Fellsmere History — Fellsmere, Florida

Fellsmere began as a drainage and land sale venture: in 1910 the Fellsmere Farm Company platted 118,000 acres nine miles west of the Sebastian River, then in St. Lucie County (National Park Service, page 4).

The idea came from Nelson Fell, a New Zealand engineer of British ancestry born in 1858 (National Park Service, page 3). Before Fellsmere he had grown sugarcane and run drainage work at Narcoossee in Osceola County, and he sat on the Osceola County commission from 1890 to 1896. The National Register study calls Narcoossee only moderately successful and Fellsmere the more successful of the two.

The Fellsmere Farm Company was capitalized with $2,000,000 (National Park Service, page 4). Oscar Crosby served as president and Nelson Fell as vice president, with a board of Northeastern bankers, lawyers, engineers and a railroad specialist. The tract was muck, prairie and pine land, and the plan depended on drainage canals to make it farmable.

Fellsmere Farms, organized in 1910, ranks in the National Register study as one of the largest privately funded reclamation projects in Florida, part of the wider drainage push that Governor Napoleon Broward championed (National Park Service, page 5). Competing with Indian River Farms around Vero Beach and Fort Pierce Farms, the Fellsmere directors sold land through agents in Chattanooga and Jacksonville at $55.00 per acre.

Terms were one-third down with ten acres as the minimum purchase (National Park Service, page 6). The company built a visitor center and a ten-acre demonstration farm showing eggplant, figs, oranges, persimmons, strawberries and sugarcane, and the Fellsmere Inn went up around 1910 to house prospective buyers.

The Fellsmere town plan of July 1911 covered nearly one square mile, ten blocks square, with avenues named for states running east to west and north to south streets named for trees (National Park Service, page 7).

The plan borrowed from the City Beautiful movement, adding parks, diagonal streets and divided boulevards to the grid (National Park Service, page 7). Its largest park, Washington Park, filled a circular intersection of Colorado Street and Magnolia Avenue; a school now occupies it. The study doubts that the diagonal streets were ever built in Fellsmere.

Rail and drainage came first. The Fellsmere Farms Railroad, completed in April 1912, ran nine miles to the Florida East Coast Railway at Sebastian with one locomotive, one passenger car and four freight cars (National Park Service, page 6). Within two years dredges had drained 8,000 acres, and the main canal control gate was completed in June 1913.

Building moved fast on the Fellsmere grid: eighteen buildings in 1911 and forty-seven in 1912, including thirty-six dwellings and three stores (National Park Service, page 8). In 1913 the population reached 503, second only to Fort Pierce in St. Lucie County. The State Bank of Fellsmere opened in July 1913 with $25,000, the Dixie Playhouse opened on Broadway, and Broadway was paved as a divided boulevard, one of the first in the county.

The Fellsmere Farmer began publishing in 1911, the year the post office opened (National Park Service, page 6). Ten Black laborers who arrived in 1910 to build the railroad and cook for the survey crew were among the first residents. Their settlement grew beyond the northeast corner of the Fellsmere town plan near Willow and Booker streets, where a Missionary Baptist church was organized in 1911 and a school for Black children formed in 1913.

Under its 1915 charter, Fellsmere gave women an equal vote in city elections, a provision legislators let through without notice (Florida Division of Historical Resources marker).

According to the 2004 state marker on Broadway, Fellsmere citizens accepted the articles of incorporation unanimously at a February 1915 meeting at the Dixie Theater (Birthplace for Equal Suffrage marker). Local bills drew little scrutiny, so when Governor Park Trammell signed the act creating the town, he in effect gave Fellsmere women the municipal vote.

The National Register study dates the incorporation of the City of Fellsmere to May 1915, with three councilmen, and calls Fellsmere the first municipality in Florida to let women vote (National Park Service, page 9). Mrs. Zena M. Dreier, the marker says, cast the first ballot by a woman in Fellsmere at the city election of June 19, 1915.

Pride in the clause lasted. The marker quotes the Fellsmere Tribune of March 8, 1916 on the town's unanimous vote for unrestricted suffrage, and records that residents urged neighboring towns to follow the Fellsmere Way; a U.S. constitutional amendment granted women suffrage in 1919 (state marker 265). The City of Fellsmere describes it as the first city south of the Mason-Dixon line after Reconstruction to allow women the vote (City of Fellsmere).

Unusually heavy rain in 1915 flooded Fellsmere's unfinished canal system, and the losses pushed the Fellsmere Farms Company into bankruptcy in 1916 (National Park Service, page 9).

Only fifteen rail cars of produce left Fellsmere in 1915, and some families moved to better drained land on the coast (National Park Service, page 9). The electric company went into receivership and the Fellsmere Farmer was reorganized as the weekly Fellsmere Tribune. Broadmoor, a Dutch colony a few miles west of Fellsmere, was abandoned the same year (National Park Service, page 5).

In 1918 New York investors formed the Fellsmere Company and bought the mortgage, holdings and railroad of the failed farm company for $330,000 (National Park Service, page 10). Nelson Fell's visits dropped off after 1915, and he died in 1928. Fellsmere counted 333 residents in 1920, down from 503 in 1913.

A 1997 state marker on the Fellsmere Grade gives a different count, over 800 people in 1919, and records the first public road across the St. Johns River marsh in St. Lucie County, now Indian River County (Fellsmere Grade marker). Promoted as a Fellsmere to Tampa road, it carried traffic from 1919 into the 1940s toward Kenansville, the Holopaw sawmill and the Kissimmee cattle markets, but never reached Tampa; its river bridges burned in the late 1940s.

When the Legislature carved Indian River County out of St. Lucie County in May 1925, Vero Beach became the county seat and Fellsmere was the only other incorporated community (National Park Service, page 10). The 1920s land boom mostly passed Fellsmere by: population peaked at about 400 in 1924 and fell to 356 in 1930, and the Bank of Fellsmere closed about 1922 (National Park Service, page 11).

In 1923 the Fellsmere Company sold most of its holdings to the Standard Agricultural Chemical Company, renamed the Ammoniate Products Corporation in 1924 (National Park Service, page 11). That company built the Mission style Fellsmere Estates Corporation Building at 40 North Broadway about 1926. The railroad passed to the Trans-Florida Central, which hauled Fellsmere crops to the main line at Sebastian until 1953.

Sugarcane and citrus gave Fellsmere a mild recovery in the 1930s, and the Fellsmere Sugar Company, organized in 1931, opened the first factory in Florida to refine sugar from locally grown cane and sold it as Florida Crystals (National Park Service, page 12).

The company later reorganized as the Fellsmere Sugar Producers Association, which by 1939 cultivated 3,600 acres of cane and produced 118,000,000 pounds of sugar a year (National Park Service, page 12). Federal relief grants from the CWA and FERA helped the City of Fellsmere build a small airfield north of town in 1934, and PWA money helped finish the water system in 1938 (National Park Service, page 13).

Fellsmere's population nearly doubled during the decade, from 356 to 643, yet few commercial or residential buildings went up, and many small dwellings for cane workers were apparently built outside the city limits (National Park Service, page 13). No military base came to Fellsmere in World War II, and the count fell to 312 in 1945. In the late 1950s Okeelanta Sugar Refinery acquired the refinery west of town and expanded it.

Growth after the war was steady rather than sudden: Fellsmere had 732 residents in 1960, 1,161 in 1980 and 2,179 in 1990 (National Park Service, page 13). The U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimate puts the City of Fellsmere at 4,953 residents (U.S. Census Bureau, B01003).

Much of early Fellsmere still stands: a 1995 survey documented 98 historic buildings, about 80 percent of them houses, and most of the historic houses lie north of Pennsylvania Avenue (County Road 512) (National Park Service, page 15).

More than half of those Fellsmere buildings date from 1910 to 1919, and most are small one or one and a half story frame houses on large lots (National Park Service, page 15). Losses are real too: since 1924, fifty-five buildings have disappeared from the community, and the railroad's abandonment in the early 1950s probably took the freight and passenger depots (National Park Service, page 13).

Several landmarks carry the Fellsmere story under the Fellsmere multiple property listing. The NPGallery record for the Marian Fell Library at 63 North Cypress Street shows a published date of October 8, 1996 (NRIS 96001059), and the record for the Fellsmere Public School at 22 South Orange Street shows November 22, 1996 (NRIS 96001368). The First Methodist Episcopal Church at 31 North Broadway, a red brick church nominated under the same group, was completed in 1924 (church nomination, page 3).

The City of Fellsmere counts the library and the school among its firsts: the first library, first public school, railroad depot and hotel in Indian River County were all built in Fellsmere, and the city has been proclaimed the Frog Leg Capital of the World (City of Fellsmere). The City of Fellsmere's own address today is 22 S. Orange Street, the old school address.