Rockledge incorporated August 7, 1887: how it became a town, and the Titusville question

Rockledge became a town in 1887. The city gives the date as August 7, 1887, and describes itself as the first incorporated municipality in Brevard County. The National Park Service’s history of Rockledge, written for its National Register listings, tells the same story: by 1887 the settlement had about 150 permanent residents, and H.S. Williams, then in his second year in the Florida Legislature, sponsored the bill that incorporated it.

There’s one wrinkle in the “first” claim, and it comes from the same federal series. The Park Service’s history of Titusville says Titusville’s men voted 58 to 2 to incorporate in November 1886, nine months before Rockledge’s date.

The settlement before the charter

The town grew out of land along the river bought after the Civil War. Gardner S. Hardee, a Georgian born in 1842, came to Florida with his brother in 1868 and bought several tracts on the Indian River. He named one “Rock Ledge,” the Park Service form says, for a prominent outcrop of stone that formed a natural seawall along the bank. The city’s own account calls them ledges of coquina rock. Hardee’s brother’s land was platted as “Indian River city” and ended up part of Cocoa.

Hiram S. Williams arrived in 1874. Born in 1833 and a builder in New York before the war, he had served in the Confederate army with the 40th Alabama and came to Florida after a failed attempt to restart his carriage business in Alabama. He settled on 35 acres near Rockledge. Hardee and Williams became the town’s promoters, printing brochures for northern cities, and both held county posts and seats in the Legislature.

What made a town of it was tourism. Steamboat service to Lake Poinsett began in 1880, and Hardee ran the five-mile coach from the landing to Rockledge. In 1885 the railroad reached Titusville, and visitors could come down by steamboat from the railroad wharf there. By the late 1880s Rockledge had a reputation, the form says, as one of the premier resorts on Florida’s east coast.

1887

Incorporation followed the population. The Park Service puts the permanent count at about 150 in 1887, “a number significant enough to be considered for incorporation as a town under Florida law,” and credits Williams with the bill. Two years later the town had two large hotels, the Tropic and the Indian River, along with two restaurants and several boarding houses, and in 1889 Samuel Barton platted Rockledge’s first residential subdivision on what is now Barton Avenue. The town’s population peaked at about 400 before the Great Freeze of 1894-95 and fell to about 272 by 1900.

Is Rockledge really the first?

Rockledge’s claim rests on 1887 and on the Legislature. The city says it, and the Park Service’s Rockledge form says the Williams bill “made Rockledge the first incorporated municipality in Brevard County.”

The Park Service’s Titusville form says something that doesn’t fit. Titusville, it says, “remained unincorporated until 1886. In November of that year, local residents (men only) voted 58 to 2 in favor of incorporation,” electing D.L. Gaulden mayor on the same ballot. Titusville had been part of Brevard since the county annexed southern Volusia in 1879, so a November 1886 incorporation would be the earlier one. The City of Titusville’s own history, though, dates its incorporation to 1887.

The two forms don’t reconcile the dates. What both support is narrower: Titusville voted to incorporate by local ballot in November 1886, Rockledge was incorporated by act of the Legislature in 1887. Rockledge’s title as the county’s first city is the city’s own claim and its Park Service form’s, not a settled fact.

Reincorporated twice

The 1887 government didn’t last unchanged. The Park Service form records that the town was reincorporated in 1915, with a mayor, clerk, marshal and six councilmen. The new council passed ordinances for “peace, good order, and morals,” built a jail, banned free-roaming livestock and began paving Rockledge Drive. In April 1925, at the height of the land boom, Rockledge reincorporated again, this time as a city, to take in a larger area.

Cocoa, for comparison, was founded in 1882 as Indian River City, took the name Cocoa in 1884, and didn’t incorporate until 1895, eight years after Rockledge.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon
• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce
• Flagler: Rockefeller Partner and Florida Baron by Edward N. Akin