The 1894-95 Great Freeze on Cocoa's stretch of the river

The Great Freeze hit Cocoa’s stretch of the Indian River twice. The first freeze peaked on December 29, 1894, the second on February 8, 1895. Herbert J. Webber, who studied the damage for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wrote that after the second “the oldest and youngest trees, whether sweet or sour, were alike killed to the ground throughout the greater part of the State.”

The readings nearby

Webber’s table of temperatures has no station at Cocoa. The nearest readings come from Titusville to the north, Merritt Island across the river and Melbourne to the south:

Station	December 29, 1894	February 8, 1895
Titusville	18°F	19°F
Merritts Island	22°F	22°F
Melbourne	22°F (unofficial)	no reading

Webber also found that in any given latitude, the coast was about as cold as the interior; the shelter of water helped groves within a short distance of it and faded within a couple of miles. Serious damage stopped only south of about the 27th parallel, well south of Cocoa.

Two blows

The December freeze came while the trees were mostly dormant. It destroyed the fruit still hanging, about 3,000,000 boxes statewide by Webber’s estimate, and killed small and young trees, but most large orange trees survived. Then January turned warm. By the time the second freeze arrived on February 7, the trees had put out new shoots one to four inches long, and the cold killed even trees 20 to 40 years old to the ground in many groves.

What it did to the towns

The best record of what the freeze did to a town on this part of the river is Rockledge’s, just south of Cocoa. Its National Register documentation says packing houses had to close, thousands of workers across the citrus belt lost their jobs, and most owners of small groves in Rockledge were ruined and left; the town’s population fell from about 400 before the freeze to about 272 by 1900.

Cocoa was incorporated as a town in 1895, according to the Florida Department of State, the year of the second freeze.

Recovery

The groves came back. The Rockledge form says the citrus industry began to recover, the Indian River regained its reputation as the state’s best citrus region, and growers from North Florida moved south to escape the freezes. By 1900 Brevard was again one of the leading citrus counties in Florida, and in the following decade Rockledge and Cocoa were headquarters for the Florida Citrus Exchange, the state’s cooperative packing, shipping and marketing system. The freeze across the whole county is covered on Old Space Coast’s freeze page.

Further Reading

• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon