Crane Creek Freedmen Founders of Melbourne — Melbourne, Florida

The first permanent residents of the place that became Melbourne were three formerly enslaved men: Peter Wright, Balaam Allen and Wright Brothers. Weona Cleveland's history for the Genealogical Society of South Brevard states that the earliest permanent settlers of Melbourne were these three Black men and that they came to the Crane Creek area about 1870 to 1872. The first white families, the Clohecys and the Bradleys, followed in 1874 and 1875, the Goodes in 1877 and C. J. Hector in 1878.

Dates for the freedmen's arrival vary by source. The African American Chronology in Brevard County compiled at Florida Tech places the settlement sometime between 1867 and 1874, while a WFIT report from May 2018 gives 1868 to 1874. All of these accounts agree that the three men were on Crane Creek before the white families who named the post office Melbourne in 1880.

The three arrived as homesteaders. Space Coast Living reports that shortly after the Homestead Act of 1866, Peter Wright, Wright Brothers and Balaam Allen left slavery to seek a better life on the Florida frontier. Peter Wright and his brother Dick had left Georgia; Wright Brothers came south from West Virginia looking for work and found it on a pineapple farm on the beachside of Melbourne. Less is known about Balaam Allen, beyond the fact that he too acquired land through the Homestead Act.

Melbourne Founders, the history site of the Greater Allen Development Corporation, notes a basic limit on what can be known: the three men left no written records, and whether they reached Crane Creek separately or together is not known. Most of what is documented about the Crane Creek founders comes from the 1880 census and from histories compiled later in Brevard County.

Their land straddled the creek that became the spine of early Melbourne. Melbourne Founders states that each man received property on the north and south sides of Crane Creek. Space Coast Living is more specific: Peter Wright's land was on the north side of the creek, and the homesteads of Allen and Brothers ran along the southern shoreline. The Florida Tech chronology records that in 1880 Wright Brothers and Mary Silas Brothers settled on 7 1/2 acres on the south side of Crane Creek.

Two of the three Crane Creek homesteads lay on the south bank. Space Coast Living reports that Brothers turned his seven and a half acres along Crane Creek into a successful citrus grove. The chronology adds that later research describes both Allen and Brothers as citrus tree farmers, and that Brothers went on to open and operate a grocery store on Lipscomb Street. In 1912, it notes, the Union Cypress Sawmill opened at Hopkins, on the south side of Crane Creek, employing 300 men.

The 1880 federal census is the first document to record the founders by name. The Florida Tech chronology states that the census identified five Black men as heads of family in Melbourne, listing Peter Wright and Cassel Patterson as mail carriers and Joseph Curley as a sailor, with no occupation recorded for Balaam Allen or Wright Brothers. Melbourne Founders confirms that three of those five heads of families were Wright, Allen and Brothers. The same chronology counts 84 African Americans in all of Brevard County in 1880.

Those numbers grew quickly once the Crane Creek families had established themselves. The Florida Tech chronology cites an 1870 census count of just 19 African Americans in Brevard County, out of a total population of 1,197, during the years the freedmen were arriving. By the 1900 census, it reports, the African American population of Melbourne alone was 281, with 277 more in neighboring Eau Gallie.

Peter Wright's mail route linked the Crane Creek settlement to the rest of the coast. Space Coast Living reports that Captain Peter Wright carried the mail in his catboat Nellie on a twice-weekly route, collecting it at Titusville from his brother, who brought it down from New Smyrna, and sailing it south to Malabar. He announced each arrival by blowing a large conch shell. Florida Today, quoted by Space Coast Living, covered the 1991 dedication of a bronze marker honoring Wright's service.

When steamboats and the railroad made sailboat mail obsolete, Space Coast Living reports, Wright sold his Melbourne property, which helped open the southern part of Melbourne to development, and moved north to Cocoa, where he owned an orange grove.

The families' children were among Melbourne's first students. The Florida Tech chronology lists Susie Allen, Willie Brothers, Balaam Allen and LaFayette Allen among the first pupils at Melbourne's 1883 school, which both Black and white students attended for a short time. Space Coast Living reports that William Brothers, son of Wright Brothers, was the first Black child born in Melbourne, and that in the one-room schoolhouse later moved to the Florida Tech campus, white children had lessons in the morning and Black children in the afternoon.

The three founders died decades apart. WFIT, citing the Florida Star, reports that Balaam Allen died in 1893, Wright Brothers in 1910 and Peter Wright in 1925. Allen and Brothers, with their wives Salina and Mary, were also founders of Allen Chapel A.M.E., Melbourne's first congregation, organized on the south bank of Crane Creek in the 1880s.

Place names in south Melbourne carry the founders' history. A 2011 Florida Today report reprinted by History News Network identifies the first three settlers of Melbourne, then called Crane Creek, as former slaves Wright Brothers, Balaam Allen and Captain Peter Wright, and notes that Brothers Park, at Church and Race streets in south Melbourne, is named for the Brothers family. The Florida Tech chronology records that Melbourne Vocational School, the town's school for Black students, was founded in 1930 on the site of what is today Brothers Park.

The Brothers family home now houses the Melbourne Founders Museum at Crane Creek on Brothers Avenue, according to Melbourne Founders and Space Coast Living. Its exhibits trace the settlement from the homesteads of the 1870s through the Hopkins sawmill era of the early twentieth century.