Sand Point before Henry Titus: Windover, Fort Ann and an 1859 post office

Sand Point was a place before it was Titusville. The name belonged to a spit of land that jutted into the Indian River, “a natural place for a dock,” as the National Register nomination for nearby La Grange Church puts it, and people had lived along this shore for thousands of years before Henry Titus arrived in 1867. Until 1879 it lay in Volusia County, not Brevard.

Windover

The oldest evidence is very old. The National Park Service’s history of Titusville points to the Indian burials at Windover, discovered in 1982 and listed on the National Register in 1987, which date to about 6000 B.C. The form calls Windover “one of the best preserved aboriginal burial sites yet discovered”: it has yielded more than 40 skeletons of men, women and children about 8,000 years old, and “among the remains are some of the oldest, most intact brain tissue ever found.”

A fort and a few groves

The La Grange nomination dates the first white settlers in the area to 1835, when soldiers came to build Fort Ann and clear trails during the Second Seminole War. In 1843 one of them, Capt. Douglas Dummit, acquired land on Merritt Island and planted citrus groves; Mills Burnham planted groves on Cape Canaveral soon after. The nomination names Sand Point and La Grange as the earliest settlements on the mainland, and says La Grange’s settlement began in 1860 with families who came to plant citrus and fruit.

The 1859 post office and the war

Sand Point was the area’s business center. The City of Titusville dates the first U.S. post office in the area to 1859, at Sand Point, and the La Grange nomination calls it the first post office south of St. Augustine and the region’s only trading post. During the Civil War the Confederates ran a salt works there, and blockade-running smugglers worked out of the area. Henry Titus was one of them: the Park Service form says he turned up during the war as a blockade runner on the Indian River and was captured by Union forces.

After the war the coast was thinly settled. When Titus came back in 1866, the Park Service form says, only a few families lived along this part of the river: the Stones at Sebastian, Capt. Miles C. Burnham at Canaveral and the Dummetts on Merritt Island. The La Grange nomination adds that the east coast south of New Smyrna didn’t really begin to develop until after the war, when the Homestead Act of 1866 brought the first settlement “of any consequence.”

Titus’s town

Titus settled at Sand Point in 1867 on land his wife, Mary Hopkins Titus, had acquired, according to the city’s marker. He opened a store with J.W. Joyner, built the Titus House around 1870 and became postmaster. In 1873 the post office’s name changed from Sand Point to Titusville. His story is on our founding page.

The name survives in Sand Point Park, the city’s 29.88-acre river park at U.S. 1 and the Max Brewer Causeway; our Sand Point Park page covers it.

Further Reading

• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce