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Daytona Beach - Florida - History |
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The
"World's Most Famous Beach" is Daytona Beach. Its 23
miles of beautiful white sand beaches are famous the world over dating
back from the very early 1900's when automobiles were first raced on the
beach. Speeds were incredible for their day, the top speed in 1902 was an
amazing 57 miles per hour. The last land speed record set on the beach was
in 1935 when Sir Malcolm Campbell drove the world famous
"Bluebird" at 276 miles per hour on the beach! 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 Mansfield, 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.
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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At
the south end of Daytona Beach, the Ponce de Leon Inlet
Lighthouse, Daytona's beach museum, 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."
