Melbourne Founders Museum at Crane Creek — Melbourne, Florida

The Melbourne Founders Museum at Crane Creek is a one-cottage museum in south Melbourne devoted to the Black families who settled the creek after the Civil War. It is run by the Greater Allen Development Corporation, a 501(c)(3) public charity linked to Greater Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church, which introduced the museum in partnership with Northrop Grumman. The site is the corner of Lipscomb Street and Brothers Avenue, a few blocks south of Crane Creek and across the street from Greater Allen Chapel.

What makes the museum unusual is the building itself. The cottage is the house where Melbourne's first congregation was organized, and the organization that saved it now uses its rooms to tell the story of the freedmen Peter Wright, Wright Brothers and Balaam Allen and the community that grew around them. The corporation's site states that 2025 marked the 158th year since the founding of Crane Creek by former slaves, the settlement later renamed Melbourne. A March 2025 Space Coast Living feature described the museum as recently unveiled.

The cottage is where Allen Chapel began. The Melbourne Founders history page records that in 1884, in a tiny house on the southern banks of Crane Creek, Wright and Mary Brothers, Robert and Carrie Lipscomb, and Balaam and Salina Allen met to organize a place of worship for the Black community. A year later the first Allen Chapel A.M.E. building went up at the northern end of what is now Lipscomb Street, and that 1885 building is described as Melbourne's first house of worship.

Space Coast Living identifies the house as the original family home of Wright Brothers, one of the three founders, and quotes the development corporation's president saying the church was founded in its living room. The structure covers about 900 square feet. For more than a century it stayed on its Lipscomb Street lot south of Crane Creek while the congregation moved into a new building in 1964, still on Lipscomb Street, under the name Greater Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church.

The move was a response to development. According to Space Coast Living, apartments were planned on the south side of Crane Creek, and the Greater Allen Development Corporation was offered the house if it could get it moved. Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor with a large Melbourne campus, provided the $35,000 needed to transport the 900-square-foot structure two blocks through woods to Brothers Avenue. The move took place during the pandemic.

The community partnership page explains how the money was arranged: the corporation partnered with Global Corporate Citizenship and AATG-Melbourne to obtain a charitable donation from Northrop Grumman to move the historic cottage and keep it from being destroyed by land developers. The same page describes the cottage, at the corner of Lipscomb Street and Brothers Avenue, as being converted to a historical museum and welcome center. Space Coast Living reported in March 2025 that the restoration was complete and the rooms had been fitted with period furniture to frame exhibits on Melbourne history.

The furnishings are local. Space Coast Living reports that most antique pieces in the Founders Museum were donated by the community, including the North Brevard Heritage Foundation, and names a four-poster bed, one of the original church pews from Allen Chapel and a vintage kitchen stove. The exhibits use the founders' own lives as a starting point. Peter Wright carried mail by catboat, and the magazine notes that settlers along the Indian River Lagoon knew Peter Wright's arrival, which he announced by blowing on a large conch shell.

The museum then follows Melbourne into the 20th century. One exhibit covers Hopkins, the company town that grew around the Union Cypress sawmill in what is now the southern part of Melbourne; at its peak, according to Space Coast Living, Hopkins had its own hospital, post office and company store. The Florida Tech chronology dates the Union Cypress Sawmill to 1912 on the south side of Crane Creek, with 300 men employed.

School history is the other thread. Space Coast Living describes the Little Red Schoolhouse, where white children attended in the morning and Black children such as William Brothers in the afternoon, and a one-room school for Black pupils built in 1909. The Florida Tech chronology places that 1909 school at the corner of Lipscomb and Line streets and records that the Melbourne Vocational School was founded in 1930 on the site of what is today Brothers Park, a few blocks from the museum.

Opening is limited because the museum is run by volunteers. The March 2025 Space Coast Living listing gives hours of 10 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. on the second Saturday of the month, with admission free for children 12 and under and a suggested donation of $10 for adults; special tours could be arranged by phone. Those details were current as of that article and the Melbourne Founders site does not post a separate schedule, so the second-Saturday pattern is the most recent published one.

A documentary accompanies the museum. Melbourne Founders describes the film, titled Moving History in the Space Coast Living report, as following the restoration of the cottage and the traditions behind the first Black church in Crane Creek through accounts of life-long Melbourne residents. The corporation offers a link to the film for donations, with proceeds supporting the museum.

The same corporation hosts the Annual Melbourne Founders Festival near the banks of Crane Creek during Memorial Day weekend. In its May 2018 festival announcement, WFIT listed the location as along the banks of Crane Creek at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Lipscomb Street, with a Saturday festival and a Sunday Gospel Fest. The festival and the museum share a stated purpose: to raise awareness of African American history and its role in the development of Melbourne.

A separate memorial effort has been reported. FOX 35 Orlando reported on Feb. 4, 2022, that the Concerned Citizens Committee of South Brevard was working to put up a monument in Melbourne honoring Peter Wright, Balaam Allen and Wright Brothers. The station put the project cost at about $400,000, of which the group had raised $13,000 at the time. No later public report on the monument's status was found during research for this page, so the cottage museum on Brothers Avenue remains the documented physical site dedicated to the Crane Creek founders.