Pioneer Brothers
By Diane Barile
Peter and Dick Wright – Melbourne’s First Pioneers
A black man, born into slavery about 1847, became the first settler on Crane Creek in what became the village of Melbourne. Peter Wright and his brother Dick came to Florida from Quitman, Georgia with former slave holder, Confederate Captain William H. Sharpe.
For Sharpe and others from Quitman, it was a desperate time. When the defeated, returning home, the Southerners found most former slaves were gone, fields fallow and Confederate money worthless. The national government implemented the process of Reconstruction in 1867. Life seemed even worse when federal troops were put in charge of the community. To make matters worse, the entire cotton crop of 1868 was devastated by an invasion of caterpillars.
The uncertainty of the political and economic climate was untenable for the Confederates and unsettled for the freed slaves. They both wanted a new life. Sharpe and others looked to the open wilds of Florida. The Sharpe, Hardee, Mims, Williams, Scott and Creech families found their way to the Indian River Lagoon region from Quitman in 1868 along with a few free men to help with the move.
The 1948 History of Brooks County, Georgia pays tribute to the faithful Negroes who stayed with and assisted former master’s families. Peter and Dick Wright may well have aligned themselves with those Confederates for the move from Quitman to Indian River.
The Wrights became mail carriers by sail boats. Dick carried mail from New Smyrna to Titusville and Peter from Titusville to Melbourne and further south. Dick became the barber in Titusville.
Peter homesteaded the north shore of Crane Creek and the high bluff on the lagoon. He built a two story house with wife Leah. He had a successful grove, a cat boat, horse and buggy, a cow and chickens. Land sales brought new settlers to Melbourne. Peter sold first to C. J. Hector for a trading post at the mouth of the creek. Wright delivered the biweekly mail to the post office in Hector’s store.
As the settlement grew, Wright sold land on the bluff to the Yankee Camp brothers who divided the homestead into town lots. This sale brought Wright’s move to Rockledge near another of the Quitman pioneers. Gardner and Thomas Hardee developed the town of Rockledge. Wright maintained a livery stable west of the railroad tracks. Years later he moved to Cocoa where he is buried in the local cemetery.
Hardee Brothers – Founded Rockledge
It was a mass exodus from Quitman, Georgia in 1868 headed to the Indian River Lagoon. Losing “The War Between the States” weighed heavily on Confederates as they returned to homes never to be the same with the economy in shambles. There was an agreement by several families to leave Brooks County for better lives elsewhere. They travelled to Jacksonville, then by steamboat down the St. Johns River to Titusville, hence to the Indian River Lagoon. Each family homesteaded sixty acres spaced the length of the west back of the lagoon from north to south. You may recognize the communities that grew from these scattered settlements: Sharpes, Mims, Scottsmoor, and Hardeeville.
Three Hardee brothers came to Brevard. Gardner and Thomas settled Rockledge. Gardner became a state senator and hosted President Grover Cleveland in his home in 1888. Robert Hardee established the Sebastian Fish Company with A. M. Sample. They had twenty boats working from Sebastian to Ft. Pierce.
The Confederate families kept close ties with friends left behind in Quitman. But along the Indian River Lagoon their orange groves and pineapple plantations grew, setting new roots in Florida.