THE FIRST SETTLERS, 10,000 BC to 1820

Author: Vera Zimmerman

Wave after wave of settlers have washed over the place we now know as Brevard County. Ancient stone spear points found on the shores of Lake Hell 'n' Blazes tell archaeologists that the earliest inhabitants were here about 12,000 years ago. (Bense 1990) They left no family photos of women and children gathering palm berries and coco plums. They left no stories of hunters waiting in ambush for herds of mastodon.

The First Settlers

By 8000 years ago there were villages of people living a more settled life along the river we now call the St. Johns. Excavations at the Windover Site uncovered evidence of people who wove fine cloth, shaped tools of bone and shell and buried their dead in mortuary ponds. (Purdy 1988)

About 5000 years ago ocean level rose enough to flood the Indian River lagoon with salt water. Oysters and clams flourished and Native American populations increased. The first pottery in North America was made 4000 years ago along the east coast of Florida and Georgia. Broken pieces of that pottery, known to archaeologists as Orange fiber-tempered pottery, were first found along the St. Johns River at Orange Mound, just west of today's Orange-Brevard County line. (Bense 1990, Dickel 1992)

The St. Johns and Indian Rivers were highways for Indian dugout canoes. Trade routes connected the people here to other Native American populations. Shell mounds grew along the Indian River as generation after generation of families feasted on the rich harvest of the lagoon.

The Spanish Arrive

The arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s found the Native Americans living much the same as their ancestors had for thousands of years. The Spaniards called the people along the Indian River the Ays or Ais (pronounced Ah EES) for the chief of the largest village near today's Vero Beach. Ponce de Leon's first landfall is believed to have been in Ais territory somewhere south of Cape Canaveral. (Griffin and Miller, 1968)

Our best description of the Ais comes from Englishman Jonathan Dickinson who was shipwrecked near Jupiter Inlet in 1696 and made his way through Ais territory to the Spanish settlement at St. Augustine:

"They had their hair tied in a roll behind in which stuck two bones shaped, one like a broad arrow, the other a spearhead." They wore "a piece of plat-work of straw wrought of divers colors and of a triangular figure with a belt of four fingers broad of the same wrought together, which goeth about the waist and the angle of the other, coming between the legs, and strings to the end of the belt; all three meeting together and fastened behind with a horsetail, or a bunch of silk-grass exactly resembling it, of a flaxen color, this being all the apparel or covering that the men wear..." Jonathan Dickinson (Andrews, 1975)

European diseases and raiding by the English and their Indian allies reduced the number of Ais. By 1715 when the Spanish set up a salvage camp near the Rio San Sebastian to recover treasure from their shipwrecked fleet, they mentioned seeing only a few Ais fishermen. (Rouse 1951, 1981)

British East Florida: Loyalists to the Crown

Most of the remaining Ais left with the Spanish when the British took control of Florida in 1763. What is now Brevard County was then part of British East Florida. Creek Indians from Alabama and Georgia began to move south into the peninsula. The British called this new wave of settlers Seminoles after the Creek word for Wild Ones or Separatists. (Gannon 1993) The Panton, Leslie Company set up trading posts along the St. Johns River to trade with the Seminoles.

Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution caused the population of British East Florida to swell from 3,000 in 1776 to 17,000 a few years later. There were some land grants in today's Brevard county during the British period, notably one grant of 10,000 acres on the west side of the Indian River across from the Haulover to Thomas Bradshaw and one of 20,000 acres to Col. William Faucitt at the head of the Indian River. (Seibert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1929) The Bisset plantation was located near the current boundary of Brevard and Volusia Counties. Bisset worked about 30 slaves on his grant, clearing about 137 acres and growing indigo. (Adams,1987)

The Spanish Resume Control

When the Spanish returned to Florida in 1784, the population fell to under 2,000 and most plantations were abandoned, but some of the people remained. An oath of loyalty to the Spanish government was the only requirement for land ownership and the British Panton, Leslie Company continued trade with the Indians. The population during the second Spanish period included Spanish, Minorcan, Indian, Anglo, and Black, both free and slave. (Adams, 1987)

The Spanish encouraged settlement by making land grants. The Pouchard, Fontaine, Garvin, Acosta, and Segui Grants were north of what is now Mims. The Reyes Grant was on the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. The Delespine Grant covered an area south of Titusville. Merritt Island was granted to John H. McIntosh and the Fleming Grant was in the area of the San Sebastian River. (WPA, 1941, Land Grant map)

From 1803 until 1835 Domingo Reyes planted sugar cane and operated a sugar mill at his plantation. He was the inspector and overseer of the Spanish Royal Hospital at St. Augustine. The ruins of the mill are on the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. The Delespine Grant was one of the largest ever granted by the Spanish. Governor Jose Coppinger conceded the 43,000 acre tract to Joseph Delespine, a French physician, in 1817. It was located at what was later called Indian River City. (WPA, 1941)

Spanish East Florida became a haven for runaway slaves and Seminole Indians. Mosquito Lagoon and the Indian River provided a setting for contraband trade and slave smuggling. English freebooter, William Augustus Bowles, who declared himself Prince of the Muscogees, is reported to have used the Indian River as a center for contraband dealings. (Adams 1987)

Indian, Spanish and British settlement in the area that would come to be known as Brevard County left little evidence. The subtropical plant growth slowly covered Native American shell mounds, and palm thatched houses. When Andrew Jackson raised the United States flag over Florida in 1821, the banks of the Indian River did, indeed, appear unsettled.

Special thanks to Vera Zimmerman for submitting this useful information about the county history.