William Henry Gleason, Founder of Eau Gallie — Melbourne, Florida

William Henry Gleason, born around 1830 and died in 1902, was the Reconstruction politician and land promoter who created Eau Gallie, the river town that now forms north Melbourne. The Florida Department of State historical marker placed at his house in 2013 summarizes the career: arrival in Florida in 1866, purchase of a 16,000-acre Brevard County tract in 1870, the naming of Eau Gallie, a term as Florida's first elected Lieutenant Governor, and a final move to the Indian River town in 1882.

He came from the upper Midwest. The marker says Gleason traveled from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with his wife Sarah Griffin Gleason and two sons and first settled in Dade County, far to the south. The Genealogical Society of South Brevard history adds that the Gleason family had been founders of Eau Claire, a detail that explains the first half of the name he later gave to his Brevard County land.

His first Florida role was federal. Florida Tech historian Gordon Patterson writes that Gleason came to the state as an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Florida Tech African American chronology for Brevard County records that in 1866 he was commissioned by the federal government to survey Florida for Black resettlement as part of Reconstruction. That survey work took him along the Atlantic coast and the Indian River, the country he would soon buy in Eau Gallie.

Gleason rose quickly in the new state government. According to the marker on Pineapple Avenue in Melbourne, he was instrumental in framing the 1868 state constitution and was elected Lieutenant Governor that year under Governor Harrison Reed, the first person to hold the office by election in Florida. The marker describes him as interested in politics during Reconstruction, the period when Republicans governed the state after the Civil War.

That political position shaped Eau Gallie's early fortunes. Patterson writes that Gleason used his influence to rename the settlement, and in 1872 he offered the Florida Legislature 2,320 acres in the Eau Gallie area for a state agricultural college, according to the Eau Gallie Arts District. A coquina building was raised beside the Indian River, but the college moved to Lake City after a political change in Tallahassee in 1877. Patterson ties that reversal to the end of Reconstruction, when Democrats regained power, and the Eau Gallie building was later sold back to Gleason.

The purchase was large and cheap. The EGAD history says Gleason bought most of the area, 16,000 acres, at $1.25 an acre, and that his plat took in everything from the Indian River Lagoon west to Lake Washington, roughly thirty square miles. Part of that tract became the city of Eau Gallie and, after the 1969 consolidation, the northern part of Melbourne. The state marker dates the purchase to 1870.

Gleason did not start from an empty shore. Patterson writes that he settled in a small Indian River town then called Arlington, the name given by the Houston family who had arrived in 1859, and the Genealogical Society of South Brevard history says Gleason came to the area in the late 1860s and renamed the community. EGAD gives a founding year of 1860, which does not match the marker's 1870 purchase date; the marker is the more detailed source.

Three published explanations of the name Eau Gallie exist. The marker says Eau came from his hometown of Eau Claire and means water, and that Gallie derives from a Seminole word meaning rocky. The EGAD history translates the whole name from the French as rocky water, after the coquina rocks along the Indian River shore. The Genealogical Society history derives Gallie from the French galet, meaning gravel. All three accounts tie the name to the shell rock that still lines the Eau Gallie waterfront.

Gleason moved his family to Eau Gallie in 1882, convinced that the area was likely to develop, according to the marker. There he practiced law, was a partner in a sawmill business and served as director of the town's first bank, the State Bank of Eau Gallie. Those enterprises gave the riverfront settlement legal services, lumber and credit in the decade when Brevard County towns depended on steamboats for most trade.

Other parts of the young town grew up on land inside the Gleason plat. The EGAD history records that A. G. Hill and H. R. Olmstead opened stores in the 1870s, that Eau Gallie held the Brevard County seat for four years beginning in 1874, and that Capt. Aaron Bennett built a boat yard and basin between 1885 and 1889 that became the Eau Gallie Yacht Basin, the harbor behind the Harbor City nickname later shared with Melbourne. The sources do not credit those ventures to Gleason himself, but each depended on lots carved from his 16,000 acres.

His most consequential deal was the railroad. In 1887, the marker records, Gleason convinced Henry Flagler to extend his railroad to Eau Gallie by offering right-of-way through the area. The EGAD history notes that the line, then the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Indian River Railroad, reached Eau Gallie in 1893, and that it gradually drew traffic away from the Indian River steamers.

The house he built still stands. The William H. Gleason House on Pineapple Avenue was built around 1884 by Gleason and Sarah Griffin Gleason. The marker calls it an outstanding example of Queen Anne style architecture and records its listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. It sits on Pineapple Avenue in the Eau Gallie Arts District, within walking distance of the riverbank where the coquina college once stood.

The family remained part of Eau Gallie public life into the twentieth century. The Florida Historical Society exhibit Zora Neale Hurston in Brevard County identifies W. Lansing Gleason, William's grandson, as mayor of Eau Gallie and notes that his support allowed Hurston to return to her Eau Gallie cottage in 1951. The Florida Tech chronology records that Hurston wrote her first book in Eau Gallie in 1929 while living in a cottage rented from Lansing Gleason at the corner of Guava Avenue and Aurora Road.

Melbourne's university also carries the connection. In his 2020 Florida Tech history, Patterson writes that the Little Red Schoolhouse in the Florida Tech botanical garden rests on a coquina rock foundation given by Lansing Gleason, and he links that stone to William Gleason's 1870s campaign for a land grant college in Eau Gallie.

Gleason died in 1902, according to the marker, more than six decades before Eau Gallie voters joined Melbourne. His 16,000-acre plat, the bank, the railroad right-of-way and the Queen Anne house on Pineapple Avenue remain the documented outlines of his work. Sources consulted do not record his burial place or the extent of the sawmill business, so those details are not included here.