What 'Old Titusville' means, an editorial position

“Old Titusville” is not a specific decade. The phrase is meant to gesture at the layered city that’s still visible in the current Titusville if you know what to look for: the Henry Titus hotel block, the 1885 FEC depot site, the 1912 brick courthouse, the post-1894-freeze Mims grove revival, the 1951 Moore home in Mims, the 1960s motel sprawl along US-1 from the Apollo build, the 1992 memorial plaques at Space View Park, the post-2014 commercial-space recovery. Every one of those is “old Titusville” in the sense the site uses the term. The current Titusville is the sediment of all of them.

Why the name

Several reasonable alternatives existed when this site was being scoped: “Historic Titusville,” “Titusville History,” “North Brevard History,” and others. “Old Titusville” was chosen for two reasons.

First, the word “old” implies depth without claiming exhaustive coverage. “Historic” suggests an institutional history-society site with associated obligations; “Titusville History” suggests a complete textbook. Neither fits what we’re doing. We’re surfacing 25 specific articles at launch, with the room to add more as we find material worth surfacing. “Old” carries the right scope: deeper than a tourism site, narrower than a museum.

Second, the broader Old Space Coast portfolio (oldspacecoast.com, oldcocoabeach.com, oldcapecanaveral.com, oldmelbourne.com, oldpalmbay.com, oldrockledge.com) uses the same “old” prefix. The pattern matters. The portfolio’s premise is that the older identities of Brevard County’s cities are worth preserving in their primary-source detail, not just as background context to the modern tourism economy.

What the 25 launch articles cover

The articles fall into rough categories:

• Founding era (1860s–1880s): Henry Titus, Sand Point, the Sand Point Hotel, the 1880 county-seat move, the Indian River steamboat era.
• The FEC and citrus era (1880s–1900s): the 1885 railroad arrival, citrus shipping, the 1894–95 freeze, Mims’s recovery.
• Civil rights era (1934–1956): Harry T. Moore’s NAACP organizing, the 1951 bombing, the long investigation, the 2006 attorney general’s report.
• Space era (1960s–2010s): Apollo as gateway, the population boom and bust, Space View Park, the Astronaut Hall of Fame, the Challenger viewing, the Shuttle era’s end.
• Civic infrastructure and ecology: the 1912 courthouse, Sand Point Park, the Indian River Lagoon, Enchanted Forest Sanctuary, La Grange Cemetery, the Florida Wildlife Hospital, Hurricane David, the high school football tradition.

The list is not exhaustive. Several topics that deserve coverage have been held for later articles: the Pritchard Brothers Bank, the broader history of Black education in north Brevard (the Mims schools, the Lyle Hancock School, the Booker T. Washington High School in Cocoa as the regional Black secondary school before integration), the Camp Knox / Patrick Air Force Base history that touches Brevard, the broader history of the Sebastian Inlet and Mosquito Lagoon as ecological systems and as 19th-century salt-making and fishing economies.

What this site is not

A few clarifications on framing:

• Not a museum. Museums have collection objects, curatorial staffing, physical exhibits. We have articles. Where we reference physical sites and collections, we link to the institutions that hold them: Brevard County Historical Commission, Florida Memory at the State Library of Florida, the FBI Vault, the National Park Service. Those institutions are doing different work than we are.
• Not a tourism site. A tourism site optimizes for trip planning. We’re not. Several articles touch on visiting (Sand Point Park, Space View Park, Enchanted Forest, La Grange Cemetery), but the framing is historical context, not “ten things to do in Titusville this weekend.”
• Not advocacy. Several of the articles cover politically charged material, the Moore case, the cultural-appropriation dynamics around Indigenous-tradition coverage in spirituality sites elsewhere in this portfolio, the Florida civil-rights record more broadly. We try to handle these with primary-source sourcing and factual restraint, not with editorialization. The position is that the documentary record can speak for itself if it’s surfaced properly.
• Not exhaustive. We’ve made deliberate choices about what to cover at launch. Many subjects we haven’t covered. We’ll add as we find material worth adding.

What we’re not trying to do with the “old” framing

The “old” in Old Titusville isn’t nostalgia. It’s not an argument that pre-NASA Titusville was better than NASA-era Titusville, or that 1890s Titusville was better than 1990s Titusville. The point isn’t to romanticize the past or to mourn change.

The point is that a small Florida city’s identity is built up in layers over time, and the layers are still visible if you know how to read the city. The Sand Point bluff is the same bluff Henry Titus stood on. The 1912 courthouse is the same building that handled Brevard County’s judicial business through every decade since. The Moore home site in Mims is the same parcel of land where Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore lived and died on Christmas night 1951. The lagoon-front at Space View Park is the same waterfront the Apollo crowds stood on in July 1969.

A city this small, this layered, deserves articles that take its layers seriously. That’s what the 25 launch articles try to do. That’s what subsequent articles will try to do. That’s what “Old Titusville” means.

Errata, additions, and corrections

If you find an error in any of the 25 launch articles, a misnamed person, a wrong date, a mis-cited source, please write to us at the email on the Contact page. We will correct the article, note the correction with date and reason, and add the corrected version with an updated dateModified. Family members of people named in articles are welcome to send corrections or additions; we’ll handle attribution as requested.

The Old Titusville History Team March 2026