to stony and indignant, but their father was too busy preaching about the family’s need to work together for survival to notice.
Over the course of the evening and the next day while working in the fields, Herbert and Raymond became more and more frustrated with the conversation they’d had with their father, and his inability or unwillingness to see them as men who had earned their income through hard work, and no longer as boys. While on their lunch break that afternoon, Herbert unhitched the horse from the plough and rode into town, withdrawing all the funds from his and Raymond’s bank accounts. After enjoying a delicious meal that Flora prepared that evening, the two boys feigned exhaustion and excused themselves to bed. Once the house fell silent, the brothers gathered some of their belongings, raised their bedroom window, and stepped out onto the porch.
While they likely felt a twinge of guilt leaving their mother and other siblings behind, their frustration with Elias and his unrelenting expectations clouded their remorse, and together, the two hustled into town and to the Santa Fe train station. Using some of their earnings from their patch of farmland, they each purchased a ticket for the 9.30pm train to Chicago, riding the night train north, away from Marceline, never to return to live at the Disney farm.
Elias saw his eldest sons’ departure as a betrayal of the worst kind, but rather than unleash his fury on the rest of the family, he poured himself into the farm even more, picking up the slack left by Herbert and Raymond’s vacancies. Roy attended classes at Park School, located west of downtown Marceline, helping out with chores before and after school and on the weekends. It was decided by Elias and Flora alike that, due to the closeness in age between their two youngest children, and because extra help was needed now on the farm, they would keep Walter out of school until Ruth reached an age to be old enough to enrol at Park School. Thus, over the next year, he helped out with farm chores, continuing to mill the sorghum and tend to the livestock. Flora, not wanting her youngest son to fall behind, began giving Walter lessons, particularly in how to read, to prepare him for the rigours of public education.
It was decided that Walter and Ruth would be enrolled at Park School in the autumn of 1908. Over the next couple of years, Walter began to realise that education was not his strong suit: he was more accustomed to dreaming and doodling than learning, going so far as drawing on the pages of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader and carving W.D. into his wooden desk, not once but twice. When his teacher, Miss Brown, attempted to refocus his attentions, she found the boy to be ‘ornery’, refusing to participate in his assignments.
While the academic side of school didn’t appeal to Walter, the artistic side was right up his alley. After the popularity of Maude Adams’ performance in Peter Pan at Cater’s Opera House, Park School decided to put on its own production. Walter auditioned and was granted the lead part of the play’s protagonist. Even at a young age, Walter Disney wanted to bring the story to life and to immerse his audience in the action. Determining to make himself fly like his character, he convinced Roy to build a hoist and tackle mechanism that would allow him to soar over the audience.
It was during his time at Park School that Walter also discovered his first love and ‘dream girl’: Mrs Eugenia Moorman, the young wife of Marceline’s superintendent of education. Walter was not a shy boy, but he had a difficult time understanding how to get the attention of his object of affection. Luckily for him, when Elias and Flora went out of town for an evening, they asked Mrs Moorman to be Walter and Ruth’s babysitter. He was even more surprised at his luck that evening, as she was putting him to bed.
“Are you afraid of sleeping alone in the dark?” the maternal young woman asked the young boy.
The boy assured her that he was.
Not wanting her charge to throw a fit and hoping his parents would allow her to babysit again, Mrs Moorman crawled into bed with the boy, who didn’t know much more than the fact that people in love slept in the same bed.
There was one thing Walter hadn’t accounted for: his bedwetting problem.
When he awoke several hours later in a panic to find wet sheets, he found the other half of his bed empty. He was never quite sure whether Mrs Moorman left the bed because of his incontinence or for some other reason.
With love often came loss. On 20 January 1909, Erastus ‘Grandpa’ Taylor passed away. Not only did 7-year-old Walter lose the man whom he loved listening to and learning from, but the Taylor-Phillips-Crane family, into which the Disneys had been adopted, lost its patriarch. Young Walter felt the empty ache of loss every day as he opened his front door to see Grandpa Taylor’s small house across the street, its clapboard siding, plate glass windows, and beautiful white screen door less charming without Grandpa Taylor hobbling around the yard or sitting in his chair. The house sat empty now, as Elizabeth Taylor had moved out of the home she’d built with her husband after his passing and into the home of her son Winfield, who lived nearby.
Several months later, Walter was awakened in the middle of the night to yelling outside his bedroom window. Groggily opening his eyes, he noticed a flickering orange light on the wall near his bedroom door. The brass bed that Walter shared with Roy creaked as the boy’s older brother slid out from under the covers and crept to the window. As Roy pulled the curtains back from the window, he gasped. Walter hopped out of bed and ran to his brother’s side, crawling up into the dormer’s window seat so he could see out. Across the street from the Disney home, a violent blaze had engulfed Grandpa Taylor’s home, a horse-drawn fire engine and bucket brigade doing its best to extinguish the flames. The boys noticed the slim figure of their father attempting to help, but over the course of the next few minutes, it became obvious that their work was futile as the roof collapsed inward and the grass nearby sizzled.
“It’s like the whole world is on fire,” Walter commented. While it is obvious that this was the observation of a small boy learning to process trauma in the totality of his world, figuratively he wasn’t too far off: the idyllic life of the boy who had fully embraced the charm and simplicity of small-town community was about to be stolen from him much in the same way his elderly friend and the visual reminder of him had been.
While Elias had experienced some success on the farm during the family’s years in Marceline, he lacked capability as a farmer and was often looked down on by his peers because of his ineptitude. This, combined with his lack of help due to Herb and Ray’s departure, made it difficult to keep up with the work farming required. Near the end of the decade, a drought plagued the area, not only withholding rainwater from the fields, but even causing the family well, from which Elias drew irrigation water, to begin to dry up.
Illness began to sweep through the Disney farm as well, when some of his livestock began to develop maladies, and Elias’s overworking himself led to him developing diphtheria. In his incredibly weakened state, at times requiring hospitalisation, Elias was unable to complete the work necessary to turn a profit on the farm, leaving many tasks to Flora, Roy and Walter, none of whom had the knowledge required to make the family venture successful. The final straw was the ultimate collapse of crop prices, the problem which Elias had fought so hard to prevent at his downtown oyster dinner at the Knights of Pythias lodge just a few years earlier.
After much discussion, it was decided by Elias and Flora that it was time to sell the farm and once again move on to new opportunities elsewhere. Robert, who had been living in Kansas City with his wife Margaret, had seemed to find success in the economy of the city, and encouraged his older brother to join him. In an attempt to clear the family’s assets in Marceline, Elias determined to hold an auction of the animals and farming equipment. Walter and Roy were enlisted to wander the countryside and into town, putting up signs advertising the auction, as well as the different items that would be for sale. A pre-auction sale took place for the Disneys’ neighbours, and some of the draught animals were sold, causing Walter especially to be heartbroken. Collecting their possessions, the family vacated the farm in 1910, moving into a smaller home at 508 Kansas Avenue, much closer to downtown Marceline; rather than immediately leave for Kansas City, it was decided the family would remain in town until the end of the school year. Luckily for Walter, the family’s new home was next door to the Moormans.
One afternoon, while parked along Kansas Avenue to sell hay from the farm, the sound of a high-pitched whinnying caught Roy and Walter’s attention. The boys looked across the street to where the noise was coming from to find a small colt tied to a hitching post. It had been born on the family farm and on recognising the Disney boys, it had begun crying. Walter, tender-hearted as he was towards his animals, ran across the street to embrace the pony’s head, and Roy eventually had to pull his little brother off the animal and lead him away before things got more out of hand.
The boys climbed onto the buggy for the ride home, their old horse Charlie standing quietly munching from a feed bag. As they made their way north along Kansas Avenue towards home, something spooked their horse and he began to run. The buggy was old, and as a result, the handbrake no longer worked. Roy did everything he could to try to slow Charlie down, pulling on the reins and calling out commands, while Walter held on tightly to avoid falling off the cart.
“We need to jump off before we crash, Walter!” Roy called to his brother.
“No!” Walter yelled back, holding onto the handrail of the cart with an iron grip.
“Alright,” Roy called. “Take this,” he ordered, handing his brother one of the reins, while he held the other. The elder brother’s stomach dropped as he realised they were coming to the crest of one of the largest hills in town; if he couldn’t get Charlie to stop, this wouldn’t end well. Leaning to the left as far as he could without falling off the buggy, Roy pulled on the left rein, steering the horse towards a copse of trees. Charlie dodged the trees, but the cart wasn’t so lucky and it crashed into them, jerking the horse to a stop. Residents of nearby houses heard the commotion and came running into their yards to help the boys. Luckily, neither boy was injured and the cart, nor the horse, sustained much damage.
With the decision having been made to move to Kansas City, the Disneys didn’t go through their grief alone: the Taylor-Phillips-Crane family that had adopted them as one of their own shared in the sadness of losing those they had come to love over the last five years. Manly Howe Taylor even promised to look after the farm after the family’s departure until it was possible to sell in November 1911. Flora attended her last meeting of the Rural Home Circle on 15 May 1911 and was so distraught at leaving her friends, she failed in her club responsibility of preparing to share current events in the life of her family. As per club minutes recorded at the end of the meeting, it was discussed and unanimously passed by the club’s twenty-one members that a ‘souvenir tea spoon’ would be presented to Flora as a parting gift on her departure for Kansas City.
At the conclusion of the school year, Elias, Flora, Roy, Walter and Ruth said their goodbyes to the charming rural town they had come to love so much and the people that they loved more, loaded their belongings at the same train station along the Santa Fe Railroad that they had arrived on, and moved along to their next adventure. As the train pulled away from the platform and began gaining speed, charging towards the southwest, both Elias and Walter looked out of the window as their dreams drifted away behind them: the former, leaving behind his hope to establish himself as a small-town farmer raising his children with small-town morals, while his youngest son left behind the town that had brought him so much life. Little did the boy know that his next home, Kansas City, Missouri, would be even more instrumental in creating the man he would become.