Ann Stevens House B&B

Change in the way folks think about West Volusia doesn’t happen quickly, and people like that. Life is good in the vale of the slow flowing St. Johns.

Discovering the region’s unexpected past works its own slow magic.

Discovery starts with head-shaking disbelief that gives way to an appreciative “Wow!" before glow sets in. Who could have imagined this vicinity once the glory of Florida?

Yet from its earliest settling, the region of the St. Johns through Volusia has stood for Florida in an honest way.

Of course, in a state where people shovel in and shovel out, anything that happened before anyone here now can recollect seems ancient.

Even so, it’s less than a century and a half since events defined the region, and life at its best today still owes everything to what happened then.

People before the Civil War were settling Volusia from the north while Indians already here stood their ground. Seminoles destroyed plantations along the Halifax River after dissension ended an earlier plantation at New Smyrna. Result was that after dispatching the Indians west across the Mississippi but before Halifax proprietors re-populated the coast, America was newly testing St. Johns waters in West Volusia.

Settlers were steamboating up the river. That was the new way to explore this wilderness that was once already forgotten as part of an aboriginal footpath from Canada. Some also knew about St. Johns River Country from botanist William Bartram’s fantastical tales of colonial times and others from a visit by John James Audubon in 1832.

Buzz newly excited those northeastern elites who, with money and time on their hands, were curious about this 27th state in the expanding American union.

In 1851, Jacob Brock from Jacksonville launched a steamboat company to connect the lower St. Johns with Enterprise on the north shore of Lake Monroe near the site of a former Indian War fort. A cousin of Zachary Taylor had built an inn. Brock soon built a 100-room hotel, which he named for himself. (Though Vermont born, Brock spent the Civil War in low-bore smuggling that served the South.)

Then starting with Reconstruction, Brock and his sons for 25 years turned the wilderness community of Enterprise into the most talked-about escape for industrially rich and famous northerners.

They came to hunt and fish, to bathe in the healthful springs, to stare at alligators and behold bears thrash in the bush. They hobnobbed with Grant and Sherman, with Goulds and Vanderbilts. Winslow Homer came to paint, and Harriet Beecher Stowe of Mandarin one early downstream spring morning wrote about how “No dreamland on earth can be more unearthly in its beauty and glory than the St. Johns in April."

Brock’s chefs pampered their guests with venison and wild turkey, with duck and bass. Brock’s neighbor, the French importer Frederick deBary, supplied Brock’s guests with exclusive wines and Mumm’s Champagne (chilled with ice brought up-river by his own boats).

Wealthy and recently widowed, deBary in the late 1860s followed a season with Brock by acquiring his own properties along the lake and building the grandly colonial deBary Hall. He, his family and business associates created a winter whirl of what author Edith G. Brooks calls “chattering" opulence. The Brock and deBary families became friendly competitors in steamships and shipping. They gloried in American prosperity.

As Brooks recalls for us, everywhere in the region, every farm family, every merchant and guide rejoiced each winter that, together with the Brock Hotel, “deBary Hall was [again] open and inhabited, another brilliant season. . . begun in Florida’s most elegant winter resort."

If the region remained distinct and in the public eye, Enterprise itself failed. Railroads connecting Florida elsewhere were only partly to blame for demise of this town so dependent on steamboat connections.

Yellow fever wracked north Florida in 1888 followed by successive years of citrus-devastating freeze. Change seized its opportunity. Fast-growing DeLand captured the county seat from Enterprise. The new city relied less on seasonal tourism, and though DeLand claimed its own larger-than-life benefactor, his investments instead made the newly ascendant city a center of education and year-round economy.

DeLand’s benefactor was the famed Philadelphia hat maker John B. Stetson. Like the town’s namesake founder Henry DeLand, Stetson had been drawn by the region’s luster. DeLand envisioned a center of education in the near-river setting he developed. But fever and freeze also troubled his holdings and he turned to Stetson to bail out the educational center he began. In 1883, Stetson University became Florida’s first private institution of higher learning.

Soon town and campus became synonymous, Even a century and a quarter later, the two blend comfortably along Woodland Boulevard, still a sacrosanct two lanes and one of the most beautiful commercial streets of Florida. The historic look partly stems from an early ordinance that granted property owners a 50-cent rebate on taxes for each tree they planted of at least two-inch diameter.

At a time when $7 a week in DeLand could provide a man with room and board at a "well supplied table," rebate for a sapling went a long way.

Today “America’s Best Colleges" ranks Stetson 4th among liberal arts colleges of the South. Full-time enrollment tops 2,000. The school was co-ed from the start and in 1960 became the first private university in Florida to integrate. Stetson established the first business, engineering, law and music schools in Florida and was the first private university in the state with a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Like Henry DeLand, George Colby hailed from western New York but arrived with a different purpose: a spiritualist in search of a new Jerusalem. A spirit guide led him to a hilly lakeside district that he chose as site for the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association. Next door, Henry DeLand had founded a second town he named Lake Helen for his daughter.

Cassadaga has evolved over the decades as a charming district of gingerbread houses lived in by Colby’s spiritualist descendants, while Lake Helen rates acclaim as a city of smart growth, the site of a downtown equestrian center and hub of Florida’s (and possibly America’s) first year-round adult bicycle safety training and touring program.

An enterprising ethic flourished up and down the river corridor.

Orange City became a citrus center and river port during Reconstruction. The pioneer Thursby House still stands at the site of an Indian midden at Blue Spring State Park. The old Blue Spring, Orange City and Atlantic Railway – the BSOCA irreverently maligned as “built strictly on credit and air" – soon faded, though its corridor is becoming a main Volusia County trail connecting to New Smyrna Beach.

Agriculturists north in the county discovered a micro-climate ideal for fern culture, so that today Pierson and Seville overlap as Fern Capital of America. Citrus, which flourished everywhere until disrupted by late 19th-century freeze, revived under the hybridizing experiments of Chinese agronomist Lue Gim Gong, honored for development of a freeze-resistant varietal.

Among ghost towns and others almost forgotten, Glenwood along the river once hosted a steamboat landing, a rail depot and hotels. Today a much admired canopy road through the residential town draws bicyclists from everywhere.

Beresford, too, just west of DeLand, housed steamboat landings and a waterworks for bottling sulfur water ballyhooed to boat passengers for their health.

East and northeast of Enterprise, from Osteen to Briggsville (today’s Samsula) a vast inland farming district developed, which continues despite encroaching land developments. Garfield, a short-lived African American post-Reconstruction settlement along today’s Enterprise Osteen Road, was named for American President James A. Garfield.

Decades after the demise of steamboating, conservation land acquisitions have ensured that the St. Johns retains its idyllic course. Adherents popularized a new form of river travel, turning the St. Johns through Volusia into a hub of American houseboating.

Thanks to stable good living through the region, voters in election after election have supported land conservation, environmental protection, cultural and historical preservation and generally have held the line on get-rich-quick scheming. West Volusians have helped sponsor a museum and legitimate stage, the restoration of an historic county courthouse and movie palace, all in DeLand; a Pioneer Center for the Creative Arts in Barberville, and up and down the corridor, multi-use recreational trails coming together.

Three state parks, a national wildlife refuge and a cluster of equestrian facilities apart from Lake Helen all nurture distinct habitats and pursuits.

Most recently, the City of DeLand has launched a program to attract more year-round residents back downtown. Throughout this slow-changing corridor much beloved by its people, the city is ensuring that they stay in touch with their gifts.

Towns, corridor and river roll on as one.