The Disney parks around the world have a lot in common, but there have been other Disney projects that went nowhere. One of them was Disney’s America, a theme park announced in 1993 that would be built near Haymarket, Virginia.
The park would be arranged into nine sections, loosely focusing on significant periods of U.S. history. One land would focus on the founding fathers while others would feature a 20th century farm, world war battlefields, factories of the industrial revolution. The park would also cover some potentially controversial topics too, like turn-of-the-century immigration, Native Americans, and slavery.
Disney’s new park would be state-of-the-art amusement while mixing in education and sensitivity towards the “painful, disturbing, and agonizing” aspects of American history. Attendees could expect VR technology, innovative motion-simulators, next generation animatronics, and a nightly ironclad ship battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia.
For various reasons, the project was canceled less than a year after it was announced. But what they had planned is quite intriguing, including the development of technologies that were later used elsewhere in the Disney universe. Read a description of the attractions planned for Disney's America at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg
(Image credit: Mliu92)
Funny this is, with the DC suburban boom swallowing up Haymarket, it's as crowded today as anything people were forewarning about if Disney had come.