DeBary Hall: The Steamboat Baron's Winter Villa

Before the automobile, before I-Four, the St. Johns River was Florida's highway, and Frederick deBary was the man who controlled it. A German-born champagne importer who arrived in America and made a fortune, deBary founded the People's Line of steamboats on the St. Johns in eighteen seventy-three, running fashionable boats from Jacksonville south through the interior, depositing wealthy tourists at orange-grove landings and jungle springs.

His own winter retreat, built in eighteen seventy-one near what would become the town bearing his name, was one of the finest homes in frontier Florida. DeBary Hall sat on a bluff overlooking the river, a frame house with wide verandas where guests could watch steamboats pass while eating northern food in a southern winter. Ulysses Grant and Grover Cleveland may have been among those who visited. DeBary died in eighteen ninety-eight; the hall passed through several owners and eventually became a historic house museum. The steamboat era it embodied was already gone by then, replaced by Flagler's East Coast Railway and the automobiles that followed.