Cape Canaveral — EATING FLORIDA

If you’ve ever taken a good look at a map of Florida, my guess is the shape and location of Cape Canaveral have caught your eye. The shape is somewhat like a protruding skeletal knee. That interpretation may be re-enforced by its position smack dab in the middle of the State. The Cape is a complex of intertwining, ever shifting barrier islands, sand bars, and lagoons along Florida’s east coast. The two most important of those barrier islands are Merritt Island and Cape Canaveral, which were created by the constant and ever-repeating wind and wave cycle of destruction and renewal. Although hurricanes are a significant seasonal factor, the Atlantic waves that pound relentlessly along the eastern shore are the most persistent force shaping the area. In stark contrast, the usually calm waters of the Indian River, Banana River, and Mosquito Lagoon lap quietly on the west.

The quiet lagoons and inland waterways combine with the Gulf Stream to moderate what could be a brutally hot climate and ensure a year-round subtropical refuge. Well, only if you have access to industrial strength insect repellant and air conditioning. Hey, the name Mosquito Lagoon should be an instant give-away. If you want to know the brutal truth, the good old days really sucked when it came to creature comforts. Try living in central Florida through the summer without electricity, air conditioning, or screens on your windows if you don’t believe that statement.

The geological evidence of ancient dune lines that are about ten to fifteen miles inland paralleling the existing coastline tells us that the present location of the Cape was likely underwater for many thousands of years. What is certain is that at many times in the past the ocean waves receded and a combination of tidal action and local topographic irregularities allowed a small point of land to jut out from the coastline into the sea. After centuries of rising and falling sea levels, largely due to glacial and inter-glacial periods, that small promontory served as an anchor that accumulated silt, mud, sand, organic detritus, and sea shells that had previously been gypsied about by shifting ocean currents and periodic tropical storms. Until we have the present complex land/seascape that forms the Cape.

Although maps containing a rough outline of Cape Canaveral date from 1502, the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León is credited with first exploring the general area in 1513. His second landing in Florida was just south of Cape Canaveral, most probably near present day Melbourne Beach. Not realizing the area was dominated by the fiercely warlike Ais, who also had a taste for the flesh of their enemies, de León tried to establish a beachhead. But he was forced to beat a hasty retreat with his tail between his legs after being repulsed by the fierce and determined natives.

How the Cape received its name remains unclear. The oldest known map containing the name Cape Canaveral was drawn by LeMoyne in 1564, well after the initial landing by de León. Although the name has a Spanish origin — Cabo, indicating a point of land jutting out into the sea and Canaveral, meaning canebrake — it might have had several different meanings depending upon who chose the name and why. The name Cape Canaveral has been roughly translated as “Cape of Reeds” and “Cape of Canes.” Sugar cane is not indigenous to the Cape Canaveral area but there are several native plants that resemble it, including a type of bamboo reed called “normal” cane by early American residents of the Cape (as opposed to “sugar” cane). A good guess is that Spanish sailors named the area Cape Canaveral because they thought they spotted sugar cane along the coastline. But none of the several historical accounts of the name’s derivation is generally accepted.

That east-central Florida proved of little interest to Spanish should not come as a shock. The Ais were too tough a nut to crack easily and the area possessed no gold, no silver, no tangible natural resource treasures of any kind. Which meant no reason to tempt the greed-driven Spanish to hang around. It was a simple matter of time management and economics. The conquistadors tried their damnedest to spend their time where gold and silver were readily available and easily ripped from the hands of their former owners and deposited into their deep pockets.

However, despite its evident lack of tangible resources and based on its outstanding geographical assets, Cape Canaveral itself quickly evolved into a critical landmark for passing ships and became a regular fixture on all early maps of Florida. Even the oldest known maps of the area contain two important geographical features for navigators: the Florida Keys and Cape Canaveral. Sailing by dead reckoning was the principal means of navigating, therefore, if the ship’s captain had a choice he preferred to remain within sight of the coastline, using it as a reassuring reference. Remember, a whole lot of those guys still believed, in their heart of hearts, that if they sailed too far west or even got out of sight of land they would fall off the edge of the Earth.

Although Cape Canaveral remained a well-known and highly useful landmark for sailors in the decades that followed, human settlement of the area would not be successful for another three centuries. But when Florida, and Cape Canaveral as well, became part of the United States after the Revolutionary War the first American pioneers slowly made their way to the mainland west of the Cape. Between 1830 and 1835 an enterprising fellow named Douglas D. Dummitt from St. Augustine and who originally hailed from Barbados, at the tender age of 23 no less, established a grapefruit grove on Merritt Island directly west of Cape Canaveral. By 1828, Dummitt was so successful he began shipping commercial quantities of citrus to northern markets via the Indian River. To demonstrate our not so distant ties to Spanish settlement, Dummitt’s grove had been started from a grove near Port Orange that were reputed to had been budded from seedling stock brought to Florida by the Spanish.

The physical conditions on Cape Canaveral itself, however, proved far less hospitable to permanent settlement than Merritt Island and continued to discourage all comers. It wasn’t until the 1840s that the first group of American settlers established permanent residence on the Cape. Those first settlers constructed a barebones community of a few simple houses. They were able to maintain a low-level but self-reliant existence in what at the time was a hostile environment marked by brutal summer heat, plagues of mosquitoes and sandflies, and a challenging sand and scrub environment that must have seemed to willfully repel all efforts to plant crops. But their biggest problem had to be the all but total isolation from civilization.

In 1843, the U.S. Government recognized the geographic significance of the Cape’s easternmost point and established a permanent lighthouse, which was completed in 1847. Originally called St. Lucie, in 1855 the Florida mainland west of Cape Canaveral was renamed Brevard County. Regardless of that new political designation, the Cape still had no access other than by sea. Roads, bridges, or railroads were non existent, making travel problematic, to say the least.

However, by the 1880s steamboat traffic was running on a fairly regular basis from the St. John’s River in north Florida south to Brevard County. Although that economic tie did little to increase the population of isolated Cape Canaveral it did encourage population expansion on the mainland just to the west, which experienced steady growth through the 1890s. Truth be told, most of that credit was due to the efforts of none other than that famous entrepreneur, Henry Flagler. Who was pleased as punch to extend his rail line into and through Brevard County, if only because it was en-route to Palm Beach and then to Miami and Key West. By June 1893, the Flagler Railway had reached the northern Brevard County community of Titusville, which had been a popular port as early as the 1880s, and was quickly extended southward along the western bank of the Indian River through the towns of Cocoa, Rockledge, and Eau Gallie.

Once the Flagler Railway reached Eau Gallie, the entire mainland area west of Cape Canaveral was served by railroad. Titusville, Cocoa, and Melbourne sprang to life and quickly became major local population centers. But the Cape itself remained almost completely unsettled and isolated, still accessible only by boat. Although population was gradually increasing on the mainland and on nearby Merritt Island, only a few additional families set up permanent residence on Cape Canaveral. The separation of the Cape from the mainland by the Banana River, Merritt Island, and the Indian River constituted obstacles to growth and development that proved extraordinarily difficult to overcome.

An important lesson may be learned about what has happened to Florida in terms of human occupance but I’ll let that tempting topic slide until later. When I can draw on a comparison or two with other locations in the Sunshine State.

With development pressure slowly increasing year by year, Cape Canaveral was opened to settlement under the Homestead Act. As the relative prosperity of the early 1920s dawned, a number of families and small businesses slowly trickled onto the Cape. Although the area had no permanent roads, was still accessible only via boat, and remained isolated, several small settlement clusters emerged. The most developed and populated area of Cape Canaveral was known as DeSoto Beach, which was located in the vicinity of NASA’s present day Launch Complex 36. DeSoto Beach featured about fifteen permanent homes, a small hotel, a store, and even a brothel that reportedly did a brisk if seasonal business. Think it was all that fishing that made the guys horny or was it because they were free from their wives?

The barrier island area south of Cape Canaveral was not settled until 1923, when the first bridge was extended from Merritt Island eastward to the Atlantic coast. The eastern terminus of the bridge was incorporated in 1925 as the city of Cocoa Beach and soon began to expand. Suddenly, the handwriting was on the wall. With the bridge in place it was only a matter of time before settlement mushroomed. You should remember the developers’ mantra because it is right on the money: “Access is everything.”

Although at the dawn of World War II the permanent Cape Canaveral population still numbered only about 100, the area had begun to attract what today we would call eco-tourists. The largest group of visitors consisted of saltwater fishermen eager to take advantage of the excellent fishing the Cape waters provided. Well, it’s not a stretch to suppose that the whorehouse held out the lure of certain creature comforts not offered in the Compleat Angler. Hey, they were only meeting one of the many demands created by growing eco-tourism. It was traditional American enterprise in action.

In the period of international unrest just prior to World War II, events outside of Florida intervened to change the future of Cape Canaveral. In 1938, under the Naval Expansion Act, which called for reinforcement of the Atlantic Coast Defense System, two naval installations were authorized on the east coast of Florida. A narrow strip of the barrier island located roughly between Melbourne and Cocoa Beach was selected for a naval air station. Construction began in late 1939. The resulting Banana River Naval Air Station was commissioned on October 1, 1940. It covered nearly 1,800 acres and was roughly four miles long by a little over a mile wide. Although the facility continued to support the Navy for several years after World War II, the Station was officially deactivated in 1947. But it was a Federal foothold that would prove to be highly significant.

Enter the Cold War, Werner von Braun, his German colleagues, and the age of rocket science. American post-war development of ballistic missiles as a long-range weapons delivery system quickly progressed from our stealing a terrific idea from the Germans to a critical struggle with the Soviets, who had stolen their own German rocket scientists, over shaping a new geo-political reality. The race for world domination was on and turning back was not an option.

It soon became obvious to the U.S. Government that their existing testing facilities weren’t up to the new rocket-based standards. The Department of Defense had to find a new engineering and scientific research facility where tactics and techniques for guided missile operations could be developed and tested.

With the exploding arms race, tremendous amounts of activity were required in a tightly constrained time frame. Highly qualified personnel had to be recruited, run through an elaborate security screening process, and then trained in the rapidly evolving scientific techniques. Equipment used to operate and ultimately control the missiles had to be designed, tested, redesigned, and built to ever evolving but exacting standards. And the new guided missiles had to be subjected to rigorous ground and flight testing to determine their effectiveness.

All those steps were required to be conducted in relative secrecy. Preferably in a location far from prying eyes and ears, not only those of our enemies but the public’s as well. Therefore, the most suitable locations had to be relatively isolated from existing population centers. They also had to be near extensive unpopulated spaces over which missiles could be launched (and possibly destroyed if they began turning off course), thereby avoiding politically messy problems like civilian injuries and deaths. And they needed to accommodate the installation of downrange tracking stations to make sure that the then typically unreliable buggers stayed on course. Land for a military base that would serve as the operational headquarters for the missile program was also part of the locational requirements.

White Sands, New Mexico, had a missile range that was associated with development of the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos. It had been in operation since the close of World War II. However, at 135 miles long the range’s dimensions were unsuitable for new, far more powerful missiles. Plus, it had the additional negative of being located much too close to a number of large cities, especially Almagordo, Las Cruces, Socorro, Albuquerque, El Paso, and Ciudad Juarez, among others. When the more powerful, and therefore more dangerous, missiles were tested in the late 1940s, the glaring deficiencies of the White Sands Range with respect to its size and poorly chosen location were dramatically demonstrated.

The concerns of the Los Alamos/White Sands scientists and engineers over the safety of firing larger and larger missiles powered by high-explosive fuel became reality in May 1947. To the shock and dismay of the assembled scientists and engineers, a modified V-2 rocket went badly off course, wheeling south instead of heading north over the White Sands Range. The missile scared the living shit out of thousands of residents as it thundered directly over El Paso, Texas, and eventually crashed across the Rio Grande into the Tepeyac Cemetery in nearby Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, creating a blast crater at least 50 feet wide by 30 feet deep. Although no one was injured — luckily, the dead were already dead and the living had taken off running as if the very devil himself were in hot pursuit — the wayward rocket quickly turned into a full-fledged international faux pas. After suitable negotiations and the consumption of a large serving of humble-pie, the U.S. government settled damage claims with their highly pissed-off neighbor, Mexico. Which understandably added considerable incentives to the identification and selection of a new, larger, and safer missile range.

Three potential sites quickly emerged as front runners. One was based on the coast of northern Washington, with a range that ran through the Aleutian Islands. A second was located at El Centro, California, with a range along the coast of Baja, Mexico. The third option was the Banana River Naval Air Station in Florida, which would serve as the missile center headquarters and Cape Canaveral would function as the launch site, with the range extending eastward over the Atlantic Ocean.

The Washington State site was quickly rejected because its isolation and poor weather conditions made it a less than stellar alternative in the first place. Although the California site would have been highly suitable and even preferable owing to its proximity to existing aerospace equipment and systems manufacturers in the Los Angeles area, it was summarily rejected when Mexican President Aleman refused to agree to allow the rockets to fly over the Baja region. Remember that wayward V-2 that had crashed and exploded just outside Juarez, Mexico? Well, the Mexicans hadn’t forgotten it either and had no reason to believe that additional high-powered rockets fired over their country would do them much good. Scratch El Centro from the list of alternatives.

Our good friends the Brits, however, proved very amenable to allowing missiles to take off over the sparsely populated Bahamian archipelago, whose natives were largely black and poor so didn’t count for much in the eyes of their then rulers. They also were willing to lease island properties to the U.S. military for the then important tracking stations. That cooperation, coupled with the inherent geographical advantages of Cape Canaveral and a lack of serious physical or political constraints, pushed it to the forefront. It was quickly selected as the first U.S. long-range missile proving ground.

The very physical characteristics that had over several centuries discouraged human occupance made Cape Canaveral the near-perfect site for a missile range. Covering more than 23 square miles, the Cape was relatively isolated from heavily populated areas but would be accessible by road (if the roads and the required bridges were to be constructed by the Department of Defense), rail, and ocean-going vessels. The weather was also favorable most of the year, if you allowed hurricane season as a significant exception to that generalization.

Cape Canaveral’s east-facing orientation into the open Atlantic provided a huge over-water flight area that was well removed from populated land masses and heavily trafficked shipping lanes. A second important bonus was the accessibility of Bahamian and South Atlantic island sites for the installation of the then required optical and radar tracking stations. The additional fact that the Banana River Naval Air Station, located just 15 miles south of Cape Canaveral, was immediately available to serve as the missile center’s headquarters encouraged the American Government to push full steam ahead with the development of a missile range at the Cape.

On May 11, 1949, President Harry S Truman signed legislation establishing Cape Canaveral as the Joint Long-Range Proving Ground. The Banana River Naval Air Station, which had been transferred from Navy control to the Air Force, was renamed the Joint Long-Range Proving Ground Base. Although the U.S. Government already owned several square miles of real estate on Cape Canaveral, more land was needed to fulfill existing and future program needs. Government agencies began condemning and purchasing private property and moving residents out. Which caused no end of trouble because in their heart of hearts people everywhere are either NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) or BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), no matter how critical the governmental mission is to the country’s national welfare and safety. Construction of the first permanent access road, launch sites, instrumentation facilities, and missile operations areas on the Cape began in 1950. Cape Canaveral would never be the same.

Anxious to get the show on the road and demonstrate their new-found rocketry expertise, the Army launched two modified German V-2 rockets from Cape Canaveral on July 24, 1950. A few days later came a new name, Patrick Air Force Base, by which it goes today, for what had previously and inelegantly been called the Long-Range Proving Ground Base. Even the Air Force balked at calling it the LRPGB. Patrick AFB was so much easier to spit out.

After that things at the Cape accelerated to a fast and furious pace that never seemed to slow. The prime cause was the quickly evolving ballistic missile program. Ballistic missiles were high explosive metal monsters that consumed everything in sight. The program’s ever growing special needs drove operations at the Cape and expanded everyone’s horizon. Again and again. Year after year. Continual expansion quickly became a way of life. Launch Pads 1, 2, 3, and 4 quickly proved insufficient to handle the newly developed requirements. New programs meant new ballistic missiles, which meant new facilities. Cape Canaveral became Construction Central. From their relatively humble beginnings, the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral doubled and re-doubled until ultimately they sprawled across the entire Cape. What incremental human settlement was unable to accomplish in 400 years, the military did in less than a decade. The Cape had been tamed and would never again in human history resemble what it had been in the so recent past.

In 1975 Congress created the Canaveral National Seashore. That legislation protected the Kennedy Space Center from potential urban encroachment slowly creeping south from Daytona Beach and New Smyrna Beach by setting aside the last major hunk of undeveloped beach property in eastern Florida. It was a land developer’s wet dream turned nightmare. All that pristine oceanfront property and no way to slice it into bite-sized pieces to be sold to irrational bidders who had been whipped into a state of frenzy by over-hyped marketing techniques. That must have made a ton of real estate agents sick at heart. To see all that easily saleable land pulled off the market. It was almost a crime. I mean, didn’t the Federal Government know that people had to have some way to make money? Hellfire, that’s what the free enterprise system is all about. Selling sun and fun on the Florida coast. Hey, peckerwood, it ain’t called demand for nothing.

Today, the Canaveral National Seashore is a quiet land and water wilderness populated largely by birds, mosquitoes, and those always nasty sandflies. Approximately 25 miles long, it consists of 60,000 empty acres of off-shore bars, sand dunes, brackish and salt marshes, lagoons, and shifting islands. It extends north from the Space Center and the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, separated from the mainland by the Indian River. If you’re a birdwatcher a trip to Canaveral National Seashore or Merritt Island is a small piece of Paradise, with more than 280 recorded species. If you get there early enough and move slowly and quietly so as to not spook the little critters, you might catch sight of herons, egrets of all kinds, ibises, pelicans, gulls, sand-pipers, terns, osprey, bald eagle, reddish egret, and roseate spoonbill. The list goes on and on and on. And if you’re a night-owl and arrive during the summer months, you just might be rewarded by a sighting of giant loggerhead turtles or green sea turtles. They’re the real deal, as the great biologist Archie Carr would have been delighted to tell you.

Implications

Now for that word on human occupance patterns to which I eluded previously. Cape Canaveral was spared much of the environmental destruction that has been visited on the vast majority of coastal Florida for two primary reasons. First, its isolation was a direct result of geographic barriers and constraints that discouraged settlement over a long period as other, more easily accessible and developable locations went under the development gun. And second, just as pressure to open the Cape to urban development was increasing, the entire area was purchased and thus protected by the Federal Government from the typical Florida coastal urbanization process.

In a somewhat similar manner, that’s what happened to the Ocala National Forest and what has not happened to the Green Swamp in central Florida. Both of those areas were relatively isolated or at least difficult to access at times when other places around them were being exploited for human use. But only one was protected by U.S. Government action. And that’s why Cape Canaveral and the Ocala National Forest are still relatively pristine environments. With of course the terrible exception of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal that rips through the National Forest. And that’s also the reason the Green Swamp is threatened with piecemeal destruction. Because neither the State nor Federal governments have seen fit to step up to the plate and act as legitimate environmental stewards. A condition natural for the State since it exists only to serve its corporate paymasters.

The State of Florida seems paralyzed at the wheel, unable to protect sensitive, critical environments from insatiable demands for more and more land, more and more development. If you don’t believe that assessment is factual, take a close look at what is happening to the coastal areas of the Panhandle, throughout southwest Florida and specifically at the margins of the Big Cypress-western Everglades, and in the Green Swamp Basin. If those conditions of State preference for development and callous indifference to environmental preservation continue, then the future of Florida’s sensitive and relatively natural places is certain. If you listen closely, you can already hear the bulldozers roaring.

But the example of Cape Canaveral is one of hope, however faint. It holds up yet another sign that the future of Florida’s natural environments is not necessarily bleak if certain actions are taken.