Old Titusville
About this publication

Titusville has been the county seat since 1879. It has watched every Apollo launch from across the lagoon.

Henry Titus arrived at the Indian River in 1867 and started a store at a spot where the steamboats could dock. The settlement was called Sand Point. It became Titusville in 1873, named after him, when the county agreed he had done enough to deserve the honor. Titusville has been the Brevard County seat since 1879, when the legislature moved it north from LaGrange. Thirteen miles to the east, across the Indian River Lagoon and the Banana River, sits Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. This site covers the 140-year span between Henry Titus's store and the Saturn V launches that Titusville watched from Space View Park.

Portrait of Henry Titus, the founder of Titusville, Florida.
Henry Titus, who arrived at the Indian River in 1867 and built the store and dock that became Sand Point, then Titusville. He died in 1881, before the railroad arrived. State Archives of Florida via Florida Memory. Public domain.

What this site covers

Henry Titus and the 1860s-1870s settlement era. The Florida East Coast Railway's arrival in December 1885, which made Titusville the first Indian River town connected to Jacksonville by rail. Flagler pushed the FEC south to Palm Beach seven years later, but the depot years left a hotel economy and a shipping infrastructure that held the town together through the citrus boom and the 1894-95 Great Freeze that ended it.

Harry T. Moore, the NAACP organizer who built Florida's Black voter registration from a few thousand to over 100,000 in the 1940s, lived in Mims, five miles north of Titusville. A Klan bomb killed him and his wife Harriette on Christmas night 1951. The FBI Vault FOIA file on the case runs to hundreds of pages. The Florida Attorney General's 2006 final report is the most complete public account. Both are primary sources. We use them.

The Apollo-era population boom: Titusville grew from roughly 2,600 residents in 1950 to over 30,000 by 1970 as NASA and its contractors filled the county. Space View Park was built on the Titusville waterfront specifically to accommodate the launch-viewing crowds. The post-Apollo contraction hit Brevard hard. County unemployment reached 15 percent after the Apollo program wound down, a number that appears in Bureau of Labor Statistics records from the period and in the testimony of residents who lived through it.

The Enchanted Forest Sanctuary and the natural systems that existed along the Indian River Lagoon before and after the aerospace era. The Sand Point Hotel of 1873. The Brevard County Courthouse and its 1894 fire. The La Grange Cemetery pioneers. The long relationship with Cocoa, across the water.

A Saturn V launching from Kennedy Space Center, viewed from Titusville across the Indian River Lagoon.
A Saturn V launch viewed from the Titusville shore. Pad 39A is across roughly 13 miles of Indian River Lagoon and Banana River. Space View Park was built specifically to accommodate launch viewers. NASA. Public domain.

Corrections and local knowledge welcome at hello@oldtitusville.com.