Old Melbourne
Founding

William H. Gleason: the Reconstruction lieutenant governor who built Eau Gallie

William H. Gleason became Florida's first elected lieutenant governor in 1868, was ruled out of office by the state Supreme Court in 1869, and spent the rest of his life developing land. He bought 16,000 acres on the Indian River in 1870, platted Eau Gallie in 1884, and died there in 1902.

By The Old Melbourne Team Updated October 15, 2026
A 1920 Sanborn fire insurance map plate of Melbourne, Florida.
Melbourne on a 1920 Sanborn fire insurance map. Gleason's Eau Gallie lay just to the north. Sanborn Map Company via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

William H. Gleason is the reason Eau Gallie exists. His house at 1736 Pineapple Avenue, built between 1883 and 1885 and listed on the National Register in 1997, is the subject of a nomination that tells his story in detail; the 2016 nomination for Melbourne’s Green Gables adds to it.

Wisconsin to Florida

Gleason was born in New York around 1830, the Gleason nomination says; the Green Gables nomination puts his birth in Tioga County, New York, in 1829, and says he moved to Wisconsin at fifteen and trained as a civil engineer. After the Civil War he settled his wife, Sarah, and their two sons in the Biscayne Bay area in 1866. Both nominations describe him traveling the peninsula for the federal government after the war to study whether it suited a colony for freed slaves; the Green Gables nomination says he logged some 1,500 miles with the Freedmen’s Bureau agent Colonel George F. Thompson and reported that it did not, though he saw the land’s promise for development.

Lieutenant governor, 1868-69

Gleason helped frame Florida’s 1868 constitution and in that year’s election became the state’s first elected lieutenant governor, under Governor Harrison Reed. When Reed’s enemies moved to impeach him, Gleason claimed the right to act as governor and set up his own office. In January 1869, according to the Gleason nomination, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that he was not entitled to act as governor, and disqualified him as lieutenant governor because he had not been a Florida citizen for three years before his election. He went on to represent Dade County in the state House from 1871 to 1874.

Signs for State Road 518 in the Eau Gallie neighborhood of Melbourne.
Eau Gallie, the town Gleason named and platted, is now a neighborhood of Melbourne. November 2018. Formulanone via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Eau Gallie

In 1870 Gleason bought 16,000 acres on the Indian River and named the place Eau Gallie. He persuaded the state to locate its agricultural college there in 1872, though it never opened, and had plans for an inland waterway and large drainage projects that came to nothing in his lifetime. He sold most of his Dade County property, moved to Eau Gallie in the winter of 1882-83, and filed the town plat in 1884. A stroke in October 1885 left him partly paralyzed, but with his sons’ help he practiced law, was a partner in a sawmill and a director of the town’s first bank. In 1887, the nomination says, he offered Henry Flagler right-of-way and several hundred town lots to bring the railroad through.

Gleason died in 1902. His son William H. H. Gleason, who kept the house, served as Eau Gallie’s postmaster for ten years, as a bank president and as mayor several times. The town Gleason founded is on our Eau Gallie page.

Further Reading

  • Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon

Sources

  1. National Park Service, National Register Registration Form: William H. Gleason House, Melbourne (1997)
  2. National Park Service, National Register Registration Form: Green Gables, Melbourne (2016)

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

gleason land reconstruction eau gallie lieutenant governor