American Real Estate Network

Daytona Realtor Directory

Daytona Florida

Daytona Beach’s breathtaking expanse of sand, like the rest of Florida, was first claimed by Spanish explorers in the 1500s, but it was not until 1835 that Mathias Day of Manfield, Ohio, founded the first permanent settlement in the area. The residents who incorporated the town of Daytona in 1876 honored Day by adapting his name. (The city of Daytona Beach, a merger of several local communities, was formed 40 years later.)

At the south end of Daytona Beach, the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse, built in 1887, is still in operation. For trivia buffs: It’s the second-tallest brick lighthouse in the nation. It was also a sign of hope that a lifeboat full of sailors and passengers from the S.S. Commodore spotted and rowed toward in January 1897, after their ship sank offshore. One of the desperate souls aboard that lifeboat was author Stephen Crane, who later recreated the experience in his famous short story, "The Open Boat."

In addition to shipwrecked sailors, Daytona Beach began attracting auto racers shortly after the invention of the automobile, because the hard-packed sands provided the perfect place for drivers to show their stuff. In 1935, English speed demon Sir Malcolm Campbell hit 276.8 miles per hour on the sands, at the time the world’s land speed record. The motor mania moved off the sands to Daytona Beach International Speedway in 1959. Today, the speedway is home to the Daytona 500 and the corporate headquarters of NASCAR, the major league of stock car racing.

In the early 1960s, the city’s hotel entrepreneurs toured college campuses to cajole fun-loving students into spending their spring break vacations and their parents’ money in Daytona Beach instead of, say, Fort Lauderdale (the destination immortalized in the 1960 film Where the Boys Are). For a few years in the late 1980s, after Lauderdale abdicated the role, Daytona became the number-one destination for hard-partying collegians. In 1989, an estimated 400,000 students descended on the city in a Dionysian frenzy of such extremes that the city was nearly paralyzed, and police made more than 1,400 arrests for public drunkenness and other crimes. Daytona then stopped going out of its way to attract the youthful throngs, and today, like Lauderdale, it aims for older tourists and families instead.

Daytona Beach’s Jackie Robinson Ball Park is the location of an obscure, but important, bit of baseball history: On March 17, 1946, it was the site of the first racially integrated spring training game, between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the minor-league Montreal Royals.

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