Three Towns Into One: The 1926 Merger and the Modern City
Near Daytona, Florida
In nineteen twenty-six, four separate municipalities sat along a twelve-mile stretch of coast in Volusia County: Daytona, which occupied the mainland shore of the Halifax River; Daytona Beach, which had developed on the barrier island itself; Seabreeze, the northern beach community that had grown up around the tourist hotels of the Gilded Age; and Kingston, a smaller community between them. Each had its own mayor, its own city commission, its own tax rolls. For a place that advertised itself as the World's Most Famous Beach, the governance was conspicuously fragmented.
Florida's land boom of the nineteen twenties was reshaping everything. Northern investors and winter residents were pouring in, real estate was moving fast, and boosters argued that three separate governments made coordinated development impossible. Civic leader J. B. Kahn and others pushed hard for consolidation.
The merger was completed in nineteen twenty-six. The new unified city of Daytona Beach had a population of about fifteen thousand people, roughly one-third of whom were Black. That proportion is important context: Daytona Beach was, like virtually every Southern city of its era, a deeply segregated community, and the consolidation made the administration of that segregation more efficient as well as more expensive to maintain.
A railroad reached Daytona in eighteen eighty-six, and Henry Flagler incorporated it into his Florida East Coast Railway in eighteen eighty-nine, transforming the area from a sleepy agricultural backwater into a genuine resort destination. By nineteen twenty-six the population had grown nearly tenfold in thirty years, driven by railroad tourism, automobile culture, and the growing fame of the beach and its speed trials.
The combined city kept the name Daytona Beach, which was the most commercially recognizable of the four, and began planning the unified infrastructure that allowed the resort economy to expand through the mid-twentieth century. The Bandshell followed in nineteen thirty-seven. The Streamline Hotel in nineteen forty. And the speedway, which would anchor everything, in nineteen fifty-nine.
