Fish, ice and the railroad: Melbourne and Eau Gallie's working river, 1890s to 1920s
After the 1894-95 freezes, commercial fishing helped carry Melbourne and Eau Gallie. The railroad shipped fish north packed in ice; James W. Rossetter ran an Indian River fish company out of Eau Gallie from 1902; and Florida Power and Light built an ice plant on the Dixie Highway in the 1920s to serve the fishing fleet and the growers.
The river paid Melbourne’s and Eau Gallie’s bills when citrus could not. After the freezes of the mid-1890s damaged the groves, the National Register nomination for William H. Gleason’s house says, “commercial fishing, naval stores, lumber and mill work became the economic basis” of Eau Gallie. In Melbourne, the 2016 nomination for Green Gables credits commercial fishing, lumbering and ranching, with replanted groves, for the recovery between 1896 and 1920.
Ice and the railroad
The railroad made the catch worth more. When the tracks reached Eau Gallie in 1893, the Gleason nomination says, it became possible to ship citrus and fish packed in ice to northern markets.
Rossetter’s fish company
The best-documented fish dealer on this stretch of river was James Wadsworth Rossetter. According to the 2005 National Register nomination for his house in Eau Gallie, he became a principal partner and director of the Indian River and Lake Worth Fish Company on March 4, 1902, owning 20 percent of it, and moved to Eau Gallie that year to look after the company’s interests. He later started his own wholesale and retail fish and produce company and, by his family’s account, at one time had the largest payroll of any business in the area.
The nomination credits him with two more firsts. In 1907 he built a fish pond at the Bight of Canaveral, which it calls a precursor of today’s Port Canaveral, and as the biggest buyer of gasoline for his fishing fleet he took on the Standard Oil distributorship for central Brevard, bringing the fuel’s price down. He lived in the Eau Gallie house from 1904 until 1921.
The ice plant
In the 1920s Florida Power and Light, which was buying up smaller companies and building new plants, put up an ice plant in Melbourne on the Dixie Highway, then the main road for automobile travel in Florida. According to its 1982 National Register nomination, the plant supplied ice to Melbourne and the farming country along the Indian River, and its main customers were “the local fishing industry and the Indian River citrus and vegetable growers.” Its building, in the Modernistic style of the 1920s, was listed on the National Register in 1982.
Further Reading
- Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida by Charles W. Pierce
Sources
- National Park Service, National Register Registration Form: James Wadsworth Rossetter House, Melbourne (2005)
- National Park Service, National Register Registration Form: William H. Gleason House, Melbourne (1997)
- National Park Service, National Register Registration Form: Green Gables, Melbourne (2016)
- National Park Service, National Register Nomination Form: Florida Power and Light Company Ice Plant, Melbourne (1982)
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