Goodbye Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer

Just in time for our nation’s 250th Birthday, Walt Disney World will close its Tom Sawyer Island and its companion Liberty Square Riverboat on July 6. The boat, waterway and island will disappear in favor of a Cars-themed attraction.

The shuttering and destruction of a Florida theme park ride is not normally of note in these editorial columns, or most Florida newspapers; however, Mark Twain’s world is so indicative of our national culture, and the attraction so iconic in Florida and across the globe, that the passing needs to be noted. It is the only Disney land named after an American novelist. The waterway at the park is also part of our shared waters; indeed to build the Rivers of America attraction, Disney engineers dug into the Floridian Aquifer to get the fresh, mosquito-free water to feed it. This new change even needs a 2025 South Florida Water Management District Permit.

Most of our readers have at one time been on Tom Sawyer Island, which dates from 1971. None of us could have experienced the real world of the great 19th century novelist Samuel Clemens, but at least all of us, as child or adult, could walk Tom Sawyer island, and fake it for a minute.

Along the route is Potter’s windmill, a rope “superstition bridge” and Tom’s Landing, where there was a real chess board. “Lots of caves, lots of adventure,” the guide says. And kids letting off, and seeing, steam.

Even if readers do not like that mandatory trip to Disney, the steam riverboat has too been something everyone could agree on. The voyage starts with a dock landing, with its Georgian cupola perfectly echoing the best of America’s eastern architecture. The boat is masterful, too. It runs on actual steam, like the Disney trains, and its sounds are true, though guided on a track (they must be towed to get through Seven Seas lagoon for repairs). 

The steamboat does not travel the Mississippi, but instead traverses the Rivers of America. You head into Indian Country, where political correctness has dealt a boring blow. A cabin no longer burns from a raid. There is an Alligator Swamp fishing house, looking remarkably like the Placida Cottage, as well as a secret burial ground. Gone also will be Harper’s Mill and an “idyllic American village.” 

The late architect Charles Moore admired Tom Sawyer Island and the steamboats of Disney, as it was one attraction that Disney completely detailed all by himself. Moore, a postmodernist, called Disneyland not only the extension of the public realm, but a “personal monument” to Walt’s boyhood near Hannibal, Missouri. As an acerbic critic of all things fake, Moore could at least appreciate the well-done simulacra. Moore credited the island as “full of secret and private pleasures for a child.” The steamboat, around 5/8 size replica, preserved the “finely crafted elegance” of its predecessors.

“Adults almost always find everything too small and boring, preferring instead the more complex, carefully orchestrated amusements of the mainland,” wrote Moore.

Perhaps Tom Sawyer’s island was always bound to be unappreciated by our fellow Floridians. In the original Disneyland, it was a top D ticket ride, though when E tickets were added, it was upgraded, to that tier. In Florida, it never required a ticket; you just walked in. There are fewer visitors these days; Disney last made a Huck Finn movie in 1993. Visitors take their cues from movies.

It would be a good time for a revival as the book “James,” a reimagination of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” won a 2025 Pulitzer for fiction. That indicates that tales of American Realism still resonate.

On the island, kids could run like banshees, paint the fake fence and hide from parents, our last memory of that ancient idea, free range parenting. Yes, it is a danger to let the boys and girls run free, and be children, but we all needed that. 

A hardscape Cars attraction will now show the U.S. through the lens of National Park Service-style architecture and park rangers. The outdoors is all guided now.

It mimics the destruction of other Disney attractions, including a Jules Verne attraction, long closed. Many will remember 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. That is also a loss for Florida, as it was Verne in 1865 who first introduced the idea of rocket launches from this latitude, albeit in Tampa.

For a few more days, the TikTok-ers will be out, recording last moments, to add to the millions of views, and Kodak memories already out in family scrapbooks, and now the cloud.

“Engine room ahead one quarter. Sound blast bell,” cries the captain and announcer. “Steady as she goes. I love this river even more than anything else.”

As one critic this week said: “The water is only an impediment to more glorious acres of cement.”

Garland Pollard is editor of the Boca Beacon. Email letters and comments to editor@bocabeacon.com.