La Grange Church and Cemetery: the pioneer burial ground of north Brevard

La Grange Church and Cemetery, at 1575 Old Dixie Highway about two miles north of Titusville, is the oldest church site on the Indian River and the burial ground of north Brevard’s first settlers. The National Register nomination, which put the church and cemetery on the Register on December 7, 1995, says a log church and meeting house went up here in 1869, “the first church along the Indian River, south of New Smyrna Beach and was probably the first between New Smyrna and Key West.” Henry Titus, who gave Titusville its name, is buried in the cemetery with his family, and so are the Mims families who gave theirs to the town a mile north.

Just north of the old cemetery is a second one. The LaGrange Mims Community Cemetery, begun on land given to the Mims Black community in the early 1900s, holds the graves of the civil rights leaders Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore.

The church

Settlement at La Grange began in 1860, the nomination says, with families who came to plant citrus and fruit. In April 1869 an Episcopal missionary sent to call on Henry Titus came across the little settlement, was given a meal, and came back the next day to preach to 30 people. That year the settlers built a log church and meeting house.

It served everyone. Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists all held services there, often together, depending on which minister could come. Tom Johnson, a Baptist layman from Poughkeepsie, New York, led worship until the Rev. W.N. Chandoin, an ordained Baptist minister, took over this church and others in the area; Chandoin later became president of the Florida Baptist Convention, and Chandoin Hall at Stetson University is named for him. Johnson organized an interdenominational Sunday school in March 1870 and taught it for 47 years. Many settlers couldn’t read, and Johnson taught some of them at his cooper shop in the evenings.

In 1872 a lumber mill opened about a mile south, and the settlers replaced the log building with a frame one, with a second story for Miss Narcissa Feaster’s school. The nomination says that school became the first public school in the county; her successor, Adhemar Brady, became county superintendent and had organized 21 schools by 1882. In 1893-94 the building was remodeled into the Gothic Revival church that stands today, with a bell tower and etched colored-glass windows, and the 1872 pews, with backs that swing so the congregation could face each other, were kept. It remained a Baptist church until 1953.

The cemetery

The cemetery covers 7.67 of the property’s 8.17 acres, behind the church. Burials began with the church: the nomination says one of the early settlers died in 1869, the year the log church was built, and is buried there. The earliest legible dated stone is from 1875.

The nomination names who rests there. “Many of the early settlers are buried in the La Grange Cemetery, including the Mims families, for whom the community of Mims is named, and Colonel Titus and family, for whom Titusville is named.” Chandoin and Johnson, the first minister and the Sunday school teacher, are buried there too. Settlers who had moved to the new towns were still brought back to La Grange for burial.

Burials were segregated. The nomination records that Black residents were historically buried in parcel 19, at the north end of the cemetery, and that the practice had since been dropped.

The LaGrange Mims Community Cemetery and the Moores

The second cemetery has its own history, set down on a Florida Department of State marker placed in 2003. Black and white residents had worshiped together at La Grange in the late 1800s. In 1894 Black members organized their own congregation, St. James Colored Missionary Baptist Church, which bought land in Mims and built a church in 1904. In the early 1900s a two-acre parcel north of the La Grange cemetery was given to the Mims Black community for burials; the earliest marked graves date to 1903, and many graves were never marked. In June 1913 the trustees of St. James bought the parcel from the East Coast Cattle Company, and it became known as the Mims Colored Cemetery.

The marker lists the families of north Brevard’s Black pioneers who rest there, among them Abrams, Bell, Brothers, Brown, Campbell, Cuyler, Grant, Gibson, Highsmith, McKenzie, Mitchell, Seigler, Simms, Strickland, Warren and Williams. The most noted graves are those of Harry T. Moore and Harriette V. Simms Moore. Harry Moore organized Brevard’s first NAACP branch in 1934 and later led the NAACP’s Florida State Conference. The two were killed when a bomb exploded under their Mims home in 1951. One state marker dates the bombing to Christmas Eve; the state marker at their homestead, and most accounts, say Christmas night. Their story is on our page about the bombing.

Further Reading

• Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore by Ben Green
• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce