One of my favorite things about writing the Enchanted Springs books is borrowing little pieces of real DeLand and letting them drift into fiction.
The Volusia County Bank building on Woodland Boulevard is a perfect example. It dates to 1909, and it was designed in the Classical Revival style, complete with a full-width portico, Ionic columns, and enough architectural gravitas to make anyone feel they should probably be carrying a leather briefcase and discussing interest rates.
In my books, I’ve deeded it to Ivy Sheridan, one of Enchanted Springs’ leading real estate agents.
But now, a confession: I’ve never actually been inside it. My version is pure imagination. But the outside tells such a good story that the inside practically invents itself.
This is how I pictured it in Antiques and Apparitions:
Her office occupied a prime corner on Main Street and Addison Avenue, in a landmark building that had once been the town’s grandest bank. Roman columns framed the entrance with all the subtlety of a man shouting trust me in a three-piece suit.
Inside, the space was a masterclass in modern luxury dressed up in historic charm. Marble floors gleamed beneath soft chandeliers. A row of preserved teller windows nodded to the building’s past, while the old walk-in vault had been turned into a coffee bar. Its massive iron door stood open, revealing gleaming mugs, jars of tea, and an espresso machine that hummed faintly in the background.
Above it all, the ceiling featured a sprawling fresco of Greek gods and goddesses lounging on clouds, frozen in immortal revelry.
That last part might say more about me than the building.
Still, when you’re staring at a grand old bank with columns out front, it’s hard not to imagine marble floors, brass fixtures, and at least one fabulously over-the-top ceiling. It was designed to project permanence. Stability. Confidence. It was a temple of trust, built in brick and stone and columns. But history has a way of reminding us that even the most solid-looking institutions can wobble.
But by the late 1920s, even grand bank buildings like this one were vulnerable. Florida’s banking troubles began before the stock market crash, after the land boom collapsed in 1926, and conditions worsened in 1929, when a fresh wave of panic and withdrawals swept through the state. In that atmosphere, the Volusia County Bank itself was caught in the crisis and suspended in July 1929.
Maybe that’s why this building works so well for fiction. It already carries drama in its bones. Even before I turned it into Ivy Sheridan’s office, it looked like a place where fortunes could be made, lost, hidden, or transformed.
Someday I’ll work up the guts to go inside. I should be curious. I should storm over there right now to find out what’s what. But if I walk in and Ivy Sheridan isn’t there to welcome me with coffee from the vault, I’m going to be more than a little disappointed.