The DeLand House Museum, 137 W. Michigan Ave., has served as the center of the West Volusia Historical Society’s efforts to preserve local history since it was purchased in 1988 by history lovers Hawtense and Robert Conrad and donated to the City of DeLand for use by the Society as a house museum and headquarters.

During the Hueber years 1945 - 1970s. Dreggors Collection WVHS photo archives

The house in reconstruction 1989?.  Dreggors Collection WVHS photo archives.

DeLand House. c. 1990. Dreggors Collection in the WVHS archives.

One of the oldest houses in DeLand, it was built in 1886 on part of the original 160 acres Henry DeLand bought in 1876, the first day he visited Persimmon Hollow. Now part of DeLand’s Northwest National Historic District, it was built by George W. Hamlin, of the Standard Sewing Machine Co. of Boston, as a 1 1/2-story, two-bedroom farmhouse and sold to Mrs. Martha Eames. She sold it to John B. Stetson who was buying homes near Stetson University for faculty members. In 1903, he sold it to Dr. Charles Farriss, a Stetson Classics professor, and his wife Alma, who taught piano and domestic science at Stetson.

The Farrisses and their son Carl lived there for 40 years and made it thoroughly their own. A lover of Classical style, they turned its Frame Vernacular beginnings into a Neo-Classical building by adding a large portico with two-story Classical columns facing Woodland Boulevard and the university. They raised the roof to add two bedrooms upstairs, built two elegant, bow windows on the first floor, and added new Classical fireplace surrounds to its fireplaces. They also added a built-in China cabinet, several stained glass and leaded glass panels — and probably best of all, indoor plumbing.

Dr. Farriss died in 1938 and when Mrs. Farriss moved to North Carolina in 1944, the house was sold to a Mrs. Huber, who ran a boarding house there for many years, mostly renting to Stetson students. She sold it to Alex Nyerges, then director of the DeLand Art Museum, who sold it to the Conrads in 1988.

Volunteers led by Bill Dreggors, the Society’s first director, worked hard on its renovation, with help from the City of DeLand and community donations, and it opened in 1990. It served as WVHS headquarters, and was used for tours, meetings, offices, and a gift shop, until the Conrad Research Center was built in 1997. But even then, DeLand House was still used heavily for historic tours and living history reenactments, as well as Society meetings and special parties.

When the pandemic forced its closure in March 2020, the Society partnered with the City of DeLand on a much-needed renovation and restoration, completed in June 2024. A successful fund-raising campaign allowed the Society to update the style of the DeLand House Museum from its Victorian roots to the early 20th Century Progressive Era. A completely fresh tour now tells the stories of DeLand’s exciting boom times after the First World War, when the Farrisses made it their home. It includes an extensive collection of period photographs, authentic artifacts, and memorabilia from DeLand’s earliest days, tracing and preserving the history and development of the area we call home today.

DeLand House today.