In 1886, DeLand was a town of about 1,000 people. Modest, but the biggest city in Volusia County. Daytona, its cross-county rival, was No. 2 with a little over 700 people. DeLand had decided on its name in 1876 and incorporated in 1882. So this was a new place on the map when the fire broke out Sept. 27, 1886. The fire started sometime after midnight in the back of the Wilcox Saloon on the east side of the 100 block of North Woodland Boulevard and spread fast. The story is told that the fire started after somebody dropped a cigar on the saloon’s sawdust floor. Whatever the cause, it spread fast and quickly jumped to the west side of the Boulevard. Lacking a fire alarm, townspeople spread the alarm by yelling, beating on dishpans and firing guns. DeLand’s small fire brigade, organized just three years before, wheeled in two 30-gallon chemical engines (a kind of oversized fire extinguisher on wheels) and was immediately overwhelmed. Bucket brigades were organized. Wet blankets were draped on roofs. Helen Parce DeLand, daughter of Henry A. DeLand for whom the town is named, was there. She wrote this about efforts to save the building that was shared by the Carrolton Hotel and Dreka and Sons department store: "They hung wet blankets from the verandahs, then enveloped themselves in blankets ... they went up and down to a tank on the roof for water which they kept pouring on the flames whenever they blazed up. As the men became exhausted, others took their places, until the fire sank into ashes.” By the time it was extinguished, about two blocks of the business district between Rich and New York avenues were in ashes. The blaze destroyed 22 buildings that held 33 businesses. Miraculously, though, nobody died. The place looked like it had been bombed. A photo dated Oct. 1, 1886, shows a group of men by the still-smoldering ashes. To me, they look a little stunned by it all. But then, people often look that way in very old pictures. This could have been a crushing blow to a small green-sprout of a town. But the rebuilding started remarkably fast. And less than two years later, DeLand won a hard-fought countywide referendum to relocate the county seat there from Enterprise. In 1890, a county courthouse opened on the site of the present-day Volusia County Historic Courthouse. Built soundly of fireproof red brick, as city ordinance decreed. For good measure, the city also banned saloons from the central business district, a prohibition that lasted into the 1930s.