Tillman: what Palm Bay was called before 1925
Palm Bay began in 1870 as a citrus venture at the mouth of Turkey Creek. Its post office, Tillman, was established on March 4, 1887. After 1911 a Catholic colony company brought about 100 Midwestern families, who built St. Joseph's Church in 1914. What the National Register nomination for the church records.
Before it was Palm Bay, the settlement at the mouth of Turkey Creek was Tillman. The fullest record of how it began is in the 1987 National Register nomination for St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, which ties the church to the founding of the town.
The citrus partners, 1870
According to the nomination, Palm Bay “had its beginnings in 1870,” when John Tillman, J. B. Creech and M. J. Culpepper, partners in a general store back in Quitman, Georgia, formed the firm of Culpepper, Creech and Company to buy a 75-acre tract on the Indian River for citrus groves. They built a packing house at Tillman’s Wharf, now Castaway Point, at the mouth of Turkey Creek, where the fruit was crated and loaded straight onto sailboats and steamboats bound north. The packing house later became the town’s first school.
The post office, 1887
The name came with the mail. Tillman petitioned for a post office, the nomination says, and it was established on March 4, 1887, after which the area was known as the Town of Tillman. The City of Palm Bay’s own timeline likewise dates the homestead settlement of Tillman to 1887. Tillman was small: about 40 residents, unincorporated, with no elected officials. By the end of the century Tillman and his partners had given up citrus and gone back to Georgia.
The Catholic colony, 1911-1914
The town’s second life came from North Dakota. The townsite and groves were bought by the Florida Indian River Catholic Colony, a North Dakota corporation that received a Florida permit to do business on July 21, 1911. It advertised in Midwestern newspapers and magazines, promising “cheap land that would produce two crops a year,” and sent agents through German and Slavic farming districts with gifts of citrus.
The families came by the Florida East Coast Railway, from Indiana, Wisconsin, Kansas and Oklahoma, beginning in 1912. By 1914 about 100 families had joined. They paid $30 to $40 an acre and found, the nomination says, that the poorly drained sandy soil did not take well to vegetables or citrus, and that mosquitoes and unexpected freezes ruined the crops they had hoped to ship north.
St. Joseph’s Church, 1914
The colony company had promised a church and never built one, so the settlers did. The first Mass in Tillman was said in 1913 in Joseph Slama’s general store by Father Gabriel Ruppert, who came from Fort Pierce, since Brevard County had no resident priest. Parishioners bought lumber from the Union Sawmill just north of town and supplied the labor, working from a design attributed to a Frank Minehardt. Bishop Michael J. Curley of St. Augustine dedicated St. Joseph’s in October 1914 and confirmed 78 children. Worshipers came by boat and wagon from Melbourne and Eau Gallie too.
The church, a one-story wood-frame building with board-and-batten siding, is unusual, the nomination notes, for using the Stick style rather than Gothic Revival. It was listed on the National Register on December 3, 1987. How Tillman became Palm Bay is on our 1925 page.
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