Disney's River Country
— — the swimming hole that closed and stayed.
Not only on a wall.
“Disney's first water park, opened in 1976 on the south shore of Bay Lake near Fort Wilderness. The conceit was a Huck Finn swimming hole — sand-bottomed coves, wooden slides, a rope swing called Bay Cove, a heated pool called Upstream Plunge. The gates closed in November 2001 and never reopened. The site sat untouched in the trees for two decades, the slide towers slowly going green. Reflections Lodge now occupies the ground. — from the studio
Disney's River Country, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Disney's River Country sat on the south shore of Bay Lake in the Walt Disney World Resort, adjacent to Fort Wilderness Campground in Bay Lake, Florida. It opened on June 20, 1976, as the resort's first water park and only its third theme park after the Magic Kingdom and the still-unbuilt EPCOT. The conceit was a backwoods swimming hole — sand-bottomed lagoons, wooden flume slides, and a small heated pool called Upstream Plunge. The site closed at the end of the 2001 season and was formally retired in January 2005.
Three eras of the place. The opening era ran from 1976 through the late 1980s, when Typhoon Lagoon arrived in 1989 and Blizzard Beach in 1995, both larger and louder. The decline era ran through the 1990s as attendance softened. The closure was announced as seasonal in November 2001; the park never reopened. The abandonment era ran from 2002 until demolition began in 2019, when crews cleared the slides and lagoons to make way for the Reflections lakeside lodge, a project Disney first announced that year.
For nearly eighteen years the park sat fenced off in the Bay Lake pines. The slide towers stayed standing. The lagoons filled with leaves. Visiting photographers were not welcome, but the site was visible from the Fort Wilderness shoreline and from boats crossing the lake to the Magic Kingdom — half-hidden cabanas, a wooden tower, the suggestion of a beach. Demolition crews moved in during 2019. What remains is documented in archival photographs and in the memories of a generation of guests who swam there as children in the 1980s.