By Charles W. Skelly and Donna Sheriff (Mostly Fact)

GRANDPA HARDEE SAYS that when Cocoa was still a settlement called Indian River City, there was nowhere a man could get a drink to lift his spirits unless he went all the way to Titusville. The trip alone deserved a healthy drink, but then you had to come all the way back.

Rightly enough, some enterprising young man began to bring a supply of liquor back home with him and sell a drink or two in the store on Delannoy Avenue.

Now who it was that thought a place of this kind needed protection I don’t know. Or perhaps some wife was trying to discourage patrons from entering the building. In any case, somebody went out into the scrub and captured a wild cat and chained him in front of the door.

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Brian Sherman

HISTORIC COCOA VILLAGE, within easy driving distance of Florida’s bustling theme parks in Orlando and virtually within hearing distance of the thunderous rockets that soar skyward from the Kennedy Space Center, provides a relaxing link to the past amid the cacophony of the present.

Bordered by the Indian River, State Road 520 and Brevard Avenue, Cocoa’s restored downtown offers a wide variety of businesses, an active calendar of events and a glimpse of what life was like in coastal Florida long before families flocked to Disney World and scientists turned the fantasy of space travel to reality.

Cocoa, a town of almost 17,000 people on Florida’s central coast, was founded by fishermen in 1860. The first commercial building was constructed in the early 1880s in what was then called Indian River City. Apparently, U.S. Postal authorities deemed the name too long for a postmark. Several different stories are still in circulation concerning how the name Cocoa was chosen. The city survived a disastrous downtown fire in 1890 and a brutal freeze in the winter of 1894-95 that destroyed the area’s citrus crop and crippled the industry that had given the Florida coast a taste of prosperity.

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