History of Daytona Beach

The road extended from St. Augustine, the capital of East Florida, to Andrew Turnbull's experimental colony in New Smyrna. In 1804 Samuel Williams received a land grant of 3,000 acres (12 km) from the Spanish Crown which had regained Florida from the British after the American Revolution. This land grant encompassed the area that would become Daytona Beach. Williams built a slave labor based plantation to grow cotton, rice and sugar cane. His son Samuel Hill Williams would abandon the plantation during the Second Seminole War when the Seminoles burned it to the ground.

In 1871, Mathias Day, Jr., from Mansfield, Ohio, purchased a 2.144.5 acre tract of the former William's Plantation, on the west bank of the tidal channel known as the Halifax River. He built a hotel around which the town arose, which is today the Daytona Beach Historic District. In 1872 due to financial troubles he lost title to his land, residents decide to name the city Daytona in honor of Day as its founder, and incorporated the town in 1876.

In 1886, the St. Johns & Halifax River Railway arrived in Daytona. The line would be purchased in 1889 by Henry M. Flagler, who made it part of his Florida East Coast Railway. The separate towns of Daytona, Daytona Beach, Kingston, and Sea breeze merged as "Daytona Beach" in 1926, at the urging of civic leader J.B. Kahn and others. By the 1920s, it was dubbed "The World's Most Famous Beach".

Daytona's wide beach of smooth, compacted sand attracted automobile and motorcycle races beginning in 1902, as pioneers in the industry tested their inventions. It hosted land speed record attempts beginning in 1904, when William K. Vanderbilt set an unofficial record of 92.307 mph (148.554 km/h). Land speed racers from Barney Oldfield to Henry Sea grave to Malcolm Campbell would visit Daytona repeatedly and make the