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A future king of England in inland Florida at a hunting lodge above the St.
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John's River.
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It's not the type of sentence most people expect to hear.
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But that is the DeBerry Hall story.
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Not Disney royalty, not invented Florida glamour, actual European high society, moving through what was then a rougher, quieter, far less built-up stretch of the state, and stopping at a grand winter retreat in what is now DeBerry.
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The official history of the landmark says Frederick de Berry reportedly entertained the Prince of Wells here, the man who later became King Edward VII.
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And once you know what DeBerry Hall was, that story stops sounding random and starts sounding almost inevitable.
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This is the Gallivantor Podcast.
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I'm Chad, and this is the story of why a future king ended up vacationing at DeBerry Hall, and what that says about the version of Florida well-to-do people were already buying into during the 19th century.
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The first thing to understand is that DeBerry Hall was never some accidental farmhouse that later got a grand reputation attached to it.
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It was built to impress.
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Frederick DeBerry was a wine importer, specifically the American agent for Mom Champagne based in New York.
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In the early 1870s, he came to this part of Florida by steamboat, the only way to reach the interior of Central Florida at the time.
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And what he found on the north shore of Lake Monroe was exactly what he was looking for.
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He completed construction on his hunting lodge in 1871.
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The house was 8,000 square feet with a two-story veranda, tall columns, bay windows made of hand-blown glass, high ceilings, and the kind of design meant to signal leisure and status at the same time.
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It was a machine for hosting.
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A place where Northern and European money could arrive in the Florida winter, hunt in the morning, swim in the cool springs nearby, eat well, sit on the veranda, and spend a few weeks behaving as if the frontier had been domesticated for their convenience.
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As one relative of the family later put it, entertainment was a very simple matter at DeBerry Hall.
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Most guests were asked because they enjoyed the out-of-doors with swimming, hunting, and fishing.
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So the question is not really why a prince would come here.
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The better question is why wouldn't he, if this is the kind of circle he moved in.
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By the late 19th century, Florida was already being sold to affluent outsiders as a winter refuge.
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Not yet the Florida of theme parks and condo towers.
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Not even quite the Henry Flagler Florida most people picture first.
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This was an earlier luxury Florida, river Florida, reached by steamboat, shaped by private estates, hunting grounds, orange groves, and a social world where being remote could actually increase your appeal.
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DeBerry Hall's own reputation places it inside that larger story of tourism on the St.
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John's, orange fever, and steamboating.
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Frederick de Berry did not just build a house, he turned the whole landscape into a business.
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He planted orange groves on the estate.
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He started his own steamboat line in 1876, the De Berry Merchants Line, contracted to carry mail between Jacksonville and Enterprise.
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In 1883, that line merged with Colonel H.
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T.
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Baya's competing operation to become the De Berry-Baya Merchants Line, the largest and most successful steamboat line on the St.
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John's.
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DeBerry Hall was not isolated from the world.
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It was plugged into the transportation and business network that made elite winter travel possible.
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If you were rich, well connected, and looking for somewhere warmer, quieter, and more exclusive than the urban north in January, this worked beautifully.
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You could arrive in a place that still looked wild enough to be interesting, but was organized enough to serve you dinner.
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So why did a future king vacation here?
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Because DeBerry Hall offered three things well-to-do people of the era valued enormously.
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First, climate.
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A winter retreat in Central Florida was not a gimmick in the 1870s and 1880s.
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It was a serious luxury.
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Cold weather elites were already discovering that they could leave the Northeast, come south, and spend weeks in shirt sleeves, while much of the country was miserable.
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Second, sport.
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This was hunting country hospitality.
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The Berry Hall was not pitched as a courtly palace in the European sense.
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It was something more attractive to many elite men of the era.
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A sporting estate with prestige.
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The grounds were built around it.
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Quail, deer, alligator,
Load full transcript
fishing, a spring-fed pool, hunting parties setting out before dawn, breakfast served at 4 30 in the morning.
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Third, social insulation.
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That may be the biggest one.
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The Prince of Wells, later Edward VII, spent much of his life moving through circles of wealth, leisure, and ceremony.
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DeBerry Hall fit that world.
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Not because it was royal property, but because it was private, elegant, well supplied, and patronized by exactly the kinds of names that signaled you would be among your own set.
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The official De Berry Hall history groups, the reported Prince of Wells visit, alongside Presidents Grant and Cleveland, the Astors, Goulds, and Vanderbilts.
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That is not a random guest list.
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That is a social statement.
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In other words, he was not vacationing at De Berry Hall because Florida was provincial.
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He was vacationing here because Florida, for a certain class of traveler, had already become fashionable.
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And there's another part of the story that makes it more interesting.
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DeBerry Hall lets you see how early Florida luxury was built before the modern state fully arrived.
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By the time the last American heir died in 1941, the estate had grown to more than 6,000 acres.
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The public historic site today preserves ten of them, with the main house, stables, and other structures still standing.
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What survives publicly today is a 10-acre historic site rather than the vast estate Frederick DeBery once assembled.
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The house endured long enough to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, added in 1972, and is now managed by Volusia County.
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That turn is part of what makes DeBerry Hall worth visiting.
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You are not just walking through a nice old house.
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You are walking through a moment when Florida was being invented, marketed, and refined for people with money, long before mass tourism turned that process into an industry everybody could recognize.
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DeBerry Hall is a surviving piece of the Florida that sold winter as status.
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And that is why the Prince of Wells belongs in the story.
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Not as a trivia answer, not as some decorative little royal anecdote.
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He belongs in it because his reported visit confirms what this place really was.
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A high-end winter station at the center of a growing network of wealth, leisure, transport, and image making.
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This was not the backwoods edge of nowhere.
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This was a place important enough, comfortable enough, and fashionable enough to attract someone who would later wear the British crown.