Quick answer: Historic DeLand is the Florida heritage archive for DeLand — a Central Florida city founded on December 6, 1876, by New York businessman Henry A. DeLand. It is home to Stetson University (the state's oldest private college), the 1886 Stetson Mansion, a three-time award-winning downtown, and nine walking tours of landmarks, parks, and murals.
Henry A. DeLand founded DeLand Academy on November 5, 1883. Renamed John B. Stetson University in 1889 — the first private university in the state. DeLand Hall (1884) is the first building in Florida continuously used for higher education.
Source: Stetson University [S20], Wikipedia [S19].
The 1886 Stetson Mansion was Florida's first luxury home. Grover Cleveland and King Edward VII were guests. Thomas Edison personally supervised the installation of electricity — one of the first residences in the world built for it.
Source: Visit Florida [S14], National Trust [S17].
MainStreet DeLand was a charter Florida Main Street city in 1985, won the National Trust's Great American Main Street Award in 1997 (Florida's first), and won America's Main Street in 2017 — the only Main Street in the U.S. to hold both.
Source: MainStreet DeLand [S31], Orlando Weekly [S33].
Henry A. DeLand first visited Persimmon Hollow in March 1876, bought a large tract of land, and on December 6, 1876, the settlers met at John Rich's cabin and voted to rename the community in his honor [S01, S02, S04].
He donated $400 and an acre of land for the first school, the one-mile strip of land that became Woodland Boulevard, and coined the city's nickname — the Athens of Florida — because he wanted DeLand to be "a place of culture, education and beauty like Athens, Greece" [S07, S12].
Read the full founding storySelf-guided tours of downtown, the Stetson campus, the Old Northwest district, and four surrounding state and county parks, plus the DeLand Wings mural trail.
The buildings, museums, and sites that define the Historic DeLand archive.
"Mount Dora has charm. Winter Park has money. St. Augustine has age. DeLand has the receipts — a founder who literally built the main street, Florida's first Gilded Age mansion, the state's oldest private college, and the only Main Street in America to win both the Great American Main Street Award and America's Main Street. Here's how we measure up, line by line."
