CONTRIBUTING WRITER: Molly Thomas, Cultural + Community Affairs Director, City of Cape Canaveral
It may be hard to imagine now, with over half a century of amazing space travel triumphs under our belt, that long before anyone had ever conceived of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Cape Canaveral was a remote, frontier paradise. The Cape and its adjacent barrier island communities on North Merritt Island were home to numerous individual towns – Shiloh, Clifton, Heath, Happy Creek, Haulover Heights, Allenhurst, Wilson, Heath, Happy Creek, Orsino, Canaveral Harbor, Nathan and Artesia – just to name a few.
So many articles and stories have been written about Cape Canaveral before it became THE Cape, as it was referred to in the early days of the Space Race; touting it to be a remote, vacant wilderness of snakes, swamp land and overgrown palmettos. But according to the memoirs of one local resident, that wasn’t exactly true.
Helen Wilson Tucker lived on Cape Canaveral from 1913 to 1951. Her father owned 160 acres of land and she recalls a time when Brevard’s eastern most barrier island was filled with deer, bears, panthers and all the other wildlife old Florida was once known for – but it was far from being a desolate swamp. As a child, she watched the community grow as people from all over the country came to Cape Canaveral to start homesteads – many families whose descendants still reside locally. In her memoir, she recalls the general store, two school houses, the post office – where mail arrived by boat – and the arduous trek to the mainland, even after the bridge was built in what is now Cocoa Beach around 1925.
At the turn of the 20th century the Cape Canaveral Lighthouse was a beacon for not only the vessels skirting our dangerous shoals, but also for the community that was rapidly growing around it. Mrs. Tucker’s grandfather, Henry Wilson, came to Cape Canaveral to work as the assistant lighthouse keeper under Mills O. Burnham. He married Burnham’s daughter Frances and would go on to serve as the postmaster of Cape Canaveral for 30 years. Her father was raised on Cape Canaveral, she was raised on Cape Canaveral and her three children would also be born on Cape Canaveral. For the Wilsons, Tuckers and countless other families, Cape Canaveral was a invariable paradise that they could call home.
“We was all living very happily about the year 1948,” she recalls, “when we heard that the Government was considering taking Cape Canaveral for a missile testing ground.” At first the community was excited for the development and new roads, but the residents soon realized that they would have to surrender their homes and property… “to move from our haven on Cape Canaveral,” as she put it.
The City of Cape Canaveral has the complete memoir of Helen Tucker and a few others that comprise some of the earliest written recollections of our community before it became what you see today. Some of these have been published together by the Florida Historical Society as “East Coast Florida Memoirs 1837 to 1886” by Robert Ranson and are available for purchase at the Library of Florida History in Cocoa Village. For free digital copies of the individual stories, you may contact the Cultural and Community Affairs Department at cca@cityofcapecanaveral.org.
