Henry Theodore Titus and the founding of Titusville, 1867

Henry Theodore Titus founded Titusville. He came to a landing on the Indian River called Sand Point in 1867, according to the National Park Service’s history of the town, built a hotel, ran the post office, and in 1873 the post office’s name was changed from Sand Point to Titusville. When Brevard County voted on a county seat in 1879, he pushed for his town and gave the land for the county buildings. He died two years later, in the town that carried his name.

He had arrived with one of the more notorious résumés of the 1850s.

Before Florida

Titus was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on February 13, 1822. The Park Service form describes him as a filibuster who backed Cuban rebels against Spain; he was tried for violating U.S. neutrality laws and acquitted. He moved to Jacksonville as a merchant and married Mary Hopkins, daughter of Gen. Edward Stephen Hopkins.

In 1856 he went to Kansas Territory, where the fight over whether Kansas would allow slavery had turned violent. The Kansas Historical Society’s account is detailed. Titus arrived on May 1, 1856, fresh from a private military expedition to Cuba, and with Jefferson Buford of Alabama was reportedly responsible for bringing nearly a thousand proslavery settlers into the territory. He built a fortified log house outside Lecompton known as Fort Titus. Weeks later he took part in the Sacking of Lawrence, the free-state town, where he ordered the presses of the Herald of Freedom newspaper destroyed “for the boys of South Carolina” and carried off a brass cannon called “Old Sacramento.”

On August 16, 1856, free-state men under Samuel Walker attacked Fort Titus. The fight was short, and its last cannonballs, the Society notes, were cast from the melted type of the press Titus had wrecked. Titus was wounded and captured, and a young free-stater named James A. Harvey took his sword, which is now in the Kansas Museum of History. After a prisoner exchange, Titus worked for the territorial governor as a “special aide.” The Park Service form says he left Kansas carrying the nickname “Border Ruffian.”

In late December 1856 he left Kansas with about 100 men for Nicaragua, where William Walker, an American expatriate, had seized control. When Walker’s regime fell, Titus returned to the United States; the Park Service form says he fled to San Francisco. During the Civil War he turned up as a blockade runner on the Indian River and was captured by Union forces. After the war, the form says, he “remained an irreconcilable supporter of the South.”

Sand Point

Titus came back to the Indian River in 1866, the form says, reportedly for his health, and in 1867 settled at Sand Point on land owned by his wife. Only a few families lived along that stretch of river: the Stones at Sebastian, Capt. Miles C. Burnham at Canaveral and the Dummetts on Merritt Island. Sand Point itself was not new. The National Register nomination for the nearby La Grange Church says Sand Point had the first post office south of St. Augustine, opened in 1859, and that the Confederates ran a salt works there during the war.

His first venture failed. Titus and several New York investors formed the New York and Indian River Preserving Company to catch, can and ship fish, turtles and oysters north, and it folded within the year over canning and shipping problems. So he set about making a town. He started a stage line to Enterprise on the upper St. Johns, kept a store at Enterprise and a dry goods store at Sand Point with J.W. Joyner, the only store on the coast of Volusia and Brevard, and paid to clear land and lay out the first buildings. He became postmaster and justice of the peace, and shipped freight in by boat and wagon and citrus and pineapples out.

In 1870 he finished the Titus House, a one-story frame hotel with a large central block, two long wings and wraparound verandas on what is now Washington Avenue, just south of Main Street. It became the settlement’s community center, and Titus served guests the game, fish and fruit of the Indian River country. In 1886 D.S. Hutchison bought it, remodeled it and renamed it the Indian River Hotel.

The name

In 1873 the post office became Titusville. Two stories explain why, and the Park Service form gives both. In one, Titus beat a Captain Rice at dominoes and won the right to name the town. In the other, Titus, as postmaster, simply named it for himself over some local objection. The form doesn’t choose, and neither will we.

The county seat, and the end

By 1880 the town had about 200 residents. In 1879 Brevard annexed the southern part of Volusia County, Titusville included, and Titus pushed for his town as the new county seat. Voters chose Titusville “overwhelmingly” over Eau Gallie and Rockledge, and Titus donated land on condition it be used only for county buildings. The story of that vote is on our county seat page.

Titus died two years after the election, at his home in Titusville. The National Register nomination for La Grange Church and Cemetery, two miles north of town, says its cemetery holds the graves of many of the region’s early settlers, “including leading citizens for whom two communities, Titusville and Mims, were named.”

Further Reading

• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon