Florida Agricultural College at Eau Gallie — Melbourne, Florida

The first campus chosen for the Florida Agricultural College stood on the Indian River at Eau Gallie, the settlement that is now north Melbourne. According to the Eau Gallie Arts District history, in 1872 W. H. Gleason offered the Florida Legislature 2,320 acres in the Eau Gallie area for a state agricultural college, and the offer was accepted. Gleason had bought roughly 16,000 acres there and named the place,, and the college offer tied that land to a state institution.

The institution was a product of federal land grant law. Historians H. Morris Williams and Kevin M. McCarthy write in Lake City, Florida: A Sesquicentennial Tribute (2009) that officials incorporated the college in 1872 under the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, and that its trustees considered Gainesville and Eau Gallie before Lake City. Edward F. Keuchel, in A History of Columbia County, Florida (1996), gives the state charter as 1870 and says the school was to be funded in part by a 90,000 acre grant of federal land. Both dates appear in published histories; neither changes the fact that Eau Gallie was the first site chosen.

Gleason had political reach that few Brevard County landowners could match. The state historical marker at the Gleason House on Pineapple Avenue records that he was Florida's first elected Lieutenant Governor, under Governor Harrison Reed, in 1868. Florida Tech historian Gordon Patterson writes in a 2020 Florida Tech News history that Gleason convinced the Florida Legislature to launch a state-funded land grant university in Eau Gallie, a remarkable prize for a riverbank village that in those same years briefly served as the Brevard County seat, from 1874 to 1878.

Work did begin. The Genealogical Society of South Brevard history by Weona Cleveland and the EGAD history both describe a building made of coquina rocks, quarried from the nearby river, rising on the west bank of the Indian River along what is now Pineapple Avenue. Coquina, a soft rock of cemented shells, lines the Eau Gallie shore and gave the town its name, which the district history translates from the French as rocky water.

Patterson describes the result as a multi-story building for Florida Agricultural College that was completed but never used for teaching. Keuchel adds the financial snag behind the delay. There were legal questions concerning the Florida State bonds which had been purchased with the money from the sale of the federal land grant, he writes, and once that issue was resolved, construction started in Eau Gallie in 1876. The two accounts differ on the year work started (1872 in the Eau Gallie histories, 1876 in Keuchel), which may reflect a stop and restart rather than a contradiction.

Within a few years the Eau Gallie building had a new life. The EGAD history states that the one college building in Eau Gallie was sold to Gleason, who turned it into the Granada Hotel. A photograph on the district site is captioned Ruins of Granada After 1902 Fire, while the Florida Tech article captions a similar image as the ruins of the college building after a fire in the late 19th century. No source consulted describes any surviving ruins on Pineapple Avenue today.

Politics, not construction, ended the Eau Gallie plan. Williams and McCarthy state plainly that the trustees at first chose Eau Gallie for the new college, but that a change in political administrations in Florida negated that decision. The EGAD history dates the turn to 1877, when a change in politics in Tallahassee led the college site to be changed to Lake City. Patterson ties it to the end of Reconstruction, which brought the Democrats back into power, and notes that no classes were ever held at the Eau Gallie site.

The timing fits Gleason's own career. He was a Reconstruction Republican who helped frame the 1868 state constitution, according to the Florida Department of State marker, so the return of a Democratic administration removed the political support behind a college on his Brevard County land. Keuchel's account in his Columbia County history records that political problems continued after the bond question was settled and that the school was never opened at Eau Gallie.

Rival offers and transport also differed, although the sources do not name them as reasons for the decision. In the 1870s Eau Gallie had no railroad; the EGAD history notes that steamers were the main means of passenger and cargo transport to Indian River towns until the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Indian River line reached Eau Gallie in 1893. Lake City and Gainesville, by contrast, offered cash. Keuchel reports that Alachua County offered $50,000 and the Florida Railroad offered 10,000 acres if Gainesville was selected, and Williams and McCarthy say Lake City officials offered $15,000 in cash and one hundred acres.

The college moved north and inland. Keuchel writes that in 1882 the trustees of the college offered to relocate the institution, that a group of Columbia County citizens headed by Joseph Baya offered 112 acres, and that the county provided an immediate $1,000. In February 1883, Lake City was selected as the site and the first class was admitted for the fall term of 1884, about seven years after the Eau Gallie plan collapsed. The Lake City campus stood where the Veterans Administration Hospital is today.

The school that opened at Lake City was broader than its name suggested. Keuchel records a classical and military curriculum alongside agriculture, a $15,000 subsidy from the Morrill Land Grant College Fund for five professors, and enrollment open only to white males, as was common for state colleges of the period. None of that took shape in Eau Gallie, which never enrolled a student.

The final move came in the next century. Patterson writes that in 1905 the college was relocated to Gainesville, where it became the College of Engineering at the University of Florida, and the Genealogical Society of South Brevard history calls the Lake City school the forerunner of what is now the University of Florida. The state university that grew from the Morrill grant therefore traces one thread of its history to a coquina building on the Eau Gallie waterfront in Melbourne.

Gleason stayed. The state marker records that he moved his family to Eau Gallie in 1882, practiced law, joined a sawmill partnership, directed the State Bank of Eau Gallie and, in 1887, persuaded Henry Flagler to extend his railroad to the town by offering right-of-way. His house on Pineapple Avenue, built around 1884, stands a short distance from the former college site and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

Melbourne's own university keeps the story alive. Patterson, writing for Florida Tech in 2020, notes that the Little Red Schoolhouse in the university's botanical garden rests on a coquina rock foundation given by Lansing Gleason, the lieutenant governor's grandson, and he presents the failed Eau Gallie college as an early chapter of scientific and engineering education in Florida. The Eau Gallie Arts District carries the college in its published walking history of Pineapple Avenue, alongside the 1870s stores of A. G. Hill and H. R. Olmstead.

Several questions remain open in the sources consulted: the exact construction start in Eau Gallie (1872 or 1876), the date of the fire that ruined the Granada Hotel, and the precise lot on Pineapple Avenue. The published record agrees on the main sequence: an 1870s charter, a 2,320 acre offer from Gleason, a coquina building in Eau Gallie, a political reversal around 1877, and the 1884 opening at Lake City.