Eau Gallie's founding: John Houston, William Gleason and the 1884 plat

Eau Gallie, now the northern part of Melbourne, was a town of its own for most of a century. The fullest record of how it began is in the 1997 National Register nomination for the William H. Gleason House on Pineapple Avenue.

Houston, 1859

The first settler, according to the nomination, was John C. Houston, who arrived in 1859 on 80 acres beside the Indian River that the government had granted him for his service as an Indian scout. In 1871 he became Eau Gallie’s first postmaster. The Civil War held up any further settlement.

Gleason, 1870

In 1870 William H. Gleason bought 16,000 acres in the area and gave it its name. The Gleason nomination explains it as “Eau” from his home town of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, meaning water, and “Gallie” from a Seminole word meaning rocky; the 2016 nomination for Melbourne’s Green Gables gives another reading, French for “bitter water,” after the salty river. Gleason persuaded the state to put the Florida Agricultural College at Eau Gallie in 1872, and several buildings went up, but legislators decided the place was too remote and moved the college to Lake City before it opened.

County seat, 1874 to 1879

Eau Gallie was the Brevard County seat from 1874 until 1879, when the seat moved to Titusville. The county was thinly settled; the nomination counts only 35 registered voters in Eau Gallie at the time. Gleason moved his own family to Eau Gallie in the winter of 1882-83, built his house there between 1883 and 1885, and filed the town plat in 1884, with lots of 66 by 132 feet.

The railroad and after

Gleason worked to bring the railroad, the nomination says, offering Henry Flagler right-of-way and several hundred town lots in 1887. The tracks arrived on May 20, 1893, according to the marker at St. Clair Street and Highland Avenue, and for a time Eau Gallie was the end of the line. A “Y” was built downtown so trains could turn around, a spur ran down to the river where the library and city park are now, and for three years cargo moved from the railroad onto steamboats bound south, a short land boom of its own. With the railroad, Eau Gallie could ship citrus and fish packed in ice north, and a bank, a hotel, stores and rental cottages grew up near the railroad and the river. After the freezes of the mid-1890s, commercial fishing, naval stores, lumber and millwork carried the town. It had nearly 200 people by 1900. In 1902 George Paddison founded the East Coast Lumber and Supply Company there, and the same year James W. Rossetter came to Eau Gallie for the Indian River and Lake Worth Fish Company, according to his house’s nomination.

From 1907 until about 1922 the Kentucky Military Institute spent its winter terms in Eau Gallie. The town grew between 1912 and 1918, built sewers, paved streets and a water system on bonds in the 1920s, and came out of the land boom in debt; the State Bank of Eau Gallie closed in 1928. By 1930 Eau Gallie had nearly 1,000 people. It joined Melbourne in 1969, as our merger page covers, and Gleason’s own story is on our Gleason page.

What’s left to see

Two of Eau Gallie’s founding-era houses are on the National Register. The Gleason House at 1736 Pineapple Avenue is the one Gleason built between 1883 and 1885. The Rossetter House at 1328 Houston Street is three older buildings, built at different times and places, that James W. Rossetter put together into one house by 1908; he lived there from 1904 to 1921. The railroad’s cut behind the Ginter building on St. Clair Street has been filled in, but the spur’s end is still public ground: the library and the city park by the river. The railroad’s arrival on both sides of the old town line is on our railroad page.

Further Reading

• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith