Joe
H. Wickham
Brevard
County's Last Pioneer
Brevard
County, Florida: A Short History to 1955
A different
kind of cat--a rare breed.
Those were the words Joe Wickham
used to describe some of the rascals
that crossed his path in the political
jungle of the early 1950s and 60s. And
you know, he was just that too. Last of
a breed.
At
14, Joe Wickham left Iowa with a large
family and arrived on Florida's east
coast, known far and wide as Indian
River Country. The year was 1926
and Brevard County's population was
8700, just 2% of today's 536,357
residents. Joe's father, John Q. Wickham,
accepted a position as a county surveyor
at a time when prosperity was at a
height. New roads and drainage projects
kept his old man busy.
As
a teenager, Joe saw the wild side of
Brevard when much of the county remained
untrammeled and undeveloped. When the depression hit in
1929, Joe naturally made use of his
hunting skills to keep his family from
hunger. A
simple pocket knife was all he needed. A
huge loggerhead could be dissected; legs
for stew, eggs for cakes. Joe walked
five blocks to Eau Gallie High School.
He graduated in a class of five in 1929
and took a job as a soda pop route man,
driving around Brevard and surrounding
counties.
With
a professional surveyor for a father,
young Joe developed a solid command of
practical mathematics. There were many
new roads and canal projects to survey
and soon Joe traded his soda truck for a
tripod and transit. New routes being
opened in the late 20s and 30s were
Malabar, Minton, John rodes, SR518
beachside, and SR520. The county's
population remained at this time between
the Indian River and Flagler's FEC
tracks.
One
of Joe's early assignments led him
through the swamps, snakes, and
alligators of the Turnbull Hummock to
perform a survey of the north county
line. Later in the 1930s, Joe was called
to survey a route for A1A and supervise
initial construction of the new Naval
Air Station on the Banana River. He also
took a job as Fire Chief in Eau Gallie
which meant getting up at 3 a.m. to put
out fires on the wood bridge leading to
Canova Beach.
When
WWII escalated, Joe joined the Seabees.
While In California, before his
departure overseas, he met a pretty
young woman named Bernice. That
brief encounter lingered in his mind -- he
married her in 1946. Also that year, he
used his experience building airports
and runways in the islands of the south
Pacific to start his own enterprise,
Wickham Construction.
Having
some experience as a city councilman,
Joe was approached by Max Rodes who
encouraged him to run as a democrat for
the
county commission in 1952. Ninety-two
percent of the electorate being
registered democrats, it was an easy
choice. Joe served as
District 5 commissioner for most of the
next thirty years, forming alliances
with John Hurdle, Lee Wenner, C. Sweet
Smith, C.W. "Jake" Miller, Val
Steele, Dave Nesbit,and others to run the county
government.
Soon
after taking office, he acted as
chairman (of a one man committee) to
procure the county's first dredge.
Slowly the Indian River's marshy
shorelines were impounded, destroying
the breeding grounds of the infamous
salt marsh mosquito.
Fostering
his ties with the Navy, Joe and other
leaders encouraged the county's purchase
of surplus equipment from NAS-Banana
River and later, Patrick AFB. He
stretched every tax dollar, getting life
out of used road-building equipment and
old military planes to spray mosquitoes.
He was a key player in creating the
Civilian-Military counsel which has been
active since the 1960s in promoting
cooperation and communication between
Brevard County government and the Air
Force. A man of compromise,
Joe deeded several miles of prime
oceanfront to Indian River county in
1959 to receive that county's
cooperation in bridging the Sebastian
Inlet.
Under
Joe's visionary leadership, the county
made plans to clear the route of today's
Wickham Road in the late
1950s. Some thought it was a nutty idea,
claiming it would be a road out in the
woods leading to nowhere. But it was not
a nutty idea. There was some logic
behind it. The road he planned would run
along the dividing line between two ranges, 36 and
37, a line that split the county in
two, halfway between the Indian River and Lake Washington.
He
had been aware of these major range
lines since the1930s from his work with
survey crews. Now in the late
fifties, Joe thought that range line would be
a perfect place for a road to support
future development. Not only that, it
would consolidate his political district,
along with south and central Brevard. When Wickham's bulldozers reached the Pineda area they smashed through a moonshine still, then ran out of land and turned west. It was now easy to envision another route to Osceola county. For decades Wickham Road, a dirt trail, passed through Duda farmland heading toward the St. John's River
and Osceola County as proposed State Road 536.
Wickham's vision and initiative gave Suntree and Viera a major thoroughfare that drew developers to the
area in the late 1970s. After the completion of I-95, the potential of the entire area picked up. More developers were attracted. The Duda family owned a great deal of farmland in the hinterlands. The development to the west of Pineda caused the Dudas to plan for the consequences of growth coming their way. The result was the Viera Company and the planned town of
Viera.
Today
the county spends millions for parkland,
but that was never Joe's approach. He
preferred to use his inside knowledge
and negotiation skills. In the
middle of nowhere, he found 480 acres
chopped into small undeveloped home sites--a
developers dream gone sour. Joe
negotiated with the owners, convincing
many to donate their land. Wickham Park
was the result, one of the county's
largest and most used recreational
sites, all for peanuts and the art of
persuasion.
Most
everybody liked Joe Wickham. They liked
his style and returned him to office
again and again. At the age of 74, Joe
was appointed by Gov. Bob Graham to the South
Brevard Water Authority in which
he put many hours of study, road trips,
and meetings. Joe always set the
example for every task before him:
helping others and lending his expertise
whenever called. His life was a devotion
to service--as the pioneers lived it, from
cansee to cantsee.
The
way it looked for the first 25 years of
Joe Wickham's life in Brevard County
Joe
Wickham at 82
Sources:
Brevard County, Florida: A Short
History to 1955
Wikipedia Article on Joe H. Wickham
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/keyword/wickham
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/keyword/happy-returns/recent/5
