Fellsmere History Guide: The Farm Colony, the 1915 Vote and the Sugar Years

Fellsmere began in 1910 as a drainage and land sale colony, when the Fellsmere Farm Company platted 118,000 acres west of the Sebastian River, then part of St. Lucie County (NPS study, page 4).

The company was capitalized at $2,000,000, with Oscar Crosby as president and Nelson Fell as vice president, and its board of Northeastern bankers, lawyers and engineers bet on canals turning wet prairie into farms (NPS, page 4). Nelson Fell had tried the idea once before: he grew cane and ran drainage at Narcoossee in Osceola County and served on that county commission from 1890 to 1896 (NPS, page 3).

Work moved fast on the Fellsmere tract. Ten Black laborers arrived in 1910 to build the railroad and cook for the survey crew, the Fellsmere Farmer newspaper and a post office started in 1911, dredges had drained 8,000 acres within two years, and the main canal control gate was finished in June 1913 (NPS, page 6). The nine-mile Fellsmere Farms Railroad reached the Florida East Coast Railway at Sebastian in April 1912 with one locomotive, one passenger car and four freight cars.

The town itself was a small corner of the farm lands. The July 1911 plan measured nearly one square mile, ten blocks on a side, with avenues named for states and streets named for trees (NPS, page 7). By 1913 Fellsmere counted 503 residents, second only to Fort Pierce in St. Lucie County, and Broadway was paved as a divided boulevard (NPS, page 8). The Fellsmere history guide follows the colony year by year.

Fellsmere was incorporated in May 1915 under a special act of the Legislature that let women vote in city elections, the first Florida municipality to do so (NPS, page 9).

The state marker on Broadway tells the sequence. Residents approved the articles of incorporation unanimously at a February 1915 meeting in the Dixie Theater, and the equal suffrage clause in the local bill passed the Legislature without notice; Governor Park Trammell signed the act creating the town (Florida Department of State marker). In the city election of June 19, 1915, Zena M. Dreier cast the first ballot by a woman in Fellsmere and in Florida.

The first Fellsmere council was C. W. Talmadge, G. F. Green and Wallace Sherwood (NPS, page 9). Women in the rest of Florida waited for the federal amendment, which the marker dates to 1919, so Fellsmere women voted in city races for about four years before the national change. The marker, erected in 2004, stands on Broadway at block 99, lots 12 to 14, a short walk from the old commercial blocks.

Floods ended it: heavy rain in 1915 overwhelmed the unfinished Fellsmere canals, and the Fellsmere Farms Company went bankrupt in 1916 (NPS, page 9).

The study counts only fifteen rail cars of produce shipped from Fellsmere in 1915, and the Dutch colony of Broadmoor to the west was ruined by the same water. The electric company went into receivership and the Fellsmere Farmer became the weekly Fellsmere Tribune (NPS, page 9). In 1918 a new Fellsmere Company bought the mortgage, land and railroad for $330,000, and by 1920 the town had shrunk to 333 people from 503 in 1913 (NPS, page 10).

The 1920s Florida boom mostly passed Fellsmere by. Population peaked near 400 in 1924 and slipped to 356 by 1930, the Bank of Fellsmere closed about 1922, and about 1926 the Ammoniate Products Corporation completed the Fellsmere Estates Corporation Building, a large Mission style building at 40 North Broadway that apparently served as its sales office (NPS, page 11).

Fellsmere became part of Indian River County when the Legislature carved the county out of St. Lucie County in May 1925, and it was then the only incorporated town in the county besides Vero Beach (NPS, page 10).

The Fellsmere Grade was the town's road west. St. Lucie County built it as the first public road across the St. Johns River marsh, promoted as a Fellsmere to Tampa cross state route; from 1919 into the 1940s it carried traffic to Kenansville, the Holopaw sawmill and the Kissimmee cattle markets, though it never reached Tampa (Fellsmere Grade marker). The bridges burned in the late 1940s, and the road now ends in the marsh.

The Fellsmere Grade still has standing: Indian River County lists it, from SR 507 west to Lateral M, among its five designated scenic and historic roads (Indian River County Recreation Element, page 34). The 1997 marker sits on County Road 507 near the road to the Goodwin Wildlife Management Area. On the rail side, the Trans-Florida Central took over the Fellsmere line in 1924 and ran crops to Sebastian until the tracks were abandoned in 1953 (NPS, page 11).

Sugar did it: the Fellsmere Sugar Company, organized in 1931, built the first Florida factory to refine locally grown sugarcane and sold it under the Florida Crystals label (NPS, page 12).

By 1939 the reorganized Fellsmere Sugar Producers Association was growing cane on 3,600 acres (NPS, page 12). The Florida Department of State calls Frank William Heiser, whose Fellsmere house was his home from 1915 to 1943, a major figure in the development of the town's sugar cane and fertilizer industries, and calls his Fellsmere Sugar Company the origin of the Florida Crystals brand (Florida Department of State).

Federal relief money reached Fellsmere in small pieces: CWA and FERA grants for an airfield north of town in 1934 and PWA money to finish the water system in 1938. Population nearly doubled from 356 to 643 in the 1930s, fell to 312 by 1945, and climbed again to 2,179 in 1990 (NPS, page 13).

The Fellsmere history guide carries the full timeline from the 1910 Fellsmere Farm Company to the postwar town, and three Fellsmere landmark guides cover the buildings that survive.

For the Fellsmere buildings themselves, the Marian Fell Library guide covers the library on Cypress Street that opened May 1, 1915 (Marian Fell Library marker), the Old Fellsmere School guide covers the masonry school on Orange Street completed in October 1916 (school nomination, page 9), and the Historic District and National Register Sites guide covers the district the National Park Service listed on September 17, 2021, bounded by North Myrtle Street, South Carolina Avenue, North Oak Street and Virginia Avenue (NPS weekly list, September 24, 2021).

One practical note for anyone walking the Fellsmere town plan with an old map: the 1996 study found that the diagonal streets may never have been built, Osceola and Tallahassee parks were probably little more than sand medians, and a school now sits on Washington Park, so the 1911 plat shows more parkland than the town ever had (NPS, page 7).