About this publication

Palm Bay sold 120,000 lots by mail before most of the buyers had ever seen the land.

General Development Corporation bought roughly 80,000 acres of south Brevard flatwoods in 1959, platted it into residential lots, and sold them by direct-mail catalog to buyers in the Northeast and Midwest who had never visited Florida. The pitch was retirement land. The price was one dollar down. By 1990, when GDC declared bankruptcy, the company had sold over 120,000 lots in what is now Palm Bay. Most of the land had no sewage, no paved roads, and no utilities. The city of Palm Bay is still catching up. This site covers how that happened, who Tillman and the earlier settlers were, and what Palm Bay was before GDC bought it.

Sabal palms in Palm Bay, Florida, the native tree that gave the city its name. — Sabal palms in south Brevard. The city was named Palm Bay in 1925, a generation before GDC arrived. The name referred to the native palm stands along Turkey Creek and the Indian River shore. via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

What this site covers

The pre-GDC history: Tillman, the original name. The post office that carried it until 1925. The cattle ranches and small farms that occupied the Turkey Creek watershed through the first decades of the twentieth century. The Ais village at the creek mouth that preceded all of them by a thousand years.

The GDC era: the 1959 purchase, the mail-order platting operation, the 180 miles of unpaved canals and drainage ditches that GDC dug to make the flatwoods look like developed land, and the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act of 1968 that Congress passed largely in response to what GDC and operations like it were doing. The 1990 GDC bankruptcy and the federal criminal case that followed it. Palm Bay's 1960 incorporation and the political fight over who would govern a city being built from lot inventory, not from any organic population center.

The modern record: the 1987 Palm Bay shootings, which preceded the Killeen, Texas, and Aurora, Colorado, mass shootings in civic profile while leaving almost no national historical trace. Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004, which crossed the same ground six weeks apart. The community's growth from 800 residents in 1960 to over 120,000 today, a sustained rate that makes Palm Bay one of the fastest-growing municipalities in Florida's census history. Turkey Creek Sanctuary and the natural history of the watershed that predates everything else on this page.

Bald cypress trees along Turkey Creek in Palm Bay, Florida. — Turkey Creek, the defining natural feature of the Palm Bay area. The creek drains into the Indian River Lagoon at a point the Ais used for at least 1,000 years before European contact. GDC's drainage canals altered its hydrology permanently. via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Corrections welcome at hello@oldpalmbay.com.