Why Titusville Is the Brevard County Seat

Titusville is the Brevard County seat because of a vote held in 1879. That year Brevard annexed the southern part of Volusia County, Titusville included, and the voters of the enlarged county picked their seat. According to the National Park Service’s history of the town, they chose Titusville “overwhelmingly” over the other two contenders, Eau Gallie and Rockledge. It has been the county seat ever since.

The man behind it was Col. Henry Titus, the town’s founder. He pushed for Titusville and gave the county the land for its buildings, with a covenant that the land be used only for county buildings. The courthouse still stands on it. Titus died two years after the election, at his home in the town he had founded.

How Brevard got its shape

Titusville wasn’t in Brevard County until 1879, which surprises people. The county began as St. Lucie County, created on March 14, 1844. In 1855 it was renamed Brevard County, for Theodore Washington Brevard, a North Carolinian who was Florida’s comptroller from 1853 to 1861. Titusville, settled after the Civil War, grew up inside Volusia County.

The 1879 annexation stretched Brevard into one of the longest counties in Florida, about 75 miles of Atlantic coast and Indian River. With the north end added, the county needed a seat its people could reach, and that set up the vote.

Why Titusville won

The National Park Service history gives no vote count, so the reasons have to come from what Titusville had in 1879 that Eau Gallie and Rockledge didn’t. Two things stand out in the National Park Service history.

The first was a founder with land to give and a reason to give it. Titus had been building Sand Point into a town since 1867: a store, the Titus House hotel in 1870, a mail route with himself as postmaster, and a new name for the post office in 1873. Putting the county seat there made his town permanent, and the land gift made the choice cheap for the county.

The second was its place on the way in. Before the railroad, Titusville was where travelers from the St. Johns River reached the Indian River: overland from Enterprise, about 42 miles by horse or wagon, or by small steamer to Salt Lake and then overland. Titusville was already the front door to the Indian River.

The first courthouse

For its first years the county ran its business out of a building rented from Henry Titus. In 1880 the county commissioners let a contract for a jail and advertised for bids on a courthouse. Construction began in 1881 and finished in 1882. The Florida Department of State’s marker describes that first building as a two-story wooden structure in the classical revival style.

It didn’t burn. In 1912 the commissioners made what the Brevard County Historical Commission’s marker calls a “controversial decision” to build new rather than enlarge the 1882 courthouse. The old wooden building was moved to the back of the lot and sold at auction. Lightman, McDonald & Co. of Jacksonville built its replacement in reinforced concrete for $30,566, and it opened for business on March 3, 1913. A three-story wing went on the west side in 1926, with jail cells on the top floor. The full story of the building is on our courthouse page.

The town around the courthouse

Being the seat didn’t make Titusville big overnight. It had about 200 people in 1880 and 250 in 1885, and it wasn’t even incorporated until November 1886, when local men voted 58 to 2 for it. What the seat did was give the town a reason to exist beyond Titus’s hotel. The county school board organized in 1881, the town’s first newspaper started the same year, and work on a railroad spur from Enterprise began in 1885, with residents putting up $30,000 and the right-of-way to get it. Our railroad page picks up that story.

Why the seat never moved

Brevard’s population later shifted hard to the south, toward Cocoa, Melbourne and Palm Bay, and county government followed it without the seat moving. The Board of County Commissioners now meets at the Brevard County Government Center in Viera, near the middle of the county. Titusville remains the county seat, and the state’s 2005 marker at the 1913 courthouse says the building still serves the county.

That split is the answer to the question most people are really asking. If you’re looking for the commission chambers, go to Viera. If you’re asking which city is the seat of Brevard County, it’s Titusville, and it has been since the vote of 1879.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon