Merritt Island settlement history

State markers record the Ais town of Ulumay, remembered at today's Ulumay Wildlife Sanctuary on Sykes Creek Parkway, as early as 1605, and a marker on Sykes Creek Parkway recalls the last naval battle of the American Revolutionary War, fought off Cape Canaveral in 1783.

The Ulumay marker, at 805 Sykes Creek Parkway at the entrance of the Ulumay Wildlife Sanctuary, says Spanish Army Lt. Alvaro Mexia mapped Ulumay Lagoon in 1605 and described Ulumay as the first town of the province of Ais, with many camps behind it (Florida Division of Historical Resources markers, Brevard). According to the same marker, epidemics weakened the Ais within a few years of Jonathan Dickinson's 1696 journey, Ais village mounds were mined for shell roadbed through the 1950s, the state gave the area to Brevard County as a park in 1970, and the county Historical Commission dedicated the sanctuary as a landmark in 1993. The state list files this marker under Cocoa.

The Revolutionary War marker at 400 S. Sykes Creek Parkway on Merritt Island describes a March 10, 1783 fight in which the Continental ships Alliance and Duc De Lauzun, loaded with 72,000 Spanish silver dollars bound from Havana, Cuba to Philadelphia in support of the Continental Army, were chased by the British frigate HMS Sybil. Captain John Barry turned the 36-gun Alliance back under fire, and after less than an hour the damaged Sybil broke off; the two American ships sailed on at dawn on March 11.

Last verified: October 21, 2026, when the Brevard marker texts for Ulumay, the haulover, the groves, the homesteads, Georgiana and the Sawyer sites were read again alongside the county history summary, the county library history, the county MIRA page and the refuge home page.

The haulover was the narrow neck of north Merritt Island between Mosquito Lagoon and the Indian River where boats were dragged across, and Fort Ann was established beside it in 1837, during the Second Seminole War, as a supply depot.

The Brevard County Historical Commission places Fort Ann on the east shore of the Indian River near the boat haulover point on a narrow strip of Merritt Island, established late in 1837 as an important supply depot (Brevard County Historical Commission history summary). The Haulover Canal marker on SR 3 explains the site's value: Native Americans, explorers and settlers carried or hauled boats across that strip, Spaniards slid boats over mulberry bark as early as 1605, and later settlers dragged schooners on rollers and skids (Haulover Canal marker).

The same marker traces the canal itself. Contractor G.E. Hawes dug the first cut in 1852 using enslaved labor, a channel 3 ft. deep and 14 ft. wide; steamboats and cargo ships used it until the railroad arrived in 1885; by 1887 the Florida Coast Line Canal and Transportation Co. had dug the newer, deeper canal still in use a short distance away; and in 1927 the Intracoastal Waterway took over the Haulover Canal as a federal project maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The county summary notes that Brevard County itself was created by an 1854 act signed early in 1855.

Merritt Island's settled history begins with Douglas Dummett's orange plantation in the early 1800s and continues with homesteaders who arrived after the Civil War, including the Field family in 1868.

The Dummett Grove marker on Courtenay Parkway North says the Dummett family came from Barbados in 1807 and that Douglas Dummett, born in 1806, grew oranges on his Merritt Island plantation by top-grafting sweet orange buds onto sour orange trees several feet above ground, a method that produced frost-resistant trees and spread across Florida (Dummett Grove marker). He stayed on his land through the Second Seminole War and worked the groves until his death in 1873; the marker says the groves were damaged beyond recovery by the 1893 hurricane and the 1894-95 freeze.

On the south island, the Field Homestead marker at 750 Field Manor Drive records that brothers J.R. and Sam Field stayed on after their family's 1868 arrival and used the Homestead Act of 1862 to claim over 450 acres, with Sam helping to develop the community of Indianola. J.R. Field's two-story riverfront house was standing by 1880; he planted sugarcane and mangoes first, turned to citrus, and by 1900 ran his own packing house shipping Indian River citrus nationwide. The Field house joined the National Register in 1997, and the last descendant to live on the property left the homestead to the community with the intent that it serve as a museum.

Georgiana, on the Indian River side of south Merritt Island, built its Methodist church in 1886, briefly ran a cross-island railway in the 1890s, and opened a club house in 1910 that still stands as Provost Hall.

The Georgianna United Methodist Church marker at 3925 S. Tropical Trail says Georgiana men began building in the summer of 1886 with lumber brought from St. Augustine by sailboat, held Sunday school under the roof by the end of September, and held the first service on Thanksgiving in 1886 (Georgianna United Methodist Church marker). The markers spell the community Georgiana and the church Georgianna.

The Georgiana Railway marker, near the church on S. Tropical Trail, tells of a short-lived Merritt Island tourist line. Georgianna merchant Frank Cass Allen began in 1892 to lay a 0.6-mile standard-gauge track across the island between docks on the Indian and Banana rivers, so visitors from the Titusville railhead could reach the beaches in about an hour by boat, rail and boat instead of a 45-mile boat trip around the island's southern tip. The line opened in mid-December 1893, carried over 700 people to the beaches by April 1894, gave way to a wagon route at Lotus in mid-1894 after financial and maintenance trouble, and its locomotive and passenger car were auctioned on March 2, 1896.

Provost Hall, behind the building at 3890 Old Settlement Road, began in 1910 as the Georgiana Club house on land from Charles D. and Gertrude Breese Provost. Its marker lists Christmas Eve parties, Memorial Day services, World War I sewing by the Georgiana Red Cross Auxiliary Unit, a mid-winter ball on March 1, 1917, and use as the Georgiana voting precinct from the 1930s; the Provost grandchildren gave the hall to Georgianna United Methodist Church in 1992.

State markers on Merritt Island record a Black community built around North Tropical Trail churches, family schools and the work of Dennis Sawyer, a Bahamian-born farmer and boat captain who lived from 1874 to 1964.

The Dennis Sawyer marker at 1240 North Tropical Trail says Sawyer, the son of a freed slave, married in 1898 after moving to Cocoa, settled on Merritt Island, applied for U.S. citizenship in 1902, and organized and helped build Mt. Olive AME Church in 1908 (Dennis Sawyer marker). He owned Sawyer's Hall, a two-story building with lodge rooms, a small store and rented quarters, helped establish one of the first African American schools on the island, and in 1931 arranged a 2-room schoolhouse later known as Merritt Junior High. He also captained the tug Mystic, pulling fruit barges to Cocoa for loading onto Florida East Coast Railway cars.

A second Merritt Island marker, at 258 Bevis Road, covers Dennis Sawyer Memorial Park, set up in 1956 when three acres were deeded for an African American cemetery where Sawyer and his wife Rebecca are buried. Part of the land later became a Brevard County park, and the remaining cemetery property was deeded back to Greater Mount Olive AME Church in 2012. Older still is the Bethel A.M.E. Church site at 4725 North Tropical Trail, which its marker dates to 1892 and says stood for 76 years until a 1968 fire; its cemetery remains in use as the Bethel-Greater Mount Olive A.M.E. Church Community Cemetery.

North of the Haulover Canal, the Clifton Colored School marker credits Butler Campbell, Andrew Jackson and neighbor Wade Holmes with building a 12 by 16 foot heart pine schoolhouse on Merritt Island in 1890-91, where Campbell's son Willie was valedictorian in 1892 and Jackson's son Douglas in 1893.

The 1960s space program turned north Merritt Island into federal land and filled the rest of the island with new residents, county services and, by 1988, a redevelopment agency of its own.

The Brevard County Historical Commission says the coastal scrub of Cape Canaveral became home to the missile testing program after World War II and to human space flight by the 1960s (Brevard County history summary). Two north island markers record the cost to older settlements: the Dummett grove land passed to Kennedy Space Center in 1963, and the Clifton school families moved away once NASA purchased North Merritt Island land in the 1960s, with most of their houses moved or demolished (Dummett Grove and Clifton School markers). The federal refuge on the island also dates from 1963 (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge page); the separate refuge guides cover it.

County records show the population shift. Brevard library history says the aerospace boom of the sixties brought demand for libraries in fast-growing areas, that Merritt Island and Satellite Beach joined the county's libraries in that decade, and that the county went from five libraries to nine between 1960 and 1970 (Brevard County library 50-year history). The island's redevelopment agency also traces to 1988, the year of the county ordinance behind its board of directors (Brevard County MIRA page); the Merritt Island community guide covers the agency today.

Merritt Island's history is easiest to follow through its state historical markers, which run from Sykes Creek Parkway in the south to Courtenay Parkway and the Haulover Canal in the north.

Locations and years in the table are as printed on the state marker list for Brevard County. The list files the Ulumay marker, at the Ulumay Wildlife Sanctuary entrance on Sykes Creek Parkway, under Cocoa, and it files the Sams, St. Luke's, Bethel A.M.E. and Clifton markers of the north island under Merritt Island; the North Merritt Island guide describes those four. Several sites are churches, a cemetery and homesteads, and the Haulover Canal and Dummett Grove markers stand inside the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.