DeLand In 1876, after decades in the chemical and baking-soda business up north, Henry Addison DeLand took a vacation that would change the map of Central Florida. Traveling by train and paddle-wheeler to Enterprise, then inland to the high ridge lands of Volusia County, he was struck by the beauty and the possibility of the place. He bought a large tract of land, went home, and came back six months later to buy still more — this time with a plan.
Henry DeLand did not want just a settlement; he wanted a town built on culture and education. On December 6, 1876, he gathered every settler within a ten-to-twelve-mile radius of pioneer John Rich's cabin, and that evening they voted to name the community in his honor. He backed the vote with his own money and land, donating a one-mile strip running north and south to become the main thoroughfare, Woodland Boulevard, which he had planted with orange, magnolia, and oak trees.
He funded institutions before comforts. He put up $400 and an acre of land for a schoolhouse, which opened in May 1877, and offered a matching gift to the first congregation willing to build a church — accomplished by 1880. Soon the young town had a newspaper, a store, and a post office. When DeLand was formally incorporated as a city in 1882, it already carried the ambitions of a founder who measured a town not by its commerce but by its schools and its shade trees.