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.
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.
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.