Cocoa, Florida: A History

photographs.

INTRODUCTION

I sure have tramped about to dodge the ice and snow, and now that I have found Cocoa no further shall I go, for here among the palms and flowers where the Indian River flows, I have found the place you are looking for, take that from one who knows.

—Emma Bischoff Johnson, circa 1920

Florida means land of flowers. Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, A. born in Spain in 1460, led a 1513 expedition to discover the mythical Fountain of Youth. Instead, he found the southeast coast of what would become the United States. Ponce de León first landed twenty miles southeast of Cocoa in what is now called Melbourne Beach and gave Florida its name.

Originally inhabited by descendants of the peoples who migrated across the great land bridge between Asia and North America, modern Florida was settled by European peoples—Spanish, French and English—after the 1500s and later ceded to the fledgling United States of America. It was not until 1828 that the area surrounding Cocoa was established as a county by the territorial government of Florida, and only after that did white settlers begin to enter the area in appreciable numbers. Settlement by Americans was slow until after the American Civil War, when adventurous Americans from both the North and South sought to get away from the war-torn societies farther north.

Cocoa sits on the west bank of the Indian River Lagoon, approximately halfway down the east coast of the Florida peninsula. It is best known for tourism and winter living and for being the gateway to the Kennedy Space Center, Port Canaveral and the famous beaches around Cocoa Beach. Just a forty-five-minute drive east of downtown Orlando, Cocoa boasts a quaint, historic village center with shopping and entertainment and a renowned village playhouse. On any given weekend, you will find joggers and bicyclists both north and south of the village center enjoying the beauty of the Indian River along a modern river road originally established centuries ago as a simple footpath.

Cocoa is on the east coast of Florida, approximately halfway down the state peninsula. Courtesy of sitesatlas.com.

The great Indian River Lagoon is broad for a river, stretching almost 150 miles north to south along Florida’s east coast. It is part of America’s Intracoastal Waterway spanning the Atlantic Coast from New Jersey all the way to the Florida Keys and beyond. The waterway consists of natural inlets and rivers such as the Indian River, bays and sounds, as well as some man-made canals, to provide a navigable route without the hazards of sailing the open sea.

As trade and settlement progressed south along the Florida peninsula, suitable places for boats to put in were attractive and became desirable locations to establish communities. Boat landings that offered access to other travel routes—either land or river—became settlements. Cocoa, located near the northern end of the Indian River Lagoon, had both an exceptional portage on the Indian River and a short overland traversal to portage on the St. John’s River.

One of the last frontiers of the Sunshine State, settlement of the Indian River Lagoon area was slowed due to remoteness and challenge of travel. The ocean to the east is separated from the mainland by rivers and marshes, and to the west, the St. John’s River and swamps restricted travel when settlers first came to the area. Only the thin strip of land along the banks of the Indian River and the islands between the Indian River, the Banana River and the Atlantic Ocean were habitable.

The Spanish called the area mosquito country, and when Florida became a U.S. territory, the name stuck. The new county was named Mosquito. That name remained until 1855, when it was changed to Brevard County, in honor of Theodore W. Brevard, Florida state comptroller at that time. Brevard County was much larger in 1855 than it is today. As it exists today, Brevard is about 70 miles long by 35 miles wide and encompasses some 2,800 square miles. A unique feature of the county is presented by two rivers as they flow north and south. Lying only 3 to 5 miles apart in most places, the St. John’s River flows north while the Indian River flows south. This unique feature—two rivers flowing in opposite directions so close together—does not exist anywhere else on earth.

The northern part of Brevard County. The haul-over point is at the top, and Cocoa is at the lower left. Author’s collection.

Climate

The average high temperature in Cocoa is near ninety degrees in July and August, while the average low is about seventy-five degrees. Winters are exceptionally pleasant, with average highs being about seventy-one degrees in December, January and February. During those winter months, the average low is fifty or fifty-one degrees, but there are periodic freezing spells usually lasting less than a few days each on average. On any given day, there can be both sun and clouds, with the average number of days with some sunshine near 60 percent year round. Rainfall is plentiful, with the annual amount at forty-eight inches, much of which falls in torrents from summer thunderstorms.

In 161 years of records, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) notes that no hurricane stronger than a Category 2 level has hit within forty miles of Cocoa. During this recorded history, only two Category 2 storms and three Category 1 storms have passed within forty miles of Cocoa. Cocoa, because of its location seven miles inland from the Atlantic and having Merritt Island and Beachside between the city and the ocean, is generally spared the worst when hurricanes approach. Beachside is a barrier island that runs the entire length of Brevard County, protecting the rivers and lagoon from the Atlantic Ocean.

After one of these storms in the hurricane season of 1950, Anita Roberts Blasky recorded the damages to her home in Bonaventure (five miles south of Cocoa Village) on the western bank of the Indian River. She lived in a large old house about twenty-five feet from the shoreline, with a coquina rock wall along the river to help protect the house from rough waters. She also had a one-hundred-foot dock stretching into the Indian River. Without days of warning, as we are accustomed to today, Anita and her family had only a short time to evacuate to her grandmother’s house in West Cocoa before the hurricane struck. She vividly remembered the devastation:

When we returned the next day, we drove down the dirt road, winding down through the orange grove from U.S. 1 to our house on the River. The road was about a quarter of a mile long. About halfway down, we ran into water. We parked the car and waded on to the house. What we saw was unbelievable. The coquina rock wall, which protected our home, was now crumbled into small pieces. The one-hundred-foot dock had been washed up into the yard, broken apart. The coquina underpinning of the house had crumbled away in the wave action of the violent waters of the river, leaving the pilings under the house exposed. Water was everywhere around the house. Since the house was built up on these pilings, water did not get into the house. Because of that, we were very fortunate not to have lost our personal belongings too. The windows of the old wooden house stayed firmly in place. The trees around the property were stripped of their leaves, and some were even uprooted by the force of the winds. It was weeks before the water receded enough to be able to drive up to the house again. About one half mile down the river, a ninety-foot yacht had washed up on the shore.

The Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1 and ends on November 30 each year. Unlike the last-minute evacuation the Blaskys experienced in the 1950 hurricane, today’s weather forecasting allows residents in the path of an oncoming storm to prepare their homes and evacuate in plenty of time.

Outside of the hurricane season, the winters in Cocoa are most pleasant and are a major attraction to northerners, who come to the area to escape colder climates and are affectionately known as snowbirds. In addressing the snowbird concept on March 20, 1922, the Cocoa Tribune wrote:

Why stay north and freeze when you can spend your winters in the land of sunshine and springtime?

After reading the weather report in his home paper recently, one of the Cocoa Tribune’s Detroit subscribers sent in the following: A man in Detroit went loco for a Michigan winter’s no joke, oh, the climate, he said, has gone to my head. So I’ll spend my next winter in Cocoa."

The beauty of flowers like this Chapman rhododendron may have influenced the Spanish to name the state Florida. Courtesy of shadygardens.blogspot.com.

Fauna

In the Cocoa area, the abundance of flowers, for which Florida was named, includes more than sixty varieties of orchid, palmetto and cypress trees, water lettuce, American lotus, water hyacinth and a wide variety of palms. Cacti, bougainvillea and oleander abound, as do Chapman rhododendron, Harper’s beauty, fragrant prickly apple, two species of pawpaw and the rare Florida Torreya tree.

Wildlife

Wildlife in the Cocoa area is as abundant and varied as the flowers. From the beginning of early settlement, the local game and fish attracted numerous hunters and fishermen. Most came for only brief visits during the cooler months of the year, but those settlers who stayed had plenty of game and fish to help them survive.

Florida was once home to more than eighty land mammals, including white-tailed deer, wild hogs, gray fox and cottontail and swamp rabbits. The early settlers also shared the land with snakes, including the deadly diamondback rattler, bullfrogs, alligators, turtles, raccoons, otters, opossums and squirrels, along with some cattle turned wild after the Spanish left them behind.

After the American Civil War, Captain Mills O. Burnham, the first permanent lighthouse keeper at Cape Canaveral lighthouse, wrote that the Indian River country was a vast wilderness filled with white-tailed deer and exotic birds, including parakeets and myriad water birds along the shore. Orange trees grew wild everywhere, and the river was teeming with fish. There were also monster green sea turtles along the coastline and a duck population so large that it defied estimating.

Some of these animals, like the alligator and the Florida panther, were competitors for the food supply and lethal to settlers. While Florida panthers primarily eat white-tailed deer, they are also known to eat small hogs, rabbits, raccoons and other rodents. Occasionally, panthers have been known to opportunistically take small pets or livestock from unsuspecting settlers and have, on rare occasions, killed humans as well. The panther is Florida’s state animal and is one of the most endangered mammals on earth. According to the Defenders of Wildlife, only an estimated 100 to 160 adult panthers remain in Florida.

Florida’s bird population includes many resident and migratory species such as the mockingbird, which was named the Florida state bird in 1927. Game birds include the bobwhite quail, wild turkey and at least thirty duck species. Several varieties of heron are also found, as are coastal birds such as gulls, pelicans and frigates. The Cocoa Christmas Bird Count has annually counted species of birds in or near Cocoa since 1900. In 2010, it counted 150 different species, including the American bald eagle. Florida is home to about 350 pairs of these majestic birds, and most of Florida has been declared a sanctuary for them. Also, more than 300 species of butterflies have been identified as native to Florida.