Old Cocoa
Politics and government

Cocoa and the Brevard County Seat: Why the Courthouse Is in Titusville

The Brevard County seat has been in Titusville since an 1879 vote in which the choices were Titusville, Eau Gallie and Rockledge. Cocoa outgrew Titusville by 1920, but the seat never moved.

By The Old Cocoa History Team Updated October 15, 2026
Map of Brevard County, Florida, with the City of Cocoa highlighted near the middle of the county.
Brevard County with Cocoa highlighted. The county seat sits at Titusville, about 20 miles up the Indian River. DemocraticLuntz via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Cocoa has never been the Brevard County seat, and it was never on the ballot for it. The seat has been in Titusville since 1879. That year Brevard annexed the southern part of Volusia County, Titusville included, and county voters chose their seat. The National Park Service’s history of Titusville says they picked it “overwhelmingly” over the two other contenders: Eau Gallie and Rockledge, Cocoa’s next-door neighbor.

The full story of that vote, and of Henry Titus’s gift of the courthouse land, is on our sister site’s page Why Titusville Is the Brevard County Seat.

The county Cocoa grew up in

Brevard began in 1844 as St. Lucie County and was renamed for Theodore Washington Brevard, Florida’s comptroller, in 1855. Titusville wasn’t part of it until the 1879 annexation. The county built its first courthouse in Titusville in 1881 and 1882, a two-story wooden building on land Titus donated, and replaced it with the concrete courthouse that opened in March 1913. Neither building burned; the old one was moved to the back of the lot and sold at auction. None of Brevard’s courthouses has ever stood in Cocoa.

Louisiana Volunteers at the Cocoa train depot during the Spanish-American War mobilization, 1898.
Troops at the Cocoa train depot in 1898. Over the next two decades Cocoa grew faster than the county seat. State Library and Archives of Florida via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

When Cocoa was the bigger town

What Cocoa did do was outgrow the county seat. The census counted 382 people in Cocoa in 1900, half Titusville’s 756. By 1920 Cocoa had 1,445 to Titusville’s 1,361, and it stayed ahead through 1960, when it had 12,294 to Titusville’s 6,410. The space program flipped that in a single decade: by 1970 Titusville had 30,515 people and Cocoa 16,110.

Being bigger never moved the courthouse. Once the courthouse, the jail and the county’s records were in Titusville, the seat stayed there.

Where county business happens now

Most of it happens in neither town. The Brevard County Board of County Commissioners meets at the county Government Center in Viera, between Cocoa and Melbourne, and the county’s main courthouse, the Moore Justice Center, is in Viera too. Titusville is still the legal county seat. For Cocoa residents, the trip to county government got shorter without the seat ever changing.

Florida outline map with Cocoa pinned on the east coast.
Cocoa's place on Florida's east coast, near the middle of long, narrow Brevard County. Seth Ilys via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

For how Cocoa itself began, see how Cocoa was founded and named, and for Cocoa’s neighbor in the 1879 vote, see the Cocoa and Rockledge connection.

Further Reading

  • Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon

Sources

  1. National Park Service, National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form, Titusville Multiple Property Group
  2. Florida Department of State, historical marker: Historic Brevard County Courthouse (2005)
  3. Brevard County, County Commission FAQ: where the board meets
  4. U.S. Census Bureau, 1970 Census of Population, Number of Inhabitants: Florida, Tables 6 and 7

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Brevard County county seat courthouse Titusville 1879