As the Daytona Regional Chamber celebrates a centennial of serving the great Daytona Beach region, we look back at how our community has evolved over the last 100 years.
By the early 20th Century, the sands of Daytona Beach had become a destination for aviation enthusiasts, who found the hard sand surface to be an ideal airstrip. In 1906, Charles Hamilton, the 12th person in the U.S. to earn a pilot’s license, piloted Florida’s first glider flight on the sands of Ormond Beach, and in 1910, Edward Andrews flew the first twin-engine plane ever built from Daytona Beach. For the next decade, throngs of aviators made their way to Daytona Beach, necessitating some regulations on the “natural airport.” In 1928, the City of Daytona Beach moved its aviation activities to Bethune Point along the Halifax, bringing an end to beach aviation.
