Delray Beach: From Linton to Del Rey
Florida
This town started life under a different name. In eighteen ninety-four, Michigan congressman William Linton bought land along this stretch of coast and planted a farming colony he called Linton. It struggled.
Crop-destroying freezes hit, including a hard one in eighteen ninety-eight, and Linton defaulted on his land payments and left. The settlers who stayed renamed their town in nineteen oh one. A local leader proposed Delray, borrowed from a Detroit neighborhood, which itself traced to the Spanish del rey, meaning of the king, from a Mexican War battle site.
The name outlasted the colony. Delray Beach incorporated in nineteen eleven, drew Michigan vacationers for decades, and reinvented itself in the late twentieth century as a pedestrian-friendly arts district along Atlantic Avenue, earning national recognition as a Main Street district.
