Florida Agricultural College at Eau Gallie in Melbourne, Florida

Eau Gallie, now a part of Melbourne, was named in 1872 as the future home of the Florida Agricultural College, a choice the National Register file for the Gleason House credits to the influence of landowner William Gleason.

Gleason had bought into that stretch of the Indian River only two years before. The nomination for his house, kept by the National Park Service, puts his purchase of a 16,000-acre tract in 1870 and says he gave the place its name. The file's own wording on the college is short: Eau Gallie was selected as the site for the establishment of the Florida Agricultural College in 1872.

Gleason's wider career, including his contested claim to the lieutenant governor's office, belongs to a separate Melbourne history page about him. For the college story the useful detail is timing. The nomination places him in the Florida House of Representatives for Dade County from 1871 to 1874, so he held a seat in the Legislature when the Eau Gallie site was chosen, and the state marker at his house adds that he helped write the 1868 state constitution.

The place the state picked was little more than a clearing. In the nomination's account, John C. Houston had settled in the Eau Gallie area in 1859 and became its first postmaster in 1871, and the Civil War had slowed anyone else from following him there.

Work on a campus did begin: the nomination records that several buildings went up for the school in Eau Gallie, but the college never opened its doors there.

Beyond that single line, the official records checked for this page are silent. Neither the Park Service file nor the state marker gives a count of the buildings, a lot, a builder or a building material, and neither says what happened to the structures once the school was placed elsewhere. More detailed local stories about the Eau Gallie college building are left out because no official source checked for this page confirms them.

The settlement around the empty campus did hold a civic role for a few years. According to the nomination, Brevard County's seat was at Eau Gallie from 1874 until 1879, when it moved to Titusville. The county was thinly settled then, the file notes, and Eau Gallie counted just 35 registered voters.

Real growth waited for the trains. When rail service arrived in the early 1890s, the nomination says, Eau Gallie could ship citrus and ice-packed fish to northern markets, and a bank, a hotel, a general store, a drug store and cottages for rent grew up near the railroad spur and along the river. The same file adds that the hard freezes of the mid-1890s hurt the citrus crop and slowed that growth.

The one reason on the official record is distance: the Gleason House nomination says state legislators found Eau Gallie too remote and hard to reach and placed the school at Lake City.

The college belongs to a list of Gleason plans for the area that did not come true. The nomination sets it beside a proposed inland waterway joining Lake Washington and Lake Poinsett with lakes farther inland, and beside large drainage schemes meant to free up more land for sale. None of those projects was carried out in his lifetime, the file says, and the campus he had won for Eau Gallie was never used.

Access did improve, though too late for the school. The Department of State marker credits Gleason with persuading Henry Flagler in 1887 to bring his railroad to Eau Gallie in exchange for a right of way, and the nomination dates working rail service to the early 1890s. By that point the University of Florida's own history already had the agricultural college at Lake City, with land-grant status from 1884.

The Florida Agricultural College took shape at Lake City instead, and the University of Florida counts it among its nineteenth century predecessors.

On its history page, the university says that in 1884 the Lake City school, the one Eau Gallie had been promised, gained status as Florida's first land-grant college, and that the Legislature later renamed it the University of Florida to broaden its focus. UF lists the college together with the East Florida Seminary as forerunners of the present university.

The merger that followed, more than three decades after the Eau Gallie site choice, is described on the same page. In 1905 the Legislature combined the state's existing public institutions into new schools segregated by race and sex, and Gainesville lobbied to host the largest of them, the University of the State of Florida. That new university ran in Lake City while its Gainesville campus was being built. In 1909, UF adds, its second president, Albert Murphree, reorganized it into its first group of colleges, and enrollment rose tenfold to more than 2,000.

So the school that Eau Gallie lost in the 1870s became, through Lake City, one of the roots of the state's flagship university, while the Indian River settlement waited about two decades more for its railroad.

In Melbourne the episode is recalled mostly through the Gleason House on Pineapple Avenue and through Florida Tech, which tells the story in its own campus history.

The house is the nearest physical link. The state marker gives its address as 1736 Pineapple Avenue, dates it to around 1884 and records its National Register listing in 1997. The marker puts Gleason's move to Eau Gallie in 1882, while the nomination says the winter of 1882 to 1883; the nomination adds that he laid out the Eau Gallie town plat in 1884, with most lots 66 feet by 132 feet.

Florida Tech in Melbourne keeps a smaller tie. In a 2020 article on the Little Red Schoolhouse, university historian Gordon Patterson writes that the coquina stone the schoolhouse sits on was donated by Gleason's grandson Lansing Gleason and Lansing's daughter, Jean Madry, and that the little building has stood at the entrance to the campus botanical garden since 1970.

Eau Gallie later grew into a town and then into part of Melbourne. The nomination counts close to 200 residents in 1900 and close to 1,000 in 1930, credits the 1950s space program at Cape Canaveral with spurring growth in both communities, and records the 1969 incorporation of Eau Gallie into Melbourne.

Old Eau Gallie is now looked after through Melbourne's own preservation program. The City of Melbourne's historic preservation page lists locally designated resources in the former town, among them the Eau Gallie Yacht Club at 1149 Houston Street, the Rossetter House at 1328 Houston Street and 1365 Highland Avenue, and an Eau Gallie Historic District covering addresses on Highland Avenue, Houston Street and Montreal Avenue. Exterior work on a designated property that needs a building permit first requires a Certificate of Appropriateness, which the city issues at no cost to the applicant.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Gleason House National Register file at the National Park Service, the Department of State marker on Pineapple Avenue, the University of Florida's history page and Florida Tech's account of the Little Red Schoolhouse, plus the City of Melbourne historic preservation page.