Titusville Florida Since 1867
From Henry Titus's hotel to the Apollo gateway.
Titusville is a small Florida town that became a county seat in 1880, the FEC Railway's first deep-south depot in 1885, and the place where, on July 16 1969, a quarter of a million people crowded the Indian River to watch Saturn V leave the planet. This is its history, sourced.
Latest articles
Six most-recent pieces. The full archive lives on the articles page.
- Editorial
What 'Old Titusville' means, an editorial position
Why this site exists, what it covers, and what 'Old Titusville' is meant to evoke beyond nostalgia.
- Institutions
The Florida Wildlife Hospital: forty years of native wildlife rehabilitation in Brevard County
Founded in Titusville in 1973, the Florida Wildlife Hospital has treated tens of thousands of injured native animals from across central Florida. It's one of the longest-running independent wildlife rehab centers in the state.
- Parks
Sand Point Park: the modern lagoon-front park that carries the older name
Sand Point Park on the Indian River waterfront is the city's primary recreational waterfront, named after the pre-Titusville settlement and operated by the city since the 1960s.
- Space Era
January 28, 1986: Titusville and the Challenger viewing crowd
Schoolchildren and families lined the Titusville waterfront the morning of Space Shuttle Challenger's launch. The mission ended 73 seconds in. For Brevard County the loss was personal.
- Sports
Titusville High School football: state titles and the small-school tradition
Titusville High has produced multiple FHSAA state championships in football across several classifications. The 1990s and 2000s saw the program peak; the rivalry with Astronaut High shapes Friday nights in the city.
- Disasters
Hurricane David's Brevard County impact, September 1979
David hit Titusville and Brevard as a downgraded tropical storm on September 3-4, 1979, after a Caribbean track that had killed thousands in the Dominican Republic. The Florida impact was severe but not catastrophic.
What this site is
Old Titusville covers the city of Titusville, the seat of Brevard County, from Henry Theodore Titus's arrival in 1867 through the Apollo and Shuttle eras and into the post-NASA decline that's still working itself out. Coverage extends north to Mims, where Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette were assassinated in their home on Christmas night 1951, and east across the lagoon to the launch pads that pulled tens of thousands of jobs into the area during the 1960s.
Titusville is the county seat. The county's record starts here.
Common questions about Titusville history
- When and how was Titusville founded, and who was it named after?
Titusville is named for Henry Theodore Titus, a Mexican-American War veteran who arrived on the Indian River in 1867 at age forty-four and bought up most of the pre-existing settlement of Sand Point on the lagoon's west shore. He built a hotel in 1873, and the U.S. Post Office formally accepted the name Titusville in 1874 at his request. Titus died in Titusville on August 7, 1881, and is buried at La Grange Cemetery north of the city.
- When did the railroad reach Titusville?
Henry Flagler's predecessor line, the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Halifax River Railway, pushed south and reached Titusville in December 1885, terminating at the Indian River bluff that had been a steamboat dock the year before. Titusville was the first major Indian River town the railroad touched, and the arrival triggered a roughly five-year boom while ending the steamboat era. The line was Titusville's southern terminus for about eight years until it extended south in 1894.
- What happened to Harry T. Moore in Mims?
On the night of December 25, 1951, a dynamite bomb planted under the bedroom of NAACP Florida State Conference director Harry T. Moore's home in Mims, just north of Titusville, killed him; his wife Harriette died nine days later. The case was never prosecuted in their lifetimes. In 2006 the Florida Attorney General's office named four members of an Apopka KKK klavern as the perpetrators, all deceased by then. The Moores are buried at La Grange Cemetery.
- Why is Titusville known as a gateway to the Apollo launches?
Pad 39A, where the Saturn V launched, sits about thirteen miles east of downtown Titusville across the Indian River Lagoon, making Titusville the closest major mainland town to the launch pads. Apollo 11's launch on July 16, 1969 drew an estimated one million spectators to the area, with roughly half watching from the Titusville mainland at Space View Park and along the shore. The town's population grew from about 2,600 in 1950 to over 30,000 by 1970.