How Cocoa was settled, named, and incorporated, 1860s through 1882

Cocoa was settled in the mid-1860s by homesteading families pushing south along the Indian River after the Civil War, received its post office in 1871, and incorporated as a town on August 7, 1882. The name’s origin is the bit everyone tells you about: per the version that has stuck in city tradition for over a century, a settler named the post office for a tin of Baker’s Cocoa sitting on the counter when officials asked what to call the place. It’s a story the City of Cocoa itself repeats on its history page, with the caveat that the documentary record for the naming is thin.

The mainland was the part of Brevard County people actually lived on in the 1870s. The barrier island (today’s Cocoa Beach) had no road, no bridge, and almost no settlers. The Indian River Lagoon was the highway. Steamboats ran north from Titusville to Jupiter and points south, calling at Cocoa’s wharves when there was cargo to move. The cargo, increasingly, was citrus.

Who was already here in the 1860s

Brevard County itself was newer than Cocoa’s settlers. The Florida Legislature created Brevard from St. Lucie County on January 6, 1855, naming it for Dr. Theodore Washington Brevard, the state’s antebellum comptroller. The county seat hopscotched in those early years, Titusville, then briefly to Lake View, then back to Titusville in 1894, and Cocoa was, for a stretch in the 1880s, the largest town between Titusville and the Indian River’s southern end.

The first sustained settlement at what became Cocoa is usually traced to the Robert C. May family, whose homestead was on the river south of what is now King Street. Other early families included the Travises, who would open the hardware store in 1885; the Magruders; and the Sanders. They were planting orange groves on the high ground west of the river, fishing the lagoon, and shipping what they could ship.

The post office and the name

Cocoa’s post office was established on January 27, 1871, with Christian Schroeder as postmaster, per the U.S. Postal Service’s historic post office records via the National Archives. Before 1871, mail came through Sand Point (the early name for Titusville) or by private courier from St. Augustine.

The naming story, as documented by the City of Cocoa, the Florida Historical Society’s Brevard chapter, and Patrick Smith’s A Land Remembered research files, runs like this: when the post office was approved, postal officials asked for a name that wasn’t already in use in Florida. A resident at the meeting (some accounts say a Mrs. Hatch, others say Captain Schroeder himself) pointed to a tin of Baker’s Cocoa on a store shelf and suggested that. The application went through.

The story is the kind of thing that’s repeated so often it sounds suspicious, but no contemporary alternative has surfaced in the Florida State Archives. Walter Baker & Company, founded in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1780, was indeed selling its trademarked cocoa nationwide by the 1860s, and small Florida post offices in this era were named for any number of arbitrary objects, people, and inside jokes (Christmas, Florida, was named for a fort built on December 25, 1837). The tin-of-cocoa version is plausible. It’s not provable. Treat it as the city’s accepted founding story, not as documented fact.

The 1882 incorporation

By the early 1880s, Cocoa had a population large enough, somewhere between 250 and 400, depending on whose count, to warrant municipal incorporation. On August 7, 1882, the town incorporated under Florida’s general municipal-corporation statute. The first mayor was John Gardner.

Incorporation mattered for two reasons. First, it gave the town authority to issue bonds for wharves, water, and (eventually) electric lighting. Second, it gave Cocoa a legal identity for the railroad fight that was about to dominate the next decade. Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway reached the Indian River in 1893, and Cocoa needed to be a recognized incorporated municipality to negotiate for a depot on its own terms.

The economy that was about to take off

When Cocoa incorporated in 1882, the town had:

• A working post office (1871)
• A small steamboat wharf on the Indian River
• Roughly forty buildings clustered between today’s Brevard Avenue and the riverfront
• Several hundred acres of bearing orange groves on the high ground

What it did not yet have: a railroad, a courthouse, a bank, a newspaper, or a hotel of any size. All of that arrived in the next decade. The Florida East Coast Railway reached Cocoa in 1893, S.F. Travis Hardware opened in 1885, and the Cocoa Tribune began publishing in 1908. The town that the Great Freeze of 1894–95 would test was a town built between 1882 and 1894 on the assumption that citrus was forever.

It wasn’t. But the town survived the freeze, and that’s the next piece.

The steamboat decade, 1872 to 1893

For roughly two decades between the post-office founding and the railroad’s arrival, Cocoa’s economic life ran on the Indian River Lagoon. The lagoon is a 156-mile shallow estuary stretching from Volusia County to Martin County, separated from the Atlantic by the barrier-island chain that includes Merritt Island and what is now Cocoa Beach. In the 1870s and 1880s it was Brevard County’s principal highway. The wagon roads were sand traces, impassable for half the year. The lagoon was navigable in any weather.

The Indian River Steamboat Company, organized in 1882 and operating sidewheelers from Titusville south to Jupiter, ran the service that mattered for Cocoa. The Rockledge, the St. Sebastian, and later the St. Augustine called at Cocoa’s wharves on a roughly twice-weekly schedule, carrying citrus and pineapples out and groceries, hardware, mail, and northern visitors in. The Indian River Citrus Exchange’s later records, preserved at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries, document that nearly all of Cocoa’s 1880s fruit shipments moved by lagoon steamer to Titusville, where the Jacksonville, Tampa & Key West Railway (the FEC’s predecessor in the area) transferred them to refrigerated rail cars bound for New York and Philadelphia.

The economic geography is important to grasp. Until 1893, Cocoa was a transshipment town, not a destination. The serious money was at the rail terminus in Titusville. Cocoa’s role was to aggregate grove production from the central Indian River corridor and hand it off to the steamboats. The town’s wharves, three by 1885 according to Sanborn fire-insurance maps, were the most valuable commercial real estate in town.

The Florida East Coast Railway’s southward extension changed everything. Track from Daytona reached Titusville in 1886 under the JTKW name, but the line continued south slowly, reaching Cocoa in 1893 and Fort Pierce on January 29, 1894 after Henry Flagler bought and consolidated the regional lines. Once Cocoa had a depot of its own, the steamboat trade collapsed within five years. The Indian River Steamboat Company suspended regular service in 1898. The wharves stayed in use for local fishing and recreational boats, but the commercial center of gravity moved one block inland to the rail line. The street grid Cocoa platted in the 1880s, oriented to the river, was overlaid by a second commercial axis along Brevard Avenue and Delannoy Avenue parallel to the FEC tracks. That double-axis pattern is still visible in the Cocoa Village Historic District today.

Further Reading

• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce
• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon

Sources

• City of Cocoa, “History of Cocoa,” official municipal history page, verified May 2026.
• Brevard County government, “About Brevard,” county history page, verified May 2026.
• Florida Historical Society, Florida Historical Quarterly, Brevard County issues, 1925–1960.
• U.S. National Archives, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28, Cocoa, FL post office establishment date, January 27, 1871.
• Florida Memory Project, State Archives of Florida, Brevard County collection.
• William T. Cash, History of Florida from its Discovery by Ponce de Leon in 1513, vol. 2 (1938), Brevard County chapter.
• Florida East Coast Railway corporate records, 1893 Cocoa depot opening.
• Indian River Citrus Exchange records, 1880s–1900s, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.
• Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Cocoa, Florida, 1884 and 1893 editions, via Library of Congress.
• Jacksonville, Tampa & Key West Railway corporate records, 1886 Titusville extension.