F. Alex Ford - Deland, Florida - Landis, Graham, French Council for Residing Hope in Enterprise Florida and Madison FL - Medicaid, DCF, AHCA MEDIA RELEASE - Grandma - Law Lawyer Volusia County Rotary

I grew up with a pretty simple operating system: I’m allergic to very little, but one thing I cannot tolerate is bullshit. That allergy didn’t develop in a classroom or a boardroom. It developed in Florida. Real Florida. The counties where land determines everything, where last names echo through courthouse hallways, and where everyone knows exactly which families have been pulling the strings for the last hundred years even if nobody says it out loud.

People say I have a chip on my shoulder about authority. Maybe I do. But if you grow up in places where power structures are inherited like farmland, that chip isn’t a personality flaw. It’s pattern recognition.

Florida runs on land.

Not tourism. Not beaches. Not retirement communities. Land. Who owned it first, who sold it, who developed it, and which law firms made the deals. If you trace the history of almost any county in this state, you’ll eventually hit the same intersection: land, money, politics, and lawyers.

Volusia County is one of those places where that intersection has been operating for more than a century.

The city of DeLand itself was founded in the 1870s by Henry DeLand, a northern industrialist who imagined the place as what he called the “Athens of Florida.” That vision brought institutions. Stetson University followed soon after. Citrus wealth flowed through the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Railroads connected the interior to the coast. And slowly, over decades, a small network of families and institutions began shaping the county’s civic life.

At the center of that ecosystem sits one of the oldest continuously operating law firms in Florida: Landis Graham French.

The firm was born in 1902 when Cary D. Landis and Bert Fish formed Landis & Fish in downtown DeLand. Over the next hundred years the firm produced state attorneys, judges, ambassadors, legislators, and legal scholars. Cary Landis himself became Florida’s Attorney General. Bert Fish would later serve as U.S. ambassador to Portugal and previously as America’s first minister to Saudi Arabia during the Roosevelt administration. Members of the firm were deeply involved in drafting legal frameworks that shaped Florida governance, including early foundations of what would eventually become the Florida Highway Patrol.

Over time the firm represented estates tied to some of the most influential figures connected to the region and the state. Stetson University. The estate of Adolph DeBary, namesake of the city of DeBary. Even the Florida estate of John D. Rockefeller.

For more than a century the firm evolved through mergers, new partners, and new political connections. Generations of lawyers joined, many with family ties that stretched through local government, the courts, and civic institutions. Partners served as presidents of the Volusia County Bar Association. Others became judges, state representatives, or key advisors inside county government.

In other words, this isn’t just a law firm. It’s an institutional pillar of the region.

And sometime along the way, the Ford family became part of that lineage.

Frank A. Ford Sr. joined the firm during a merger in 1969 that reshaped the partnership structure. He was instrumental in founding the Oil & Gas Law Section of the Florida Bar. Years later his son, F.A. “Alex” Ford Jr., joined the firm in 1983.

That’s where Alex Ford enters this story.

Now let me say something clearly before anyone misinterprets what I’m saying: I don’t hate Alex Ford. I don’t wake up thinking about Alex Ford. In fact, during one exchange he told me directly that he isn’t my adversary. Those are the facts.

But stories about power aren’t about personal hatred. They’re about context.

Alex Ford is a lifelong resident of DeLand. His legal practice focuses on eminent domain, land transactions, and development. That alone tells you something important, because in Florida those fields sit directly on top of the most valuable asset in the state: land.