>>This program is brought to you in part by the Paul B.

Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation, a proud partner of WUCF and the Central Florida Community.

>>Up next on this episode of Florida Road Trip... >>All the people he sold land to, which was quite a few, he guaranteed satisfaction.

If you were not successful, he would give you your money back.

>>We visit a city whose founder made a unique guarantee.

Plus... >>Much of that deep bass sound that he had that became "You rang?"

was something that really began with his career here.

>>We'll learn about some notable alumni from one of Florida's oldest colleges.

Buckle up.

Florida Road trip is back on the road.

♪♪ ♪♪ Hi there and welcome to Florida Road Trip.

I'm Scott Fais.

This week, we're making a stop in DeLand, the county seat of Volusia County.

During DeLand's early days, this area was only accessible by steamship along the St John's River.

Today, DeLand's location between Orlando and Daytona Beach make it a popular destination for both residents and tourists alike.

However, DeLand wasn't always the name of this area.

>>Prior to Henry DeLand's presence here, it was known as Persimmon Hollow.

Down at what is now the corner of New York Avenue and Florida, there was a large depression in the ground, what we in the south would call a hollow.

It was about 100 feet by 100 feet, and so it retained rainwater when it rained.

Because there was water there, vegetation like persimmon plants grew all around it.

So as a point of reference, this area was referred to as persimmon hollow after that hollow in the ground that collected water over the years.

>>But things were about to change for the town of Persimmon Hollow.

>>1876 was quite a year.

It was the centennial birthday of the United States.

Up in Fairport, New York, Henry DeLand was a 40 year old baking soda manufacturer, very wealthy, very successful, probably never been on a vacation in his life.

But this was the year.

>>At the request of his brother in law, DeLand made his way to the outskirts of Persimmon Hollow.

>>And Mr. DeLand was not not real happy about it.

He kept saying, Let's turn back I don't want to see this.

As they hit the DeLand Orange City Ridge, which is a high and dry ridge.

Mr. DeLand's interest piqued.

He said it reminded him of New York and he said he can see far in the distance through the trees.

He was really pretty excited about it.

>>That day, he bought 159.1 acres for $1,000 and set his sights on the future.

>>He sees great possibility for agriculture, for industry and for tourism in this area.

He thinks it's beautiful.

>>He goes back to New York and pretty soon he's placing ads in The New York Times and other Northern newspapers.

One said "Persimmon Hollow, 25 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, is constantly favored by the cool ocean sea breeze."

That's stretching it just a little bit, about 24 miles, I would say.

A couple of things happened that really set the tone for the development of DeLand.

One, he offered to donate land for a school, which later becomes DeLand Academy and later Stetson University.

He also donates a 60 foot wide one mile long Main Street, which will run through the center of this town.

It will be called Woodland Boulevard.

>>And because of that, the citizens of Persimmon Hollow ultimately voted unanimously to rename the area DeLand after Henry DeLand and the many things he brought to this area.

>>The name was forever changed to DeLand and Mr. DeLand continued to sell his property with a unique guarantee.

>>All the people he sold land to, which was quite a few.

He guaranteed satisfaction.

If you were not successful, he would give you your money back.

What other town did something like that?

None that I know of.

>>But that guarantee would prove costly as a great freeze hit Florida in 1895.

>>Well, February dropped to 16 degrees and stayed there for hours.

95% of all the citrus in the state of Florida was wiped out.

Not just the fruit, the tree.

Dig them up, throw them in a pile and burn them.

One settler described when it came out the next day, he described it as he sounded like a firing range.

It was like crack, pow, pop, pop, crack.

It was those trees bursting.

There were a lot of dissatisfied people after that freeze.

It takes, what, seven, eight years to get citrus producing.

So we had quite a few people come to him and say, Well, I'm sorry, but I need my money back.

So he's facing a choice.

I think he could have worked and he could've wiggled his way out of it.

He could have said, hey, act of nature, not my fault.

Or he could have said, I'm bankrupt.

I have no money.

Which was true.

So he has a choice to make.

He's 60 years old.

He goes back to Fairport.

Starts a new baking soda company.

And within a few years, he paid all the creditors off.

It really kind of makes you feel good to know our founding father actually went a step above what he had to do to hold his values.

>>The great freeze was not the only early catastrophe.

A much warmer disaster had already shaped DeLand's past.

>>September 27th of 1886, the residents of DeLand woke up to a great fire.

And citizens started coming out and watching helplessly as most of their town burned to the ground.

It started, we think, in Wilcox Saloon, and possibly with a cigar that was left on sawdust and quickly spread not only from Wilcox Saloon, but to the three story building to the south.

>>Fortunately, there were no fatalities, but 22 buildings and 43 businesses were wiped out on that fateful night.

>>In the morning when everybody was standing around, they were totally amazed at how much devastation there was.

The citizens and the townspeople passed two ordinances.

One was that there would be no more wood structures in downtown DeLand.

It would have to be brick.

And the second was no more saloons.

The Great Fire of 1896 was a milestone in DeLand's history.

It set the table for creating a new community that was more resilient, still evident today in DeLand.

And that's why we enjoy living here.

>>The Post-Fire Ordinance that bans the building of wooden structures is what gives downtown DeLand part of its charm.

And if you would like to have a seat and enjoy a little drink downtown, there's nothing to worry about because the saloon ordinance was repealed long ago.

♪♪ ♪♪ Following the great freeze of the late 19th century, the city of DeLand fell upon hard times, and the future of DeLand Academy was in doubt.

That's until a Philadelphia philanthropist put his hat down on the school and the community.

>>Stetson University was founded in 1883, and it was originally DeLand Academy.

It was founded as a prep school for both high school age students and later younger students.

>>DeLand Academy faced significant financial barriers.

So Henry DeLand went in search of additional funding.

>>He found that he needed financial support.

He realized that a prominent hatmaker and entrepreneur, John B Stetson, was buying property in DeLand he was interested in this as not only his winter home, but as an investment opportunity to buy orange groves.

DeLand contacted him.

They became friends.

And John B Stetson bought into this idea that the people of DeLand, this fledgling southern community, should have access to higher education, much like the Northern students have.

>>From what I understand, he was quite involved with the university in the early years.

He was very close to the university's first president, John Forbes.

They had a very close working relationship and he was very much involved in the early affairs of the university.

>>Stetson's early involvement with DeLand Academy eventually led the school to change its name to John B Stetson University in 1889.

>>The first building at Stetson was DeLand Hall, and it was the university, the school for the first few years, and it housed the classrooms it housed a little library, a little science lab.

The students ate there.

And really, it was the only place they had.

And it is the oldest continuous use building in Florida for the purposes of education.

>>Elizabeth Hall was built with Stetson's money, and it was named after his wife, Elizabeth.

He wanted it to look as if it had come from Philadelphia, basically.

So when he consulted with the architect, he wanted something that looked like it had been kind of dropped out of the streets of Philadelphia.

>>In the early 1900s, Stetson acquired a set of chimes, and they were named the Eloise chimes after the president's wife, Eloise, and they were housed in the cupola of Elizabeth Hall.

And after a while, these these chimes, which the students would play, begin to structurally damage the cupola of this building.

So the president of the time, Lincoln Hulley, decided to build a tower just to house these bells.

These Eloise chimes.

>>He also had plans to be interred there.

So he was buried there.

The the base of the tower is actually a crypt where he and his wife, Eloise, are interred.

>>The early days of Hulley Tower, there were a lot of stories that went around and we don't know exactly which ones are true and which ones aren't.

>>Well, there is a longstanding legend that the Hulleys dog is also buried with them.

But we have we have no proof of that.

>>But my favorite is the one about students taking cows up and down the stairs of the tower.

So I find it hard to imagine that it really happened.

But I've heard the story many times, seen it referenced in a few places.

So maybe they really did get that cow up there and back down.

>>Hulley Tower was torn down due to structural concerns, but the base remains today as a campus landmark.

♪♪ Stetson University has proved influential to many notable alumni.

For Max Cleland, the university helped shape his future that led to a lifetime of service for our country.

We had the honor of speaking to Mr. Cleveland before his passing in 2021.

>>But when I went to Stetson, I was a pine nut man, no question about that.

Whether I've turned into something or not is for other people to judge.

See, initially I thought I was going to be a teacher, a physics teacher, but I didn't have enough math to get even in the basic physics class.

So later on I thought I was going to be an English teacher.

Well, that kind of died with remedial English, but I realized that teaching wasn't going to be my bag.

It was going to be serving.

>>That call to service led Cleland to join ROTC and seek the opportunity to spend a semester in Washington, D.C.. >>That turned my life around.

That was the time the fall of 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, and we were invited into the Oval Office to see the Oval Office.

I was one of the last people to ever see the Oval Office under President Kennedy.

I saw the rocking chair and the desk.

72 hours later, the president was assassinated in Dallas.

I came out of Washington with those words of President Kennedy ringing in my ear, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you could do for your country."

I begin to wonder if even I could get into politics.

>>After graduating from Stetson, Cleland earned his master's degree in history from Emory University.

He then enlisted in the Army and headed to Vietnam, where he was wounded, losing both legs and his right arm.

>>Got blown up with the grenade dropped by a fellow soldier.

Five, five weeks before I was scheduled to go home.

I was lucky to survive that, I spent a year and a half Military at a VA hospital came home and wondered what in the world I was going to do.

So I said, well, I took a stock in my life.

I said, No job, no future, no girlfriend, no money, no car.

That was a great time to run for the state Senate.

So so that's what I did.

And believe it or not, won 1970, it was the same year, I was 28.

I was the youngest member elected, elected to the state Senate and a young man by the name of Jimmy Carter won the race for governor.

And Carter got sworn in and I got sworn in to state government at the same time.

Carter went on to become president of the United States, sworn in in 1977, appointed me as head of the Veterans Administration.

So January 20th, 1977, I was Jimmy Carter's first appointment in his Oval Office.

And then, of course, Reagan fired me and I came home to Georgia and was Secretary of State for 12 years.

>>Then an opportunity to campaign for U.S. Senate.

>>And I said, Oh, baby, this is for me.

So within a week, I announced for the U.S. Senate and by the grace of God and friends was elected in 1996.

>>Cleland lost his reelection bid, but eventually was brought back into service.

>>President Obama appointed me to be secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission, which runs all the American cemeteries abroad.

I would not have had a chance to do all this had not Stetson helped me lay the groundwork for my life.

♪♪ >>For more than 115 seasons, students at Stetson have performed in different stage productions.

One of those actors went on to find scary success when cast in a television show with a creepy and kooky family.

♪♪ >>Ted Cassidy being an alum of Stetson University is such a proud achievement for us.

When he came to Stetson, he was known for sort of being a reserved person.

And after working with our professors here, particularly one of our most notable professors, Dr. Stover, he really sort of brought out all of the talent that was hiding beneath that shyness that Ted had.

He and other directors would make Ted stand in the balcony of the then Stover Theater and make him project his lines very loudly.

And that much of that deep bass sound that he had that became "You rang?"

was something that really began with his career here.

He went on to do a number of shows here, and he was also a very, very successful basketball player here.

He was very involved in the school.

In the years after he graduated, eventually he landed the role of Lurch in the Addams Family, and that role was initially supposed to be a silent character.

When the bell rang and they first began filming, he actually improvised the line "You rang?"

and the producers were so impressed by his bravura of his voice that that became a standard part of his presentation.

I can't tell you how many productions I've sat in the audience for here and seen students read his name in the program as an alum of the school, and they will say, "Did you know Lurch went to school here, Lurch in the Addams Family?"

And that's pretty amazing that the show still has that much recognition and he has that much recognition for a show that has not produced new episodes since 1966.

So that's nearly 60 years.

And that speaks volumes to what he and what the legacy ♪♪ of the show are.

>>Athens, Greece is known as a hub of arts and culture.

In the early 1920s, settlers of the land also shared that same vision, going as far as nicknaming their city, the Athens of Florida.

In fact, they named their community theater after the Greek city.

>>The theater was originally built in 1921, and it opened January 5th of 1922.

It was one of the vaudeville theaters on the circuit.

So different traveling troops would come down and they would stop in Jacksonville and then they would stop in DeLand and they would perform here.

And then they would go on down further south to Miami and to Key West.

The theater stayed as a vaudeville theater until vaudeville started to die.

Then it moved more into these silent movies during the Great Depression.

It was actually said to be one of the only places in town that was affordable enough to be able to go.

>>Throughout the early years, the Athens Theatre compiled an impressive list of performers.

>>Sally Rand, the very famous burlesque dancer at the time, we had Mae West, Josephine Baker.

We had Al Jolson, Will Rogers, and we even had supposedly a very young aspiring Elvis.

After the Great Depression, the theater fell into a little bit of disrepair and they decided to renovate the theater and make it modern for the time.

>>By the 1980s, the theater fell into disrepair again.

The structure was almost torn down until funds were raised to save the historic building.

>>They were able to redo the facade and have the front of the building look like it had when it originally opened in 1922.

So now it looks very similar to what it originally looked like in 1922 when it opened with one slight difference, which is when the theater originally opened it had a thousand seats and now it has 450 seats because we like to adhere to fire codes.

It is a haven where you can come and you can be yourself and you can be as big and loud and exuberant as you possibly want to be and be in a nice, intimate setting and enjoy some really good entertainment.

It's not it's not just a building.

It's it's so much more than that.

It really is kind of the heart of the town.

♪♪ ♪♪ >>Scattered throughout downtown DeLand await more than a dozen historic murals.

And right around the corner, you'll find a set of wings that is a draw for folks around the world.

>>Being from DeLand and now creating this mural for DeLand has been such a cool feeling.

>>I love the fact that this is a very simple little mural.

We didn't do anything special.

We didn't repaint the doors.

It was just a simple gesture of art.

And it's just a real joy to see all the people enjoying this very simple interactive mural here in DeLand.

>>I was working for Dressed Boutique.

Social media was a big part of sales for us.

We would take photos wearing the clothing from the shop and post them online.

When customers weren't in the shop, we'd quick run outside and take some photos in front of the doors and go back in.

So this went on for a while.

One day I talked to the owner of Dressed like, what would you think if I drew some wings and we stood in front of that, she was like, absolutely, go right ahead.

And I said, I'm just going to be in chalk.

It will be this afternoon, believe it or not, in this Florida, whether they are a tiny bit protected.

Eventually they did wash away.

When I painted the wings permanently, they gained the hashtag #DeLandWings.

So many people are coming to DeLand to have a photo taken in front of the wings and then it's driving tourism wonderfully.

I've said before, and I really believe this I think you stand a little taller when you're standing in front of the wings.

♪♪ ♪♪ >>Here in DeLand at the DeLeon Springs State Park, not only can you see and smell history, you can also taste it.

That's when you make your own pancakes here at the Old Sugar Mill Pancake House.

And to show us how it's done, we have an expert.

This is Carlee McKinney.

Carlee, thanks for joining us.

Tell us, what do we have to put on this hot griddle?

We can feel it here.

>>Thank you for having me.

So we have our buttermilk, which is in the blue pitcher, and we have our multigrain, which is in the red pitcher.

Two different varieties that you can have when you come enjoy your pancakes here.

>>All right.

So how much do I actually pour on here?

>>So first you want to spray before you start pouring.

>>Spray.

All right.

Got our spray?

>>Yep.

So you can give it a good spray, and then once you're ready, you can go ahead start pouring.

>>All right, put a little bit here.

There we go.

>>Perfect pour.

>>Oh, thank you.

You can hear it already.

Starting to sizzle up now I'm making a mess.

>>Yeah.

No messes here.

>>There we go.

I gotta be honest.

Growing up, I wasn't allowed to play with the stove or the oven, so this is exciting for me.

And we also have some toppings.

>>Yes, we have some toppings.

>>All right.

>>So we have pecans over here.

We have blueberries.

We have chocolate chips, and we also have thin mints.

>>Ooh thin mints.

All right.

Let's put some of these.

And we're going to layer it on and speaking of layering it on, this is a place that has been layered on with history throughout the past 200 years.

Tell me a little bit about the facility we're at and how this used to be an honest to goodness working sugar mill.

>>Correct.

So over 100 years ago it was a working sugarcane mill, so they used to use the springhead water to crush the sugar cane with the wheel as it was spinning.

>>And the wheel is still out back.

You can see some of these artifacts, these relics from history actually still here on site.

>>Correct, we even have message boards in the park that have all the information of all the history that we have here.

>>And some of that history is that this sugar mill here was burned down not once, but twice throughout its history.

At another point, it started to fall apart, but it's been lovingly restored today and folks can come out and immerse themselves in Florida history while they make their own breakfast.

>>Correct.

For over 50 years, they've been able to come out here and make their own breakfast.

All right, you ready?

Let's see our flips.

>>All right.

Not bad.

Look at that.

Right?

This almost 200 year old structure, this foundation in Florida history has actually taken a modern twist on how you can sit here and do this yourself.

>>Correct.

Yeah.

>>That looks absolutely fantastic.

Taste our creation.

This is not breakfast.

This is dessert.

But those chocolate chips in it is absolutely fantastic.

Try not to talk with my mouth full.

Carlee McKinney, great information.

Thanks for joining us here on Florida Road Trip.

>>Thank you for having us.

>>Is there any better way to wrap up a show than in front of a hot griddle making your own pancakes?

I think we might need to do this every episode.

Thanks for joining us for this edition of Florida Road Trip.

I'm Scott Fais.

Join us again next week as we enjoy a ride through Florida history.

Until then, safe travels, everyone.

Excuse me.

I got to go.

My biscuits are burning.

♪♪ >>This program is brought to you in part by the Paul B.

Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation.

A proud partner of WUCF, and the Central Florida Community.