The Titus House: Henry Titus's hotel, from about 1870 to the Dixie Hotel fire of 1962

Henry Titus built the Titus House, one of the earliest hotels on the Indian River, at Sand Point around 1870. The National Park Service’s history of the town says he completed it in 1870; the two historical markers on Indian River Avenue date it to about 1869. It was the settlement’s community center while Titus lived. After his death in 1881 it was sold, enlarged and renamed the Indian River Hotel, and by 1915 it had become the Dixie Hotel, which lasted until a fire in 1962.

The building

The descriptions agree on the shape. The Park Service form calls it a wood frame building “with a large central block and two long wings, all rising one story in height and surrounded by verandas,” on what is now Washington Avenue just south of Main Street. The 1961 state marker describes it as U-shaped, “with each room opening on a veranda facing a tropical garden,” and says that in the days of steamboat travel the hotel, “with its elaborate salon, was considered one of the best in Florida.” The city’s marker says it stood on land Titus’s wife, Mary Hopkins Titus, had acquired.

A guest in 1880, quoted on the city’s marker, was impressed by the comforts: the house was “very comfortable, immaculately clean, and the parlor had matting on the floor, and curtains on the windows, glass windows!”

What it was for

The Park Service form says the Titus House “became the community center of the fledgling settlement and the surrounding Indian River region,” and that Titus served guests “many of the exotic game, fish, fruits, and vegetables which abounded in the Indian River region.” Getting there was the hard part. Before the railroad arrived in 1885, the city’s marker notes, visitors came up the St. Johns River by steamboat to Salt Lake, a few miles west, or overland from Enterprise.

It wasn’t alone for long. When J. Francis LeBaron platted the Original Town of Titusville in 1880, the Park Service form says, the plat took in “the Titus House and Lund’s Hotel, the two rooming establishments in the fledgling community.” In the downtown fire of December 1895, the form says, the heaviest losses fell on Mrs. M.E. Titus, who owned four buildings, and on Capt. T.W. Lund, owner of the Lund House hotel and several other buildings.

The Indian River Hotel and the Dixie

Titus died in 1881. In 1886, according to the Park Service form, D.S. Hutchison bought the Titus House, remodeled it and renamed it the Indian River Hotel; the city’s marker says the expansion “incorporated the original structure’s wings.” By 1915 it was the Dixie Hotel, and it stayed the Dixie until fire partially destroyed it in 1962. The building was torn down and replaced with high-rise apartments.

The state put up its marker in 1961, a year before the fire. Both markers stand on Indian River Avenue, about a tenth of a mile south of Main Street.

Titus’s own story is on our founding page.

Further Reading

• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce