Rockledge, Florida: Florida's Oldest Incorporated City

Rockledge makes a quiet claim that almost no one along Interstate Ninety-Five stops to notice: it is the oldest incorporated city in Brevard County, chartered in eighteen eighty-seven. The town sits on the western bank of the Indian River Lagoon in Brevard County, where settlers discovered that the coquina limestone ridges along the shore produced extraordinarily fertile soil for citrus. The groves that went in during the eighteen eighties made Rockledge a prosperous little town.

Wealthy Northerners arrived by steamboat up the Indian River, and the area developed a winter resort economy years before Henry Flagler's railroad reached the coast. The devastating freezes of eighteen ninety-four and eighteen ninety-five killed the orange groves and broke the first economy. Rockledge rebuilt slowly, eventually becoming a suburban bedroom community for the Kennedy Space Center workers who arrived in the nineteen sixties.

The coquina ridges that gave the town its name are still there, visible in cut rock along the older streets.