DeLand: The Baking Powder Man's Athens
Near Daytona, Florida
The small city of DeLand, just a few miles west of the Saint Johns River, has a nickname that tells you exactly what its founder intended: the Athens of Florida. The man who gave it that nickname was a New York baking powder manufacturer named Henry Addison DeLand, and his ambition for this patch of subtropical wilderness was somewhat out of proportion with its circumstances.
Henry DeLand first visited what was then called Persimmon Hollow in March of eighteen seventy-six. He bought a large tract of land, persuaded the small settlement of residents to rename the community in his honor, and began promoting it to northern investors as a refined alternative to the rougher frontier towns of the Florida interior. He built hotels. He laid out streets. He planted orange groves and imagined a prosperous agricultural suburb for educated Northerners who wanted Florida sun without Florida crudeness.
The centerpiece of his vision was education. In eighteen eighty-three, DeLand founded the DeLand Academy, a small institution he intended to grow into a proper college. He called in favors and convinced John Batterson Stetson, a Philadelphia hat manufacturer who wintered nearby, to come look at what he was building. Stetson, whose Boss of the Plains hat design had already made him one of the most recognizable brand names in the American West, was convinced. He donated a building in eighteen eighty-six. He joined the board of trustees in eighteen eighty-seven. By eighteen eighty-nine he had donated over one million dollars, and the institution was renamed John B. Stetson University in his honor.
The financial panics of the eighteen eighties wiped out Henry DeLand before he could see his vision fully realized. He lost his fortune and left Florida. But the university survived, and the town grew around it. Stetson University remains the oldest private university in Florida and operates the state's oldest law school. The hat man from Philadelphia funded the Athens that the baking powder man from New York imagined.
