Fish, fruit and cattle: how Brevard made a living before the rockets

Before the space program, Brevard County fed itself and paid its bills from the river and the groves. The National Park Service’s history of Titusville calls fish, fruit and vegetables “the backbone of the Indian River economy.”

Fruit from the start

The trade began with the first settlers. La Grange, north of Titusville, was settled in 1860 by families who came to plant citrus and other fruit, according to its National Register nomination. Henry Titus, who came to Sand Point in 1867, shipped freight in to Sand Point by boat and wagon, the Park Service says, and then filled the boats and wagons with citrus and pineapples to send north.

At Rockledge the groves grew fast through the 1880s, interrupted only by a minor freeze in 1886. In 1889 H. S. Williams, who had the biggest grove in town, joined other growers to form the Florida Fruit Growers Association, and in the words of Rockledge’s National Register documentation, “the Indian River orange soon became famous nationwide.”

Fish and ice

Fish mattered as much as fruit at the north end of the county. In 1885, the year the first railroad reached Titusville, George Webster Scobie set up the town’s first successful commercial fish business. Six years later the town switched on Edison electric lighting, and electricity brought Titusville its first commercial ice plant, W. T. Whetmore’s Crystal Ice Company. Ice, the Park Service form says, was essential to preserving the fish, fruit and vegetables the region shipped, and the railroad carried them north to market.

The freeze and the recovery

The freeze of 1894-95 broke the run. Titusville recorded 18°F on December 29, 1894, and 19°F on February 8, 1895, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the second freeze killed orange trees to the ground across most of the state. Across the citrus belt packing houses closed, and in Rockledge most owners of small groves were ruined; the town’s population fell from about 400 to about 272 by 1900. The full story is on our freeze page.

The groves came back faster than the people. Growers from North Florida, where the freeze had wiped out the industry, moved south, and by 1900, the Rockledge form says, Brevard was again one of Florida’s leading citrus counties, with much of the production and processing centered on Rockledge. In the next decade Rockledge and Cocoa were headquarters for the Florida Citrus Exchange, the state’s cooperative packing, shipping and marketing system. At Titusville, Thomas Nevins formally organized the Nevins Fruit Company in 1898.

The 1920s

By the boom of the 1920s, the Park Service form describes Titusville as one of the centers of Indian River citrus, with the trade supporting railroads, trucking, banks, hardware stores and fertilizer companies. Cattle ranching, truck farming and commercial fishing were the town’s other significant businesses. The census shows what came next: the county had 23,653 people in 1950 and 230,006 by 1970, and the missile range, not the groves, set the pace. That story is on Brevard in the space boom.

Further Reading

• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith
• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon