Titusville history

Titusville dates its founding to 1867, when Colonel Henry Theodore Titus came ashore at Sand Point on the Indian River, although a U.S. post office had opened at Sand Point in 1859.

The City of Titusville's own history page says the colonel came to Sand Point intending to build a town on land owned by his wife Mary, and that the couple built the first hotel, the Titus House, overlooking the river where they had landed (City of Titusville history page). The page credits the Tituses with donating land for the first courthouse and four churches, laying out many of the streets, and linking the St. Johns and Indian Rivers with mule-drawn wagons.

The National Register's Titusville Multiple Property Group form, prepared by Florida's Bureau of Historic Preservation in 1989, fills in the background (NRHP Titusville Multiple Property Group form). It records that Titus was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on February 13, 1822, supported the pro-slavery cause in Kansas in 1856 and was a blockade runner on the Indian River during the Civil War, and returned to the river in 1866. A seafood canning venture he formed with New York investors, the New York and Indian River Preserving Company, failed the year it started. He then ran a stage line from Enterprise on the upper St. Johns, kept a dry goods store at Sand Point with J.W. Joyner, served as postmaster and justice of the peace, and completed the Titus House in 1870. The form notes that human occupation around Titusville is far older, reaching back to the Windover burials of about 6,000 B.C., listed in the National Register in 1987.

Sand Point became Titusville in 1873, and the city's account says the name was settled by a game of dominoes between Colonel Titus and Captain Clark Rice.

According to the City of Titusville, the town might have been called Riceville had Titus not won the domino challenge that decided which player would rename it (City of Titusville history page). The National Register form treats the story more cautiously: it says the post office name changed from Sand Point to Titusville in 1873, gives the domino game as one account, and adds that other sources indicate Titus, as postmaster, named the town for himself despite some local opposition (NRHP Titusville Multiple Property Group form). Both versions are on the record, and neither source calls the other wrong.

Sand Point itself survives as a place name. The city's historic tour app, published by the Titusville Historic Preservation Board, describes the sandy promontory on the river's west bank as the original nucleus of the Titusville settlement and a landing place that grew into a trading center (Explore Historic Titusville, 1850 to 1895 tour). The same tour names LaGrange, a pioneer settlement whose founders helped establish and expand Titusville, and records that its present church was built in 1894 in the Carpenter Gothic Revival style.

Titusville has been the seat of Brevard County government since 1879, when the county annexed the southern part of Volusia County, Titusville included, and county voters chose it over Eau Gallie and Rockledge.

The National Register form says Colonel Titus pushed for the county seat and donated land on the condition that it be used only for county buildings; he died at his Titusville residence two years after the election (NRHP Titusville Multiple Property Group form). Also in 1879, civil engineer J. Francis LeBaron laid out Joynerville, the first area platted within today's Titusville city limits, and in 1880 he platted the Original Town of Titusville around the Titus House, Lund's Hotel, the post office, wharfs and a sawmill. The county let contracts for a jail and a courthouse; construction began in 1881 and finished the following year, and the current courthouse dates from 1912.

Growth in this period was modest by later standards. The form counts 200 Titusville residents by 1880 and a population totalling 250 by 1885, the year George Webster Scobie set up the first successful commercial fish business (NRHP Titusville Multiple Property Group form). The city's tour app adds that a Lund Line steamboat, the Pioneer, burned at the Titusville city dock in 1877 and now lies buried beneath the street near the east end of Main Street (Explore Historic Titusville tour).

Rail service reached Titusville twice: a line from Enterprise in the mid-1880s, and Henry Flagler's railroad from Jacksonville in the early 1890s, with official sources giving slightly different years for both.

The first line, per the National Register form, came in 1885, when the Atlantic Coast, St. Johns, and Indian River Railroad began a spur from Enterprise, later leased to the Jacksonville, Tampa, and Key West Railroad, which finished the track; Titusville residents contributed $30,000.00 plus the right of way (NRHP Titusville Multiple Property Group form). A railroad wharf on the Indian River turned Titusville into the transfer point to river steamers heading south. Flagler's Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and Indian River Railway followed, renamed the Florida East Coast Railway in 1895.

Two blows hit Titusville in the mid-1890s. The form records a freeze in the last days of December 1894, a second freeze in February 1895 that destroyed what little fruit was left, and a December 1895 fire in the central business core, the rebuilding of which the Digital Towns guide to the historic downtown district follows (NRHP form). By 1900, the form records, Titusville had 900 residents. The city page sums up the era with Indian River citrus shipped from Dummitt Grove, the first bank and two newspapers (City of Titusville history page).

Between 1900 and World War II, Titusville rebuilt its downtown, gained roads and an airfield, rode the 1920s Florida land boom and then slowed through the 1930s, held steady by county government jobs.

The National Register form lists the 1912 courthouse, the Titusville Elementary and High School completed in 1916, and the Dixie Highway and other roads of the 1910s and 1920s, which added trucking as a way to move Indian River fruit, while the automobile gave access to a different class of tourists (NRHP Titusville Multiple Property Group form). It says the land boom began to collapse in 1926 and that, through the hard years of the 1930s, the presence of county government remained a steady source of employment in Titusville. The city adds that a bridge across the Indian River opened access to Playalinda and Desoto Beaches after the turn of the century, and that a water system, a fire department and the first permanent street paving came in the same years (City of Titusville history page).

Aviation and war followed. In 1927, with no airports on the east coast between Jacksonville and Miami, the field now called Arthur Dunn Airpark opened as an emergency landing field for airmail (city history page). During World War II, the city says, a boat company built hundreds of landing craft at the Titusville yacht basin, and a Navy fighter field south of town became today's Space Coast Regional Airport. The city's 1900 to present tour notes that the 1930 Mission Revival garage built as Titusville's first Chevrolet dealership closed a decade later when the war halted new car sales (Explore Historic Titusville, 1900 to present tour).

The missile range that opened at Cape Canaveral in 1950 set off what the National Register form calls a period of incomparable growth for Titusville, the form recording the population tripling from 2,220 in 1940 to 6,410 in 1960.

The form explains that Titusville, across the Indian River from the Cape, was largely unprepared for the growth, and that the area became tied to tourism for the first time as thousands came to watch launches (NRHP Titusville Multiple Property Group form). The City of Titusville history page adds that the towns of Whispering Hills and Indian River City were consolidated with Titusville in the 1950s and early 1960s, and that the Kennedy Space Center boom brought the first motels, the first multi-rise apartment building, golf courses, a public hospital, shopping centers and subdivisions (City of Titusville history page). The end of the Apollo program in the 1970s and the Space Shuttle years that followed each brought new challenges, the page says.

Titusville operates under the council and manager form of government, and its present City charter was adopted June 3, 1963 (City of Titusville Council-Manager page). Individual buildings and space era stops are left to the city's Explore Historic Titusville tours and to the Digital Towns guides to the historic downtown district and the Pritchard House.

Last verified: October 21, 2026, against a fresh read of the City of Titusville history page, the 1989 National Register multiple property form for Titusville, two Explore Historic Titusville tours and the city's Council-Manager page.