Melbourne's founding: Crane Creek's freedmen, the 1886 plat and the 1888 town

Melbourne has four founding dates, and each one answers a different question. Freedmen settled Crane Creek in 1867. The settlement took the name Melbourne around 1880, the year carved on postmaster C. J. Hector’s grave under the words “Founder of Melbourne.” William Camp filed the first plat in 1886, and the Town of Melbourne was incorporated on December 22, 1888. If you need one year, 1888 is the legal one.

Melbourne began at Crane Creek, the natural harbor on the Indian River that was the settlement’s first name. According to the 2016 National Register nomination for Green Gables, a Melbourne house whose nomination includes a history of the city, the first settlers at Crane Creek were freedmen who came in 1867: Captain Peter Wright, Balaam Allan and the Wright brothers.

Plats and a name

The town took shape in the 1880s. The nomination records that William Camp filed the first plat of Melbourne in 1886, two years after William H. Gleason filed the plat of the Village of Eau Gallie to the north, and that Melbourne’s growth was guided by settlers of varied backgrounds.

The Town of Melbourne was incorporated on December 22, 1888. Its corporate seal showed a pineapple plant, a crane and a palmetto tree. The town was named for its first postmaster, Cornthwaite John Hector, an Englishman “said to have come from Melbourne, Australia”; the nomination adds in a footnote that other sources say he came from New Zealand.

How did Melbourne get its name?

By straw poll. The best account comes from Jessie S. Goode, one of the first settlers on Crane Creek, who told the Melbourne Times in January 1927 how it happened. The new name was settled by drawing straws, and her daughter Grace, then eight, drew the winning one. Mrs. Goode declared the town would be Melbourne, for the first postmaster and for the first families, who’d been born under the British flag. The paper ran the interview on its front page on January 25, 1927, under the headline “Woman Who Named Melbourne Tells of Early Days Here.”

So the namesake is Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, and the link is Hector, not any direct tie between the two places. Goode remembered him arriving from New York in the fall of 1878, aged 43, and said he’d lived for years in Sydney and in Melbourne.

Where Hector actually came from is harder. Zillah Williams, a retired Australian librarian, traced the family for the Brevard County Historical Commission’s Indian River Journal in 2006. The Hector family prayer book, now in the library of St John’s College in Auckland, records “Cornthwaite John Hector born 6th May 1835 at VD Land,” meaning Van Diemen’s Land, today’s Tasmania. The family moved to New Zealand, and at ten he was carrying ammunition from the stockade during the 1845 battle at Kororareka, where a newspaper of the day praised “Mr Hector’s two boys.” In February 1866 a C. J. Hector, aged 30, sailed from Melbourne to Hokitika, a New Zealand gold-rush town, listing himself as a miner and his birthplace as England. Goode thought he was a native of Auckland. Three birthplaces, then, and none of them Melbourne.

He stayed. Hector was confirmed at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Melbourne on April 21, 1887, married Ida M. Gard on October 10, 1895, and died at Crescent City, Florida, on January 6, 1898, aged 62. He’s buried in Melbourne Cemetery under a simple epitaph: “C. J. Hector, Founder of Melbourne, 1880.”

The railroad and the freeze

Growth came with the railroad. Henry Flagler’s railway reached Eau Gallie in 1893 and Melbourne a few months later, the nomination says, and it carried produce and timber to markets out of state. Through the 1890s houses went up along Riverview Drive and Melbourne Avenue, and a commercial district grew north of Crane Creek along Front Street, with stores, a meat market, a newspaper, lumberyards, hotels, a telegraph office and a post office. Then the freezes of 1894-95 killed the citrus groves and other crops.

From town to city

The town recovered on replanted groves, commercial fishing, lumber and ranching; the Union Cypress Company, founded by George Hopkins in 1912 just south of Crane Creek, gave Melbourne its first electricity. Melbourne reincorporated as a city in 1923, according to the nomination. The census counted 157 people in 1910, 533 in 1920 and 2,677 in 1930. The railroad’s arrival is on our railroad page, and Eau Gallie’s separate founding is on our Eau Gallie page.

Further Reading

• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith