Writing
Notes, essays, and research from Old Cocoa.
- Economy and finance
The 1925 Florida land boom and why Cocoa didn't quite collapse
The 1924-26 Florida land bubble ruined speculators across the state and left Miami, Tampa, and Sarasota with abandoned subdivisions. Cocoa took damage but survived, because the underlying economy was still citrus, not speculation.
- Historic structures
The Aladdin Theatre, 1924: Cocoa Village's surviving silent-era movie palace
Opened in November 1924 by Edwin and Jenny Hoffman, the Aladdin Theatre on Brevard Avenue is one of the oldest continuously-operating movie houses in Florida. It's on the National Register and still shows films.
- Schools and education
Brevard Junior College, founded 1960 in Cocoa: how it became Eastern Florida State
Brevard Junior College opened in 1960 on a 100-acre site west of Cocoa, founded to serve the influx of NASA contractors and military families. It became Brevard Community College, then Eastern Florida State College, Brevard County's first higher-education institution.
- Politics and government
Why Cocoa lost the Brevard County seat to Titusville in 1894
In 1894 a county-wide vote moved the Brevard County seat from Titusville to its current location, Titusville, again, after a brief Cocoa-adjacent interlude. Cocoa came close to becoming the county seat. It didn't, and that's a story about geography, railroad politics, and one specific election.
- Communities
Brevard's freedmen and the founding of Black communities near Cocoa, 1865-1920
After emancipation, Black settlers established communities at Mims, Allendale (later part of Cocoa), and near present-day Rockledge. These neighborhoods supplied the citrus-packing labor that built Cocoa's economy. Their churches, schools, and burying grounds still anchor the city's west side.
- Public health
The Brevard County Mosquito Control District: how aerial spraying made Cocoa habitable
Founded in Cocoa in 1953, the Brevard Mosquito Control District ran the aerial-spraying program that transformed coastal Brevard from seasonally uninhabitable to year-round suburban. The program had real ecological costs and a real public-health success.
- Citrus era
Cocoa's citrus packing houses, 1890-1962: the rise, the freeze, and the consolidation
A.S. Dixon, the Cocoa Citrus Exchange, the Deer Park label, the Indian River brand premium, and the 1894-95 freeze that almost ended it all. Cocoa's citrus packing era ran for seventy years and built half the buildings still standing in Cocoa Village.
- Buildings and infrastructure
Cocoa Auditorium and the 1950s civic-building era
The Cocoa Auditorium and the related civic-building boom of the late 1940s and 1950s gave the city a set of public buildings it still uses. Most were demolished or repurposed by 2000, but the era's footprint is still visible in Riverfront Park and around city hall.
- Communities
Cocoa's Cuban community: Mariel and the broader 1960s-1970s migration
Brevard County's Cuban-American community formed in two waves: the 1960s post-Revolution professional class and the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Cocoa absorbed several hundred Cuban families across both waves, building a small but stable community concentrated on the west side.
- Founding era
How Cocoa was settled, named, and incorporated, 1860s through 1882
The mainland city's founding story: Civil War-era homesteaders, a post office named after a tin of Baker's cocoa (per local tradition), and the 1882 incorporation that put Cocoa on the map twenty-five years before its barrier-island sister.
- Schools and education
Cocoa High football: 1939, the Tigers, and the modern dynasty
Cocoa High School football has won eight FHSAA state championships since 1939, including a 2008-2018 run that made it one of the most dominant small-school programs in Florida history. The Boyer-McGriff coaching era built the dynasty.
- Media
The Cocoa Tribune and Cocoa News: a small-town Florida newspaper rivalry, 1890s through 1920s
Cocoa had two competing weekly newspapers for most of the 1900s and 1910s, the Cocoa Tribune (founded 1908) and the older Cocoa News (founded 1893). Both ended up consolidated by 1923. The microfilm record is the principal documentary source for everything Cocoa did before 1940.
- Buildings and infrastructure
Cocoa Riverfront Park: the lagoon-front the city saved from itself
Today's Cocoa Riverfront Park sits where the city's 19th-century commercial waterfront, fish houses, and steamboat wharves once stood. The park dates from the 1960s; its survival depended on the city deciding not to sell off the lagoon shoreline.
- Communities
Cocoa and Rockledge: two cities that grew into each other but never merged
Rockledge incorporated in 1887, five years after Cocoa, and the two cities share a half-mile-long border on Eyster Boulevard. They have parallel histories, parallel economies, and a deliberate refusal to consolidate.
- Schools and education
Cocoa schools, 1880 through integration in 1968
From the first one-room school in 1880 through the long parallel system of Black schools (Monroe High, Roosevelt) and white schools (Cocoa High), to the federal court order that desegregated Brevard County schools in 1968-69.
- Historic district
Cocoa Village Historic District: what's listed, why it survived, and what the 1986 NRHP filing covers
The Cocoa Village Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 5, 1986, covering 32 contributing structures across roughly 12 city blocks. It survived urban renewal because preservation activism started in the 1970s, not the 1990s.
- Communities
How Cocoa Village got its restaurants: the 1980s downtown revival
By 1980 mainland Cocoa's downtown was in trouble. Vacant storefronts on Brevard Avenue, no foot traffic, the Aladdin Theatre closing. The 1986 NRHP listing, Cocoa Village Mainstreet's marketing push, and a sequence of pioneering restaurants turned the district around by 1995.
- People
Edward Porcher: orphan from Charleston who built Cocoa's biggest citrus empire
Edward Postell Porcher arrived in Cocoa from Charleston at sixteen, an orphan, and built the largest citrus shipping operation between Daytona and Fort Pierce by the 1910s. The Porcher House is what he left behind.
- Citrus era
The 1894-95 Great Freeze and how Cocoa survived where most of north Florida didn't
December 28, 1894 and February 7, 1895: two waves of subfreezing weather that destroyed Florida's commercial citrus. North-central Florida's industry never recovered. Indian River groves around Cocoa took heavy damage but lived. The freeze remade the geography of Florida citrus.
- Weather and disasters
Hurricane David hits Cocoa, September 3, 1979
Hurricane David made landfall near Stuart on September 3, 1979, then tracked north over Brevard County. Cocoa took tropical-storm-force sustained winds, hurricane-force gusts, widespread flooding, and significant damage to homes and groves. The recovery cost was an inflection point for Brevard's hurricane preparedness.
- Roads and infrastructure
The Indian River Drive era, 1900-1940: the road that stitched Cocoa to Rockledge to Eau Gallie
Before US-1 and I-95, the Indian River Drive was the lagoon-side road that ran from Titusville south through Cocoa, Rockledge, Eau Gallie, and Melbourne. It defined the mainland Brevard economy for forty years.
- Roads and infrastructure
Before the bridge: how Cocoa got to the beach, 1880s through the causeway era
Until 1917 there was no bridge from mainland Cocoa to the barrier island. Crossing meant a ferry. The 1917 swing bridge, the 1925 land-boom causeway, and the Pineda Causeway south of town all changed what was reachable.
- Historic structures
The Porcher House, 1916: Cocoa's coquina mansion and what it cost to build it
Edward Porcher's 1916 coquina-block mansion at 434 Delannoy Avenue is Cocoa's most photographed building. It's also a complete document of what a citrus magnate could spend before the 1925 land bust.
- Historic businesses
S.F. Travis Hardware, Cocoa, 1885: one of Florida's oldest continuously-operating businesses
Founded in 1885 by Stephen F. Travis on Brevard Avenue, S.F. Travis Hardware has run continuously through four generations of one family. It's older than the City of Cocoa Beach, older than the Florida East Coast Railway south of Daytona, older than Brevard County's current courthouse.
- Editorial
What 'Old Cocoa' means
A note on the editorial premise of this site. We cover mainland Cocoa, not Cocoa Beach. The citrus era, the Porcher House, S.F. Travis Hardware, the Indian River Drive years, the long arc from 1860s settlement to the Space Age. Primary sources only. No travel-blog filler.