The 1920s land boom at Rockledge: Valencia Road, a new city charter, and the bust

Rockledge had about 450 people in 1920 and over 600 by 1925, according to the National Park Service’s history of the town, which calls it “a small scale example of the frenzied development that occurred throughout the state.” Between 1921 and 1926 subdivisions spread so fast that the line between Rockledge and Cocoa “quickly obscured.” The town rewrote its charter, paved and lit its streets, built seawalls on the river, and put up a new town hall. The most complete thing the boom left behind is one street, Valencia Road, lined with Mediterranean Revival houses built between 1924 and 1926.

The boom statewide

The Park Service form sets the scene with numbers from the period. By early 1925 the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce was reporting 20 to 25 trains a day arriving in the city and 150,000 automobiles passing through during the winter season. The fall before, the Legislature had approved a constitutional amendment barring an income or inheritance tax, which the form describes as an open invitation to wealthy investors. Prosperity, a shorter work week, paid vacations, cheap cars and new paved highways sent the middle class south, and magazine stories and land advertisements did the rest.

What it did to Rockledge

The town government spent the boom catching up. In April 1921 the council adopted Rockledge’s first building ordinance, which set fire limits, required building permits and let the council ask for fireproof materials. Through the early 1920s it widened, extended, lit and paved streets, built seawalls along the Indian River, granted a telephone franchise to Southern Bell, bought a new pump truck and set up a permanent fire department.

It also built a town hall. Local architect Richard Rummell drew the first plans in 1921, but the council shelved them for lack of money. Bids went out in November 1924, construction began in September 1925 on councilman and builder W. Herbert Bower’s bid of $18,240, and the Mediterranean Revival Municipal Building at 11 Orange Avenue was finished in early 1926, with bays for the fire engines, the police office, the council chamber and the town library.

In April 1925, with the population growing and pressure to extend the town limits, Rockledge reincorporated as a city. That winter every room in town was full, the Park Service says, and the overflow slept in “tent cottages” at a tourist camp on the west edge of town. The old wooden Indian River Hotel had already been replaced in 1923 by a Mediterranean Revival building that cost $300,000. By 1926 the Dixie Highway, following the route of the Florida East Coast Railway, had reached Rockledge.

Valencia Road

The boom’s signature in Rockledge is the Valencia Subdivision, listed on the National Register on August 21, 1992, as its own district. It covers 14 through 140 Valencia Road, from just west of Rockledge Drive to Osceola Drive, a little over a third of a mile, plus houses at 825-827 Osceola Drive and 24-28 Orange Avenue.

The Park Service form describes it as the one part of historic Rockledge that looks planned. All of its contributing houses were built between 1924 and 1926, all are Mediterranean Revival, mixing Spanish Colonial, Mission, Italian villa and Moorish elements, and most have stuccoed walls, casement windows, clay tile roofs and varied roof lines. Their siting is “virtually uniform,” which the form credits to the building codes the town had adopted by the 1920s. Along Rockledge Drive, by contrast, lots vary in size and shape because that street “grew up organically.”

The boom touched Rockledge Drive too. The Rockledge Drive district has seven Mediterranean Revival buildings, all from the mid-1920s, including the two-story house at 219 Rockledge Drive, built in 1923, with its stepped parapet and barrel-tile pent roofs.

The bust

The signs came before the end. In mid-1925 the Florida East Coast Railway announced an embargo on freight shipments to South Florida because its lines and the state’s ports were clogged with incoming building materials. Bankers complained of the money draining into Florida, and northern magazines ran stories about land fraud. The “final blow,” the Park Service form says, was the hurricane that hit Florida’s east coast in September 1926, the storm that came ashore at Miami.

In Rockledge the collapse showed up in 1926 in the newspapers and at city hall. Property advertisements thinned out. The front-page bulletins on building permits disappeared. New subdivision applications slowed “to a trickle,” and developers whose plats were already approved had to show the council they could pay for their improvements. As the year went on, foreclosures on property whose owners couldn’t pay city taxes “came with alarming frequency.”

The form says the collapse sent Rockledge into a depression it didn’t recover from until after World War II, and it ends its account of the town’s historic development there.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon