Cocoa was moving citrus on the Indian River before it had a name.

Cocoa incorporated in 1882, five years after a group of mainland settlers started using the name for the little depot and dock at the Indian River's edge. By 1893, the Florida East Coast Railway had a station at Magnolia Avenue. By 1910, the town had packing houses, a church, a hardware store, and a newspaper. That commercial core still exists. This site covers how it got there and what it looked like along the way.

The story runs from the 1860s, when the first homesteaders arrived on the mainland side of the Indian River, through the FEC Railway's arrival and the citrus economy's peak, past the Great Freeze of 1894-95, and into the mid-twentieth century. Cocoa Village's postwar decline and its 1970s-80s revival are part of it too. So is the Cuban community that arrived after 1960, the desegregation fight in the county schools, and the thirty-year run of the Cocoa Tribune.

What this site covers

The Indian River steamboat era, when Cocoa was a stop on the lagoon freight network before the railroad arrived. The 1894-95 Great Freeze that killed most of the inland citrus but spared the lagoon-shore groves where temperatures ran a few degrees warmer. Edward Porcher and the citrus packing industry that made Cocoa the commercial center of mid-Brevard. The Aladdin Theatre, opened in 1924 on Brevard Avenue.

The schools before and after desegregation, including the Lincoln Park Academy years and the consolidation fights of the late 1960s. Cocoa Village's slow decline after the commercial strip moved west to U.S. 1, and the 1970s-80s revival that turned the old downtown into the historic district it is today. The Cuban families who arrived via the Mariel boatlift and earlier, and what they built on the east side of the city. The long arc of county government, from the Titusville courthouse fight to the Viera campus era.

Corrections welcome at hello@oldcocoa.com.