The Brevard County Courthouse in Titusville: 1882 and 1913

Brevard County has had two courthouses in Titusville, both on the same lot. The first was a two-story wooden building in the classical revival style, finished in 1882. The second replaced it in 1913, a two-story reinforced-concrete building with four big columns across its east front, and it still stands at 506 South Palm Avenue. The land under both was a gift from Col. Henry Titus, the town’s founder, given on condition that it be used only for county buildings.

Titusville has been the county seat since 1879, the year Brevard annexed it from Volusia County and county voters chose it over Eau Gallie and Rockledge. That story is on our county seat page.

The 1882 courthouse

For its first few years in Titusville the county ran its business out of a building rented from Titus. In 1880 the county commissioners let a contract for a jail and published a notice asking for bids on a courthouse. According to the National Park Service’s history of the town, construction began in 1881 and finished the following year.

What the building looked like comes from the state’s marker: two stories, wood, classical revival. It served for three decades.

The 1912 decision

The 1882 building didn’t burn. In 1912 the county commissioners made what the Brevard County Historical Commission’s marker calls a “controversial decision”: build a new courthouse instead of enlarging the old one. The old wooden building was moved to the back of the site and sold at auction.

Lightman, McDonald & Co. of Jacksonville built the replacement out of reinforced concrete for $30,566. It opened for public business on March 3, 1913. The fire that did hit Titusville in those years came in December 1895, and it took most of the business district on Washington Avenue, not the courthouse.

Inside the 1913 building

The state’s marker lays out who sat where. On the first floor were the county commissioners, the clerk of the court, the treasurer, the tax assessor and collector, and the surveyor. Upstairs were the courtroom, lawyers’ offices, the judge’s chambers and the jury rooms. A central corridor ran between the north and south entrances.

In 1926 the county added a three-story wing on the west side. Its third floor held the jail: cells, the warden’s quarters, a kitchen and a hospital ward. The sheriff and other county offices took the second floor, along with a vault room. The jail floor has long since gone out of use.

The courthouse now

Brevard grew south and the courts followed. The county’s main courthouse is now the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Justice Center in Viera, named for the civil-rights leaders killed by a bomb at their Mims home in 1951 (our Harry T. Moore page has their story). The Eighteenth Judicial Circuit still lists the Titusville Courthouse among its Brevard court locations, alongside Viera and Melbourne.

Who was Vassar Carlton?

The building’s full name since February 17, 2006, is the Vassar B. Carlton Historic Titusville Courthouse. Carlton was born in 1912 in Island Grove, in Alachua County, and his family settled on Merritt Island in 1929, when he was 17. He captained the Cocoa High School football team, graduated in 1931, and finished Stetson’s law school in 1937, according to a profile written by retired circuit judge Clarence T. Johnson Jr. for the county Historical Commission’s Indian River Journal.

Brevard elected him county judge in 1940, and he held the job for 14 years. In 1954 he became a circuit judge for the Ninth Circuit, which then covered eight counties from Orange and Seminole south to Martin and Okeechobee, and for a time he was the only circuit judge in the division covering Brevard and Seminole. He won a statewide seat on the Florida Supreme Court in 1968 and became chief justice in 1973, the only Brevard resident ever to hold that post. As chief justice he presided over putting the 1972 rewrite of Article V of the state constitution into effect, which abolished justice-of-the-peace and municipal courts among others. He retired in 1974 after 33 years on the bench, and died on August 31, 2005, at 92.

Johnson’s profile adds that the Titusville courtroom where Carlton presided for more than 25 years was dedicated in his name on October 1, 2004, with the judge there to speak. The building was renamed for him 16 months later, and the county’s own Historical Commission marker stands out front. Titusville is still the county seat, more than a century after the commissioners argued over whether to build it.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon