How Ormond Beach's Old Money Built a Winter Kingdom and Faded Into Ruin: The Rockefeller Estate

In the spring of 1992, a demolition crew took apart one of the largest wooden buildings in the country. Board by board, the Hotel Ormond disappeared — 11 miles of corridors, 400 rooms, 80 acres of veranda that once ran from the Halifax River to the Atlantic. It was the grandest hotel Florida's Gilded Age ever built. And the strange thing this whole story turns on is what did survive. Not the palace. The plain little house across the street — the one the richest man who ever lived bought, in part, because he thought the hotel was overcharging him. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ormond_... https://www.ormondbeach.org/87/Birthp... https://delandhistoricalsociety.com/b...