24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Disney, OK

Disney is a town in Mayes County, Oklahoma, founded on November 12, 1939, on the south shore of Grand Lake o' the Cherokees, the reservoir on the Neosho River.

The town is named for Wesley E. Disney, a former U.S. congressman from Oklahoma, and despite the famous name it has no affiliation with Walt Disney or The Walt Disney Company.

Disney is often called "Disney Island" because it occupies a small island-like peninsula, and Oklahoma State Highway 28 is the only road in or out of town.

Reaching Disney from the west means driving across the roughly one-mile-long Pensacola Dam, and leaving town to the east requires crossing two more small spillway dams.

Disney sprang up as a boomtown for the hundreds of workers, engineers and truck drivers building the Pensacola Dam in the late 1930s, and artist Thomas Hart Benton captured it in his October 1938 Scribner's magazine piece "Thirty-Six Hours in a Boom Town."

Because the town's growth is limited by its island and the difficulty of running services across the dams, Disney operates its own water plant but has no public sewer system (homes use septic tanks) and no natural gas service.

The 2020 census counted 222 people in Disney, down from 311 in 2010, packed into a total area of about 1.42 square miles, of which about 12.6 percent is water.

In the 2000 census, Disney's 226 residents lived in 124 households, and by 2010 about 17 percent of the town's population was Native American, reflecting its location in the Cherokee Nation area of northeastern Oklahoma.

Today Disney is a lake resort community whose economy revolves around Grand Lake recreation, fishing and boating rather than the dam-construction payroll that created it.