Old Titusville
Government

Titusville and Cocoa: The County Seat and the Bigger Town

Cocoa passed Titusville in population by 1920 and stayed bigger until the space boom, yet the Brevard County seat never left Titusville. The census numbers, and where county government actually went.

By The Old Titusville History Team Updated October 15, 2026
The old Brevard County Courthouse in Titusville, a white classical building with four tall columns under a pediment.
The 1913 courthouse in Titusville. Cocoa spent most of the 20th century as the bigger town, and the courthouse stayed here anyway. Organizedchaos02 via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Titusville has been the Brevard County seat since 1879. Cocoa, 20 miles down the Indian River, was the bigger town for most of the time since. The census caught Cocoa passing Titusville by 1920, and Cocoa stayed ahead for forty years, until the space program turned Titusville into a boomtown in the 1960s. The seat never moved. The reasons it landed in Titusville in the first place are on our county seat page; this page is about the two towns side by side.

The census, decade by decade

CensusTitusvilleCocoaBrevard County
19007563825,158
19108686134,717
19201,3611,4458,505
19302,0892,16413,283
19402,2203,09816,142
19502,6044,24523,653
19606,41012,294111,435
197030,51516,110230,006

Two things jump out. Titusville was twice Cocoa’s size in 1900 and lost that lead within twenty years, because Cocoa more than doubled in the 1910s while Titusville grew more slowly. And the 1960s rewrote everything: Brevard went from about 23,000 people in 1950 to 230,000 in 1970, and Titusville, the mainland town across the river from the new space center, grew almost fivefold in a single decade.

A long two-story mid-century building clad in pale panels with bands of windows, beside a Titusville street.
A mid-century addition to the old courthouse in Titusville, as its photographer labelled it. County government kept adding space here even while Cocoa was the bigger town. Pokemonprime via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

Why the seat stayed put

The seat came to Titusville through a county-wide vote in 1879, after Brevard annexed the southern part of Volusia County, and Henry Titus gave the county its land on condition that it be used only for county buildings. Both the 1882 courthouse and its 1913 replacement went up on that lot. Once a county has a courthouse, a jail and its records in one place, moving them is expensive, and Brevard never did.

Where county government went instead

As Brevard’s population moved south, county government followed it without the seat changing. The Board of County Commissioners now meets at the Brevard County Government Center in Viera, between Cocoa and Melbourne. The county’s main courthouse, the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Justice Center, is in Viera too. Titusville kept the title, the 1913 courthouse, and a court that the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit still lists among its Brevard locations.

So the old question of Titusville or Cocoa was settled by neither. The seat is in Titusville, the daily business is in Viera, and Cocoa, which once outnumbered Titusville nearly two to one, has neither.

Front of the old Brevard County Courthouse in downtown Titusville, its columns partly hidden by trees.
The courthouse front on Palm Avenue. It opened on March 3, 1913, and the state's 2005 marker says it still serves the county. Ebyabe via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Two towns, two economies

The difference between the towns shows in what built them. Titusville had the seat, a rail connection to Enterprise from the mid-1880s, and a fishing and citrus economy, then the space program’s front gate. Cocoa’s story runs through the river trade and citrus packing; our sister site covers its citrus trade and its ties to Rockledge. Today both are mid-sized cities in a county whose largest population centers, Palm Bay and Melbourne, are farther south than either.

Further Reading

  • Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon

Sources

  1. U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of Population, Number of Inhabitants: Florida, Tables 6 and 7
  2. Annie Mary Hartsfield, Mary Alice Griffin and Charles M. Grigg, eds., Summary Report: NASA Impact on Brevard County (Florida State University, 1966), Brevard population 1950
  3. Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research, Total County Population: April 1, 1970-2030
  4. National Park Service, National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form, Titusville Multiple Property Group
  5. Brevard County, County Commission FAQ: where the board meets
  6. Eighteenth Judicial Circuit of Florida, court locations

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cocoa county-seat population brevard-county