Cocoa and Rockledge: two towns founded by the same brothers

Cocoa and Rockledge started as one family’s land. According to the National Park Service’s history of Rockledge, Gardner S. Hardee, a Georgian born in 1842, came to Florida with his brother in 1868 and bought several tracts along the Indian River. Gardner named one tract “Rock Ledge,” after an outcrop of stone that formed a natural seawall along the river. The land his brother bought was platted as “Indian River city,” and it became part of Cocoa.

Two towns

The towns took different paths to becoming cities. Rockledge was a winter resort first: by 1887 it had about 150 residents and, the Park Service form says, became the first incorporated municipality in Brevard County. (Titusville disputes that: the Park Service’s history of Titusville records a vote to incorporate there in November 1886.) Cocoa, according to the Florida Department of State, was founded by fishermen in 1882 as Indian River City, took the name Cocoa in 1884 because the post office found the old name too long for a postmark, and was incorporated in 1895. Both were reached by Flagler’s railway in 1893.

In the 1900s and 1910s they shared the citrus trade. Rockledge and Cocoa, the form says, were headquarters for the Florida Citrus Exchange, the state’s cooperative packing, shipping and marketing system.

The line blurs

The land boom pushed them together. Rockledge had about 450 people in 1920 and over 600 by 1925, and between 1921 and 1926, the form says, subdivision building moved so fast that “the boundary lines between Rockledge and the neighboring city of Cocoa were quickly obscured.” Rockledge never grew a real downtown of its own. Writing about a small 1920s commercial building on Orange Street, the form notes that it “might have been the beginning of a commercial area that failed to develop because of the collapse of the Florida Boom,” and that “most of the residents of Rockledge have traditionally shopped in the commercial section of the nearby city of Cocoa.”

The census

For most of the 20th century Cocoa was the bigger town. The space age changed that:

Year	Cocoa	Rockledge
1920	1,445	453
1950	4,245	1,347
1960	12,294	3,481
1970	16,110	10,523
1990	17,722	16,023
2010	17,140	24,926
2020	19,041	27,678

Rockledge passed Cocoa sometime between 1990 and 2010. The story from the other side of the line is on Old Rockledge.

Further Reading

• Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon