Melbourne Beach Pier — Melbourne, Florida

The Melbourne Beach Pier is a wooden pier reaching into the Indian River Lagoon from the west end of Ocean Avenue in the Town of Melbourne Beach. It is not in the City of Melbourne. Melbourne Beach is its own incorporated town on the barrier island across the lagoon from the mainland city, with its own Town Hall on Ocean Avenue and its own preservation boards. The Town of Melbourne Beach calls itself Brevard County's oldest beach community, established in 1883, and the pier dates from the first winter of building on the site.

The Indian River Lagoon National Scenic Byway lists the pier at 998 Riverside Drive and states that it was built between 1888 and 1889 by the Indian River and Atlantic Railway Company. Built of wood planks and pilings in a late nineteenth century method, it is, according to the byway, the oldest known example of such piers on the Indian River. For about three decades the pier was the front door of Melbourne Beach, the place where the ferry from the Melbourne side tied up and where a small railroad started its run east to the Atlantic.

The pier was part of a land venture. The town's published history says that in 1883 Major Cyrus Graves, described as a Yankee veteran, began buying the government land that makes up present-day Melbourne Beach for $1.25 an acre. He and other investors formed a stock company and planned a resort meant to equal or surpass Palm Beach and Daytona Beach, while growing pineapples on their beach property in the meantime.

The resort plan shaped the island in a single winter. During the winter of 1888-1889, the history records, present-day Ocean Avenue was grubbed and cleared, with the palmetto brush burned in place, and a pier identical to the present one was constructed at the river end of the new street. A railroad soon ran the length of Ocean Avenue and out onto the pier. The investors drilled a 12-inch artesian well at the river and built a bathhouse on the ocean side, so a visitor stepping off the boat at the pier could ride straight across the island to the surf. The town history adds that Melbourne Beach was then the only access to the ocean for many miles in either direction, since the rest of the island was uncut scrub. The first house in Melbourne Beach, Myrtle Cottage, went up the same winter at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Pine Street.

The pier and the rail line worked as one system. The byway states that after the pier was built, a railroad was laid from the ferry landing on the dock across the barrier island 7/10 of a mile to the ocean beach, worked first by a pushcart and later by a motorized car. The Melbourne Beach town history calls it the Melbourne and Atlantic Railroad, running one modest pushcar straight east and west up Ocean Avenue. In 1909 the newly incorporated Melbourne Beach Improvement Company bought an eight-passenger, gasoline-powered Buda motor tram with a trailer.

The water half of the trip came from the mainland. A ferry service run by the Beaujean family operated between 1889 and 1923, according to the byway, and the town history adds that the Beaujeans were the earliest family to settle and that the ferry docked on the finger of the pier, where passengers and supplies were loaded onto the tram. Excursion boats from the mainland towns, including Melbourne, also brought winter tourists to the pier. The community's first post office was located at the east end of the pier, providing daily mail service in 1894.

A bridge ended the pier's working life. The byway states that the building of the toll bridge between Melbourne and Indialantic in 1921 ended the pier's importance for island access, and that the pier is used today for recreation. The Downtown Melbourne history describes the same change from the mainland side, crediting the 1920s Land Boom with the Ernest Kouwen-Hoven Causeway that connected Downtown Melbourne to the beachfront barrier island. The byway gives 1923 as the last year of the Beaujean ferry, two years after the toll bridge opened.

Melbourne Beach itself incorporated in 1923, for the purpose of floating bonds for street paving, so that the town opened to the automobile age. Before then, the town history says, no streets of any kind had been built on the island. The land boom collapsed later in the decade, and in 1933 only $609 was collected in taxes in Melbourne Beach. During the 1930s, the town history says, the community stayed quiet for about 20 years, and in early 1942 it still had fewer than 100 residents.

The land at the foot of the pier is Ryckman Park. The History Center Board page explains that the Old Town Hall building was built in 1908 by the Melbourne Beach Improvement Company, whose officers were Capt. Rufus Beaujean, his son Don Beaujean and Lawrence Ryckman, and that it originally stood by the pier in the area now called Ryckman Park. In the mid-1950s, when a new Town Hall was built, the old building was floated down the river; it was moved again in 1976, and after a six-year community effort it reopened in May 2007 as the Old Town Hall History Center on Oak Street near A1A. Its exhibits have covered the railroad and tram that once ran from the pier.

Preservation is handled by a town board that meets beside the pier. The Ryckman House Historical Preservation and Awareness Board coordinates the Town of Melbourne Beach's Historical Preservation Program and meets on the second Tuesday of each month at 4 p.m. in the Ryckman House, 509 Ocean Avenue. Ryckman Park is also the town's gathering place: in October 2026 the town calendar lists free Sunset Yoga on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Tai Chi on Friday mornings there.

A few early buildings still frame the river end of Ocean Avenue. The town history notes that the Villa Marine, a hotel built in 1912, still stands at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Riverside Drive, a short walk from the pier, and that the Community Chapel was built in 1892 just west of the site of Myrtle Cottage.