Tillman and the Citrus Era — Palm Bay, Florida

Tillman was the citrus and wharf settlement at the mouth of Turkey Creek on the Indian River that became the Town of Palm Bay in 1925.

Its start date depends on which official record is read. The National Register nomination for St. Joseph's Catholic Church dates the place to 1870, when a Georgia firm bought grove land on the river (NRHP nomination, page 4). The City of Palm Bay timeline begins in 1887, when early homesteaders settle in a town called Tillman, located at the mouth of Turkey Creek (City of Palm Bay, History). Both records put the settlement on the same shore, where the creek widens into a small bay before it meets the Indian River (1982 Turkey Creek report).

Three Georgia partners formed a citrus firm in 1870 and shipped the fruit north by water from a packing house at Tillman's Wharf on Turkey Creek (NRHP nomination, page 4).

John Tillman, J.B. Creech and M.J. Culpepper formed the firm of Culpepper, Creech & Co.

The firm was formed to purchase a 75 acre tract of land along the Indian River to develop as citrus groves (NRHP nomination, page 4). All three men came from Quitman, Georgia, where they had already worked together in a general merchandising concern. John Tillman was the partner who later petitioned the United States Postal Service for a local post office (NRHP nomination, page 4).

Shipping set the shape of early Tillman. The company put up a packing house at Tillman's Wharf, the point the 1987 nomination identifies as Castaway Point. There the fruit was crated and loaded directly onto sailing craft and steamboats for the trip north. The packing house stood at the mouth of Turkey Creek (NRHP nomination, page 4).

The packing house outlived the grove business in one way: the nomination records that it later became the first school at Tillman. A packing house serving as the first Tillman schoolroom fits a place that, by the nomination's count, had only 40 residents in 1887 (NRHP nomination, page 4).

Tillman had only 40 residents when its post office was officially established on March 4, 1887, and it had no incorporation and no elected officials (NRHP nomination, page 4).

The post office made Tillman a name on the map. John Tillman petitioned the United States Postal Service for it, and from 1887 the area was known as the Town of Tillman, though it was not incorporated (NRHP nomination, page 4). The City of Palm Bay timeline uses the same year for its first entry (City of Palm Bay, History).

The grove venture ended before 1900. By the end of the century the Tillman partners had given up the citrus business and gone home to Georgia, the nomination says, without stating why (NRHP nomination, page 4). Statewide, Florida Memory records that temperatures plummeted in December 1894 and then again in February 1895, and that Florida, which had produced five million boxes of citrus before the freeze, did not reach that figure again for almost two decades (Florida Memory, State Archives of Florida). That exhibit includes a photograph of a Rockledge grove after the 1895 freeze, but no official source ties the Tillman partners' exit to a specific freeze.

A North Dakota company, the Florida Indian River Catholic Colony, bought the Tillman townsite and groves, won a state permit on July 21, 1911, and filled the Turkey Creek settlement with Midwestern farm families by 1914.

The company sold Tillman hard. It ran advertisements in Midwestern newspapers and magazines promising cheap land that would produce two crops a year, and real estate agents traveled through parts of the Midwest with German and Slavic populations handing out gifts of citrus (NRHP nomination, page 4). By 1912, families from Indiana, Wisconsin, Kansas and Oklahoma began arriving in the sleepy hamlet of Tillman on the Florida East Coast Railway.

The land did not match the promise. Colonists paid $30 to $40 an acre for Tillman tracts and found that the poorly drained, sandy soil did not respond well to vegetables or citrus. Settlers were plagued by mosquitoes, and unexpected freezes destroyed the crops they had hoped to ship to northern markets (NRHP nomination, page 4). The state marker at 1422 Miller Street says that by 1914 the company had settled nearly 100 Midwestern families, mostly of German and Slavic descent, in the Tillman area on the banks of the Indian River and Turkey Creek, and that they traveled by wagon or boat (Florida Historical Marker).

Church life gave the colony its center. The first mass in Tillman was said in 1913 in Joseph Slama's General Store, and the parish built its own church with lumber from the Union Sawmill just north of town after the colony company failed to build the one it had promised (NRHP nomination, page 6). That 1914 church still stands at 1422 Miller Street in Palm Bay (Florida Historical Marker).

Tillman became Palm Bay because its citizens, still unincorporated in 1924, asked the Legislature for a town charter under a new name, and the City of Palm Bay says the 200 residents felt Tillman no longer fit.

Drainage came first. The Melbourne-Tillman Water Control District was established in 1922 by the Florida Legislature to build a water management system against flooding, erosion and excessive drainage (Melbourne-Tillman Water Control District). A 1982 report on City of Palm Bay manatee work on Turkey Creek records that in 1924 the district's outlet canal was connected to the creek, and that by 1982 the canal system was the major input into Turkey Creek (1982 Turkey Creek report).

The charter followed. The nomination states that the town of Tillman had remained unincorporated, and in 1924 its citizens decided to request a charter as the Town of Palm Bay; the Legislature granted it in its 1925 regular session (NRHP nomination, page 6). The limits of the new town included all of the original town of Tillman, plus additional territory, and residents appointed a commission and mayor until an election could be held. On December 16, 1925, the Post Office announced the Tillman office had been renamed Palm Bay.

The city frames the change as the residents' choice: the 200 residents of Tillman decided the old name did not depict the town and petitioned to change it to Palm Bay (City of Palm Bay, History).

The old Tillman waterfront is Castaways Point Park at 2990 Bay Blvd NE, a City of Palm Bay park open 7am until sunset (City of Palm Bay, Castaways Point Park).

The park sits at the point the nomination calls Castaway Point, where Tillman's Wharf stood at the mouth of Turkey Creek (NRHP nomination, page 4).

Where fruit was once crated for steamboats, the Castaways Point Park listing now shows a fishing pier, boardwalk, overlooks, a kayak and canoe launch, a fish cleaning station, pavilions and restrooms; the city contact on the listing is 120 Malabar Road. The 1982 Turkey Creek report described Palm Bay and Castaway Point as two developments at the confluence of Turkey Creek with the Indian River, and listed its creek survey sites, among them the U.S. Highway 1 Turkey Creek overpass, the Florida East Coast Railroad trestle, the Port Malabar Boulevard overpass, two sites in the Turkey Creek Nature Sanctuary and the Babcock Street Bridge (1982 Turkey Creek report). The trestle is a crossing of the Florida East Coast line, the railway that brought the colonists to Tillman.

The Tillman name also survives in a public body. The Melbourne-Tillman Water Control District, run from 5990 Minton Road, is a dependent district of Brevard County covering about 100 square miles, with more than 2,300 acres of canal rights-of-way in 163 miles of canals across parts of Palm Bay, West Melbourne and unincorporated land (Melbourne-Tillman Water Control District). The 1987 nomination still described the St. Joseph's church site by the old town plat, as Lots 9 and 10, Block 15, Plat of Tillman (NRHP nomination, page 5).

The citrus link is written into state law as well. Florida Statutes 601.091 defines an Indian River production area, and only fruit grown inside it may carry the Indian River name; its boundary runs along the main channel of the St. Johns River and its lakes, then south to the south line of Brevard County and on toward Martin and Palm Beach counties (Florida Statutes 601.091).

Most of what is known about Tillman comes from a 1987 National Register nomination prepared by the Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation, which rests on Brevard County deed books, state incorporation records, Postal Service lists and a December 1925 Melbourne newspaper.

The nomination's footnotes name its Tillman evidence. The notes to the Tillman paragraphs cite Brevard County Deed Records, Book 1, Pages 186-188, and State of Florida Incorporation Records, Book 3, Page 374 (NRHP nomination, page 8). The note for the 1925 rename cites the Melbourne Times of 16 December 1925 and Postal Service records of Florida post offices (NRHP nomination, page 8), listed in the bibliography as the List of Post Offices in Florida, Tillman and Palm Bay (page 9). Several Tillman notes also cite Georgiana Kjerulff's Tales of Old Brevard, published by the Florida Institute of Technology in 1972 (page 9).

The Palm Bay city timeline and the Miller Street marker are shorter and later. The city timeline uses 1887 and 1925 and gives the 200 resident figure, which the nomination does not (City of Palm Bay, History); the 2018 marker describes the colonists as mostly of German and Slavic descent (Florida Historical Marker). Because the nomination was written to list a church, it covers Tillman only as background, so dates such as the exact year the grove partners left are not recorded in any official source found for this page.