From Oceanus to Cocoa Beach: Gus Edwards and the incorporation of June 5, 1925

Cocoa Beach was a settlement before it was a town. The city’s own history says the first settlers after the Native peoples were freed slaves who came after the Civil War, and the University of Central Florida’s RICHES archive gives the settlement’s name as Oceanus.

Owners, 1888 to 1923

The land changed hands long before anyone developed it. In 1888, according to the city, a group of Cocoa men on the mainland bought the whole tract and left it largely as it was for several decades. In 1923 one of the group, Gus C. Edwards, bought out his fellow owners.

The town, 1925

Edwards moved fast. The town of Cocoa Beach was established on June 5, 1925, the city says, and RICHES records that Edwards was elected its first mayor. The archive’s notes on a postcard of the Canaveral Pier add that planning for a pier began that year, after Edwards’s election, though the pier was not built until 1962; its story is on our pier page.

Road, near-dissolution and a city charter

Growth waited on access. The archive records that the Florida Department of Transportation built State Road 140, today’s State Road A1A, in 1935, opening the island to more development. In 1944 a bill in the Florida Legislature that would have dissolved the town’s government was defeated. Cocoa Beach became a city in 1957 (RICHES gives the date as June 29, 1957), and the missile range and NASA nearly tripled it in the decade that followed: the census counted 3,475 people there in 1960 and 9,952 in 1970. That decade is on our 1960s page.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon