DeLand Before Henry A. DeLand ever stepped off the paddle-wheeler, this stretch of high, dry pine ridge in western Volusia County went by a humbler name: Persimmon Hollow. The name was pure Old Florida, earned honestly from the wild persimmon trees that grew in abundance around the natural springs, dropping their fruit for anyone frontier-hardy enough to be living out here.
The first permanent settlers trickled in around the mid-1840s. Reuben Marsh, who had first come to Florida during the Seminole War, is usually named as the earliest of them, settling the area around 1846 once the fighting ended. For thirty years it stayed a scattering of homesteads and orange groves — a place without a plat, a post office, or much of a future on paper.
That changed in December 1876, when a New York manufacturer named Henry Addison DeLand called the surrounding settlers together. On December 6, those in attendance voted to give their community his name in gratitude for what he was already investing in it. Persimmon Hollow became DeLand, and the sleepy hollow began its transformation into the cultured, tree-lined city its founder imagined.