The 1950s and 1960s boom that made Rockledge a city of 10,000

Rockledge counted 1,347 people in the 1950 census and 10,523 in 1970, almost eight times as many in twenty years. Nothing in the town’s earlier history came close. It had taken Rockledge from 1920 to 1950 to grow from 453 people to 1,347, and the 1920s land boom, the biggest event in its first half-century, had added about a hundred and fifty by the Park Service’s count.

The census record

The U.S. Census Bureau’s 1970 report for Florida lists Rockledge’s population at every census since 1920:

Year	Rockledge	Change
1920	453
1930	551	+98
1940	725	+174
1950	1,347	+622
1960	3,481	+2,134
1970	10,523	+7,042

The 1960s alone added more than 7,000 people, a 202 percent increase. Of Rockledge’s 1970 total, the Census Bureau counted 8,063 inside the city’s 1960 limits and 2,460 in areas annexed during the decade, so most of the growth came from filling in the town that already existed rather than from new territory.

The neighbors grew too

Rockledge wasn’t alone. Every town in central Brevard swelled in the same years, and the census numbers for 1960 and 1970 show how far:

Place	1960	1970
Cocoa	12,294	16,110
Cocoa Beach	3,475	9,952
Rockledge	3,481	10,523
Titusville	6,410	30,515
Merritt Island (unincorporated)	3,554	29,233

Brevard County as a whole went from 23,653 people in 1950 to 111,435 in 1960, a 371 percent increase that a 1966 Florida State University study for NASA called the fastest growth of any county in the United States that decade, and it reached 230,006 by 1970, according to the state’s demographic office. The study traced the boom to the 1948 decision to put the nation’s long-range guided missile program at Cape Canaveral, the first launches from the Cape in 1950, and NASA’s arrival in 1958. By 1955, it noted, the missile center’s pull was being described in Orlando as “creating a boom comparable to that of 1925.” Our sister sites cover the Cape’s launch history and what Apollo did to Titusville.

What it changed

Before the boom, Rockledge’s built history was compact. The National Park Service’s survey of the town, done for its 1992 National Register listings, found that apart from the Valencia Subdivision houses of 1924-26, most of Rockledge’s historic residences were built before 1920, and that the town had no historic commercial district at all. Its historic buildings were houses along three streets: Rockledge Drive, Barton Avenue and Valencia Road. Everything else came later.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon