1884 Wellge / Stoner Bird's Eye View Map of De Land, Florida

A very rare 1884 Stoner / Wellge bird's-eye view of DeLand Florida at the height of the first Florida Citrus Boom and the Second Florida Land Boom - which centered around DeLand.The view looks northeast on Deland. Thirty-eight business, offices, hotels, and civic buildings rea named, as well as seven churches. Orange grows are evident throughout, underscoring DeLand's significance as a center of the Citrus Boom.

Manuscript Content: Berlin H. Wright

Manuscript content points to the home of B. H. Wright. This can only be Berlin Hart Wright (1851 - 1940). Wright was an astronomer, surveyor, and geologist. He was born in Dundee, New York. He taught briefly at Penn Yan Academy, before developing a deep interest in the Mound Builder cultures of the American mid-west. He studied and surveyed the ruins extensively. From in the 1880s, Wright began wintering in DeLand, Florida, where he built a home and contributed to the surveying and naming of Ponce de Leon springs. After his death, his descendants continued to live in and around DeLand.

Second Florida Land Boom

In the second half of the 19th and throughout the early 20th century, Florida experienced a series of land booms and crashes. The first followed the Second Seminole War (1835 - 1842), when the government offered homesteaders who agreed to stay five years 160 acres of free land. The second - represented by the growth of DeLand - follows the arrival of the railroads to central Florida, leading to nearly 15 years of prosperity and economic growth - mostly revolving around the booming citrus industry. New settlements sprang up throughout the northern half of the state, many owned by absentee investors who never personally visited Florida. The boom collapsed in 1894-95 when a series of historical freezes wiped out the citrus harvest. Property depreciation following the freezes allowed Henry Flagler (1830 - 1913) to develop the Florida East Coast Railway. This, and the arrival of the highway system in the 1920s, led to the third Florida land boom from 1920 to the stock market crash of 1929.

American Bird's-Eye City Views

The tradition of the bird's-eye city view emerged in the United States in the middle part of the 19th century and coincided with the commercial development of lithographic printing. Before the rise of lithography, the ability to own and display artwork in the home was largely limited to the extremely wealthy, the advent of lithographic printing made it possible for everyone to own visually striking artwork. A robust trade developed in portraits of political leaders, allegorical and religious images, and city views.

City views were being produced in the United States as early as the 1830s, but the genre exploded after the American Civil War (1861 - 1865). Bridging the gap between maps and pictures, most 19th century American bird's-eye views presented cities to the public from high vantage points. Some were imagined, but others were drawn from hot-air balloons or nearby hills. The presentation, combining high elevation, commercial interest, and new printing technology, created a uniquely American art form, as described by historian Donald Karshan,

Some print connoisseurs believe that it was only with the advent of the full-blown city-view lithograph that American printmaking reached its first plateau of originality, making a historical contribution to the graphic arts. They cite the differences between the European city-view prints and the expansive American version that reflects a new land and a new attitude toward the land.

The vogue for bird's-eye city views lasted from about 1845 to 1920, during which period some 2,400 cities were thus portrayed, some multiple times. Although views were produced in many urban centers, the nexus of view production in the United States was Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The major American viewmakers were Stoner, Wellge, Bailey, Fowler, Hill, Ruger, Koch, Burleigh, Norris, and Morse, among others.

Publication History and Census

This view was published by J. J. Stoner of Madison, Wisconsin in 1888. It was engraved on stone by Henry Wellge and printed by Beck and Pauli, both of Milwaukee. We note examples in the Library of Congress and at the Touchton Map Library, Tampa.