Vero Beach Trivia and Firsts — Vero Beach, Florida

Vero Beach collects odd distinctions for a city of 13.1 square miles. Its name is usually traced to a Latin word, it was the first community with a bridge across the Indian River to Orchid Island, and in 1935 it became the smallest U.S. city with direct air mail. Each item below is tied to a dated record: Florida's state historical markers, the City of Vero Beach, or the published histories of Dodgertown.

The best-known explanation comes from the city itself. The City of Vero Beach historic preservation page says the story of how Vero got its name is often attributed to Sarah Gifford, wife of settler Henry T. Gifford, who suggested the settlement be named for its Latin meaning, to speak the truth. The city's own wording presents it as a traditional attribution, which is why the Vero name story is usually told with a qualifier.

The name first appears on a post office. State Marker 375, placed in 1975 at 21st Street and 16th Avenue, says a post office named Vero was established at the home of Henry Gifford in 1891. The marker says Gifford settled there in 1888, while the city page dates his house to 1887, a small disagreement between two official sources. Marker 923 at City Hall adds a twist: the 1962 Vero Beach City Hall was built on part of the Gifford homestead where the name Vero was first used for a post office in 1891.

The Beach came later. The City of Vero Beach overview says the city was incorporated in 1919 as the City of Vero and re-incorporated in 1925 as the City of Vero Beach, moving from St. Lucie County into the new Indian River County as its seat. The railway station followed suit: Marker 995 says Beach was added to the city and station names in 1925.

Orchid Island access came early. The Bridges marker at Royal Palm Pointe says a parade of Model T automobiles crossed the first bridge over the Indian River on Labor Day 1920, which made Vero the first community with a bridge to Orchid Island. It was built of sabal palm pilings and rough-cut planking, and tolls ran from 5 cents for a pedestrian and 10 cents for a horse to 35 cents for a two-ton delivery truck.

Air mail came next. The official Walter O'Malley history of Dodgertown says Bud Holman and Postmaster J.J. Schumann won direct air mail service for Vero in 1935, making it the smallest U.S. city with that service, three years after Eastern Air Lines began using the Vero airport as a fueling stop in 1932.

Baseball and roads add two more. The Baseball and Dodgertown marker calls Dodgertown the South's first racially integrated spring training camp, opened in 1948 on former Naval Air Station land in Vero Beach. And Marker 845 says the 1927 tee-beam bridge carrying US-1 over the Florida East Coast Railway and Old Dixie Highway was the first US-1 bridge the Florida State Road Department built in Indian River County, 288 feet long and replaced in 2014.

Vero Beach City Hall was built for drivers. Marker 923 says the Mid-Century Modern building that the council commissioned in 1962 included climate control, walls of glass and a unique drive-up window for payment of utility and tax bills. The city's first town hall, completed in 1924 on Osceola Boulevard, was called the grandest building in Vero but had little interior space.

A park was held open for a train station for sixty years. Marker 995 says the Indian River County Historical Society acquired the old Vero Beach passenger station and moved it in 1984 to a city-owned parcel in Pocahontas Park, a parcel that had been deed restricted for the relocation of the station sixty years earlier. The station joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

McKee Jungle Gardens had a resident alligator. The McKee Jungle Gardens marker says the 1932 attraction founded by Waldo Sexton and Arthur G. McKee kept monkeys, an aviary and an alligator named Ole Mac, and that its Cathedral of Palms held more than 300 royal palms planted in precise rows. It drew 100,000 visitors a year at its height and closed in 1976; 18 acres survive as McKee Botanical Garden.

Some Vero streets carry American Indian names. The Osceola Park Historic District marker notes the 1915 to 1917 subdivision used American Indian street names such as Osceola, Tom Tiger and Tallahassee, while the neighboring Little Acre Farms offered one-acre lots big enough for a home, a garden and some livestock.

The Navy made the airport 25 times larger. Marker 717 says Naval Air Station Vero Beach was commissioned on November 24, 1942, that the formerly city-owned airport grew from 100 acres to 2,500, and that by September 2, 1945 the base had logged 237,102 hours of flight time since its first flight in December 1942.

Dodgertown kept growing long after the Dodgers settled in. The MLB 1990s timeline for the Jackie Robinson Training Complex records that Dodgertown bought 8.5 acres from Piper Aircraft in 1991 and that the 1992 spring set the attendance record for Holman Stadium games, 85,332 fans. That August the University of Miami football team prepared for its season opener at Dodgertown after Hurricane Andrew, and on February 18, 1994 Chan Ho Park, the first South Korean-born major leaguer, opened spring workouts in Vero Beach. Marker 841 counts 6 World Championship and 14 National League pennant teams among those that trained there.

Vero Beach began as a planned town. The city's historic preservation page says the final plat of the original Town of Vero was adopted in 1913 and that the Indian River Farms Company launched a City Beautiful Campaign in 1915, while Marker 375 dates the founding of the Vero Woman's Club to the same year. Today the City of Vero Beach runs its own airport, marina, solid waste collection and water and sewer plants, according to its About Vero Beach page, which also places the city about 190 miles south of Jacksonville and 135 miles north of Miami.