Historic District and National Register Sites — Fellsmere, Florida

Fellsmere has five entries on the National Register of Historic Places: three buildings recorded in 1996, a house north of town added in 2017 and the Fellsmere Historic District listed in 2021.

The three 1996 dates are the publication dates on the NPGallery records for the Marian Fell Library, Fellsmere Public School and First Methodist Episcopal Church. The Heiser House date is the day the Florida Department of State announced the Fellsmere listing, and the district date comes from the National Park Service weekly list of September 24, 2021, which marks it LISTED, 9/17/2021. The Heiser House record carries no multiple listing; the other four sit under the Fellsmere MPS, filed as NRIS 64500104.

MPS stands for multiple property submission, a cover document that lets Fellsmere buildings be nominated one at a time against a shared history. A Division of Historical Resources page counts more than 1,700 Florida properties and districts on the National Register, so the five Fellsmere entries are a small, local share of the state list.

The Fellsmere Historic District is a National Register district bounded by North Myrtle Street, South Carolina Avenue, North Oak Street and Virginia Avenue, listed on September 17, 2021 under the Fellsmere multiple property listing.

The district first appeared on the National Park Service pending list for March 6, 2021 as a multiple nomination, code MP100006378, under the Fellsmere MPS. In September 2021 the weekly list printed the same number as RS100006378 with the status LISTED. In the legend of the pending list, MP marks a nomination under a multiple cover sheet and RS marks a resubmission, so the Fellsmere district went through a second submission before it was entered. The weekly list gives the boundary streets but not a count of contributing buildings.

Those boundary streets come straight from the 1911 town plan. The multiple property form records that the Fellsmere Farms Company organized the plan in July 1911, that avenues named for various states ran east to west and that north and south streets were named for trees. Myrtle and Oak are tree streets; Carolina and Virginia are state avenues. The same form says the plan measured nearly one square mile and ten blocks square, with railroad tracks along the north end of town.

A district was not the outcome in 1996. The survey summary in the 1996 form records that Fellsmere historic resources were judged too widely scattered for a historic district, while several buildings appeared to have enough integrity for individual listing. Three Fellsmere buildings were then recorded individually in 1996; the 2021 district added a grouped listing 25 years later.

The Historic and Architectural Resources of Fellsmere, Florida listing, prepared by Florida's Bureau of Historic Preservation in July 1996, sets three historic periods from 1910 to 1946 and three property types that every Fellsmere nomination under it must match.

The cover sheet names the three contexts: Founding and Initial Period of Development, 1910-1919; Florida Land Boom and Bust Development, 1920-1929; and a third context for 1930-1946 that covers the 1930s and World War II. The registration requirements name three property types, residential buildings (F.1), commercial buildings (F.2) and public buildings (F.3), and each one requires a building to lie within the city limits of Fellsmere and to date from one of those periods.

The evidence base is a 1995 survey of every building in Fellsmere built before 1946, regardless of condition. According to Section H, the team recorded 98 buildings in a format compatible with the Florida Master Site File, after research at Fellsmere City Hall, the Marian Fell Library, the Indian River County Courthouse and the St. Lucie County Courthouse. Section F reports that about 80 percent of those 98 buildings are residences, over half dating from 1910 to 1919, and that most historic homes lie north of Pennsylvania Avenue (County Road 512). Commercial buildings make up about 6 percent of the survey, and five public buildings, all built between 1915 and 1924, include churches, a school and a library.

The form also counts what is gone. Since 1924, fifty-five buildings have disappeared from Fellsmere, many of them storage buildings, packing houses and warehouses. One surviving Broadway landmark it describes is the Fellsmere Estates Corporation Building, a large Mission style building completed about 1926 at 40 North Broadway that apparently served as a sales office for the Ammoniate Products Corporation; it is not one of the five National Register records in the table above.

The First Methodist Episcopal Church at 39 North Broadway is listed under Criterion C for architecture as a brick church with Craftsman features, completed in 1924 at the south end of the Broadway business blocks.

The registration form describes a 2,300 square foot church with a modified Greek-cross plan under a cross-gable roof, textured red brick walls and a poured concrete foundation. A bell tower with a conical spire rises over the south entrance on the North Broadway front. A 2016 update to the record corrects the original text: the church is at 39 North Broadway Street rather than 31, on the northeast corner of North Broadway Street and Oregon Avenue rather than Orange Avenue, one block north of County Road 512. The original form places it at the south end of the small, two-block commercial section of Fellsmere. Inside, the sanctuary keeps six rows of original oaken pews under a beaded board ceiling with boxed beams.

The building took a decade. The history section says a Methodist congregation organized in Fellsmere in June 1914 and first worshipped in the Union Church sanctuary. Flooding, population losses and World War I stalled plans for its own building, and membership fell to fifteen parishioners about 1919. Construction used materials salvaged from older Fellsmere buildings, brick from the Fellsmere Land Company and a bell from the Community Methodist Church of Daytona Beach. The 2016 update says construction began in 1922 and the church was completed and dedicated in April 1924. The significance statement names the builder as local contractor C. E. Nourse and places the church in the land boom context of 1920-1929 under property type F.3, Public Buildings, and the NPGallery record lists Bungalow/Craftsman as its style.

The Frank and Stella Heiser House is listed under Criterion B for its link to Frank William Heiser, a central figure in Fellsmere's fertilizer and sugar industries, with a period of significance from 1925 to 1943.

The house sits on County Road 507 in the vicinity of Fellsmere, about 1.6 miles north of the old city limits at South Carolina Avenue, so it lies outside the area the 1996 multiple property listing covers. It is a one-story wood frame bungalow built circa 1925 by Shupe & Shafer Contractors in Fellsmere. The nomination calls it the only remaining historic building associated with Heiser and notes that vinyl siding left it short of the integrity needed under Criterion C for architecture. Its current function on the form is a single dwelling, and this page gives only the listing facts.

The chronology in the nomination explains the Fellsmere significance. In 1925 Heiser became president of the Fellsmere Drainage District, now the Fellsmere Water Control District, a post he held until 1946. He founded the Fellsmere Sugar Company, incorporated on Dec. 14, 1931, and the mill produced 2 million pounds of raw sugar in its first season, ending April 7, 1933, while employing 225 people. The Florida Department of State added in its December 21, 2017 announcement that the Fellsmere Sugar Company was the origin of the Florida Crystals brand.

A National Register listing in Fellsmere is recognition rather than regulation: federal law places no restrictions on what a non-federal owner does with a listed property unless a project receives federal funding or permits.

The National Park Service FAQ states that listing places no federal restrictions or requirements on a private property owner, who works within the framework of local laws or ordinances, and that there are no fees to remain listed. For tax credits, the same page points to Technical Preservation Services, a separate National Park Service program. Florida nominations, including the Fellsmere ones, reach the National Park Service through the Division of Historical Resources in Tallahassee.

Two of the listed Fellsmere buildings have their own Digital Towns pages, so they get one paragraph each here. The Marian Fell Library at 63 North Cypress Street opened on May 1, 1915, according to its 2010 state historical marker, and its NPGallery record lists social history, education and architecture as areas of significance.

Fellsmere Public School, the building covered on the Old Fellsmere School page, is filed at 22 S. Orange St. with 1916 as its significant year and Frederick H. Trimble and A.F. Sanders as architects in its NPGallery record. The City of Fellsmere website gives 22 S. Orange Street as the address of city government.