Old Titusville
About this publication

Titusville has been the county seat since 1879. Kennedy Space Center is across the river.

Henry Titus came to a landing on the Indian River called Sand Point in 1867. The post office there was renamed Titusville in 1873, and in 1879 the voters of an enlarged Brevard County chose Titusville as their county seat over Eau Gallie and Rockledge. It has been the seat ever since. Across the river, on Merritt Island, NASA acquired 88,000 acres in 1963 for its moon program, and the town grew almost fivefold in the decade that followed. This site covers what happened in between.

Portrait of Henry Titus, the founder of Titusville, Florida.
Henry Theodore Titus, who came to Sand Point in 1867 and gave the town its name. He died two years after the 1879 county-seat vote. Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

What this site covers

Henry Titus and the settlement years. The county seat and the courthouses of 1882 and 1913. The first railroad, a line from Enterprise on the St. Johns that reached Titusville in 1885 and ran onto a wharf in the lagoon, and Henry Flagler's railway, which followed in January 1893. The citrus trade and the Great Freeze of 1894-95, and the downtown fire of December 1895.

Harry T. Moore, the NAACP organizer, and his wife Harriette, both former Brevard teachers, were killed by a bomb placed under their home in Mims, north of Titusville, on December 25, 1951. The Florida Attorney General's 2006 case summary, written with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, is the main public account, and it is the one we cite.

The space-age boom: the census counted 6,410 people in Titusville in 1960 and 30,515 in 1970, partly through annexation of neighboring suburbs. Space View Park, dedicated on the riverfront in 1994, honors the people who built the space program. The Enchanted Forest Sanctuary, the La Grange Cemetery pioneers, the Indian River Lagoon, and the long relationship with Cocoa, to the south.

The Apollo 11 Saturn V lifting off from Launch Complex 39A, July 16, 1969.
Apollo 11 lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969, across the Indian River from Titusville. NASA. Public domain.

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