>>This program is brought to you in part by the Paul B. Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation, a proud partner of WUCF and the Central Florida community.

>>On this edition of Florida Road Trip, we're headed to Melbourne, a Space Coast cit shaped by waterways, pioneers, and two historic communities that tell one story.

>>They both have fantastic histories that go into it, but I don't think you can get either picture without talking about both of them.

>>Then we dive into a thriving arts district where historic storefronts spark creativity, small business opportunity, an a little bit of the unexpected.

>>You'd be surprised at the variety of weirdness.

>>And we visit a zoo that proves what can happen when an entire community rallies behind one wild idea.

>>More than 16,000 people had helped physically build Brevard Zoo from early settlers to astronauts and artists.

Florida Road Trip is ready to roll through Melbourne.

♪♪ Hi there and welcome to Florida Road Trip.

I'm Scott Fais.

Melbourne is known a part of Florida's Space Coast.

Yet the story starts well before rockets.

On one hand, you had Eau Gallie, on the other, Crane Creek.

Together they tell the story of how this area became known as Melbourne.

Before Melbourne, there was Eau Gallie.

Growing along the water where the river and lagoon shaped how people lived.

>>Melbourne itself is not quite as old as Eau Gallie.

Now here with Eau Gallie, it actually started with a John Carroll Houston III.

And he came here really in the 1840s as a scout during the Seminole Wars.

And he came to know this area really well.

He tries to build this huge plantation here, and he was really the first white settler.

And since he wanted to build a huge plantation, he did have slaves.

>>Later, William Gleason helped push the community towards incorporation and gave it a nam that reflected the land itself.

>>He was really the big person that pushed for incorporation because Houston didn't really didn't see it as useful.

He could say he just didn't see it as necessary.

He was still able to live, but Gleason really wanted to actually push this.

Now, he was an early lieutenant governor of Florida, but he came from the Great Lakes region.

So Eau Gallie is technically Frenc and Chippewa for "rocky waters."

It's supposed to represent th coquina we've got around here.

>>In the 1800s, the nearby waterways transported people as they moved and worked.

Eau Gallie had access in just the right spot.

>>We're actually directly between West Palm Beach and Jacksonville.

So it ends up being pretty equidistance there.

But we also have access to all the waterways.

So this ends up kind of becoming the center.

>>A littl farther south, another community began to form along Crane Creek, built by people starting new lives after slavery.

>>Melbourne is itself is a vision of the future.

This town was founded by three free men, three former slaves who came here sometime between 1865 and 1867.

>>Wright Brothers, Balaam Allen and Peter Wright.

As you can imagine, there was nothing there.

They settled here.

They did farming.

They did pineapple farming and also fruit.

>>They came because they had a vision of building lives unencumbered by the shackles of slavery.

They were African-Methodist, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists.

>>Wright Brothers living roo with the people that was there.

Wright Brothers, Balaam Allen and certainly at that time their wives.

Matter of fact the first African-American child was born in this house in the city of Crane Creek.

>>For another side of that story, we travel back to Ea Gallie at the Rossetter House.

One family's rise durin the early 1900s is tied to Henry Flagler's Railroad, whic brought new growth to the area.

Yet the whole story starts earlier with what the museum identifies as a former slave cabin from the plantation that once stood here.

>>You walk from the bac end of the house to the front.

You're kind of getting a little bit of the history of everything, because that original sectio of the house is actually the one and only slave cabin that we still have.

>>The Rossetter family story includes two sister who made their mark in business.

After their father died, Carrie Rossetter stepped up to help support the family.

>>She needed to do something to help support the family, and she felt tha it was on her being the oldest, so that's where she decided to go to Standard Oil, present herself to the board in Kentucky, and ask for the distributorship that she's known for.

So they grant it to her and she has that title, actually 62 years.

So she's one of the longest holding distributors, just purely because 6 years is a long title to beat.

But she's actually the first woman that ever had an oil distributorship.

>>Entrepreneurshi ran among the Rossetter women.

Carrie's sister Ella built her own path in business just a few years later.

>>So at that point, she was 21.

Really gets interested in insurance.

So she's working for a coupl different lawyers at the time, kind of building up what she knows, and she opens up her insurance office.

So the Rossetter insurance agency in 1926.

So bot these women were very prominent and in business in an era where even women getting their own bank account was kind of impossible.

>>As both communities grew, so did the need for shared services.

Eventually leading Eau Galli and Melbourne to join together.

>>1969 specifically is when Eau Gallie became part of Melbourne.

They did play around with som names including Melba Eau Gallie which I am so glad didn't win.

That sounds terrible, but they ultimately came together because at the time, both of the cities were struggling to pay for basic infrastructure, meaning schools, fire, the police.

>>Crane Creek and Eau Gallie offer two ways to understand the same city.

Two histories, one Melbourne.

Together, those historie tell a fuller story of who built Melbourne and how.

>>You're not going to understand the full story of Melbourn if you don't include Eau Gallie.

They both have fantastic histories that go into it, but I don't think you can get either picture without talking about both of them.

There's just kind of two halves to that story.

♪♪ >>At first glance, thi looks a lot like miniature golf.

That's because it is.

Even in the Eau Gallie Arts District, mini golf takes on a little art, a little science, and a whole lot of imagination.

Dreamlan Mini Golf takes a classic game and turns it into something shaped by local artists.

>>I realized after we got this thing going that mini golf is like the original STEAM activity.

When you're about to putt, you know, you're considering angles and you know the geometry and the surface tension of the ball on the surface and all that, but also the wizardry of the art.

That mix of creativity and curiosity defines the Eau Gallie Arts District known as EGAD.

It's a place where art isn't just limited to a frame on the wall.

>>Somehow we fi 18 holes of mini golf in here, and it's all made by local artists, and we change up the holes sometimes and we it actually includes a scavenger hunt.

So right now, while you're putting, you're also looking for these wacky elements like Starman on a caravan, which you know, might be a little David Bowie play.

>>Step outside and you realize Dreamland is just one piece of a small but creative district.

>>It's just a few blocks of some cool retail, some historic homes.

>>EGAD grew from a plan to bring new life to a struggling area using historic preservation, small business and creativity as its foundation.

>>The area was quite blighted and it needed the method to revitalize.

And so the National Mainstreet program there's a model to follow.

It helps when there's a story to wrap around.

And yes, there's an art supply store as well as a few galleries.

There was a pinch of creativity.

Like any good town has, there was a percentage of creative folks who did their thing, and so it became a story to rally around.

And somebody came up with the clever name of Eau Gallie Arts District >>The early days proved scrappy, but in the best way.

Before it became a destination, artists and businesses experimented with one night shows and pop up events, allowing visitors to feel as if they were part of something happening in real time.

>>We all learned that rising tides raise all ships, and just energetically, you want to play together and learn from each other and boost each other.

>>Boosting the experience is the art that's seemingly everywhere and ready to explore.

>>The best way is to look around, discover the murals, see the walking tour of the murals, and then, while you're at it you're going to find these nooks and crannies a little hidden art.

You're going to se interesting events and fliers.

That kind of stuff gives you great vibe of what's happening.

Be surprised at the variety of weirdness and a couple of speakeasies.

You know, little hidden gems.

>>Sometimes protecting history means more than saving a building.

It means letting the past become part of the present.

>>When developer or somebody buys a new building, you know, we try to we make sure to have a conversatio so that you can speak, you know, be the Lorax and speak for the trees, or you can speak for the history, speak for the old buildings.

In fact, there's a spot called Nomads around the corner of the restaurant.

Little things like when they took off some of the second floor to have an exposed cool rooftop deck.

They use some of the I-beams to become the supports of the tables on the first floor.

Instead of buying brand new stuff that makes the place look generic.

They use the literal history.

>>A world of expression includes telling a story for these murals.

A restaurant can preserve history.

An art gallery can become a putt putt center, and a famed few blocks can become a creative home for an entire community.

>>Art is a human touch.

When you can see a paint stroke or a finger print or ripped edges like in my art, it keeps the human touch.

You know this is not AI.

This is not digital experience.

This is not scrolling.

This is not sitting at home and seeing other people do stuff.

This is a place to have an experience.

This is a place to make some art.

Make a mess.

Be human.

Be a kid again.

[XYLOPHONE CHIMES] ♪♪ >>Long before travelers began rolling their luggage through the terminal, this place stayed busy shaping Melbourne's future.

Aviation took root here.

World Wa II reshaped the runways that led to businesses doing commerce along the Space Coast.

And baseball.

Yeah, baseball even had a home run in Melbourne.

>>The airport's story begins in the early days of American aviation.

>>The Air Mail Act of 1925 is really what set off modern aviation as we know it today.

In 1928, the Melbourne Airport was founded.

>>The first airport started small and resided in a different part of town.

>>It was actually ten acres located to the north of what is now 192 and to the west of where present day I-95 is.

There was some controversy with that location, and some people though it should be closer to the city.

So in 1929, the City of Melbourne went to the Florida Legislature, as you had to do back then, and asked for permissio to buy property for an airport.

>>Then came World War II and everything changed.

>>The City of Melbourne and Eau Gallie who at one poin also owned part of the airport.

They were proactive.

In 1941, they sa what was going on in the world, and they actually went to the federal government and said, hey, our airport.

I think it would be really great to be used for defense training.

>>The airport became Naval Air Station Melbourne and the runway became parts of the war effort.

>>From there, it became the only fighter aircraft training facility on the East Coast, not just the east coast of Florida on the East Coast.

The first aircraft that were here were the Grumman Wildcat aircraft.

Then those were shortly replaced by the Grumman Hellcat aircraft, which was a superior fighter jet.

And at one point, we had 20 o those jets here on the airport.

At the full complement of personnel, there was 361 officers and 1,184 enlisted men that were stationed here.

>>After the war, the airport returned to civilian use.

>>In 1944, there was the Surplus Act, and that allowed the federal government to release these lands back to the municipalities.

So in 1947, the Melbourne Airport was then deede back to the City of Melbourne.

>>Decades later this part of Melbourne welcomed another kind of training.

From 1964 through 1989, the Minnesota Twins ran their minor league baseball operation right here near the former Naval Air Station Melbourne.

The airport also helped Melbourne's identity as a technology hub.

One of its earliest tenants became part of a much larger Space Coast history.

>>The very first tenant o the airport was Radiation, Inc.. Now you might go Who's Radiation, Inc.?

Then became Harris and then became L3 Harris.

>>And Melbourne International Airport continue to maintain its military roots.

>>We hosted Space Coast Honor flight.

It's an organization that takes 50 veterans on a trip from Washington, D.C.

for a day.

And when they come home, we host this great big welcome home ceremon that we invite the community to.

>>From a ten acre field to a modern airport, these runways shaped Melbourn and the people who call it home.

>>Using our airport is very important because we are such a part of the community, and we love this community so much.

♪♪ >>The story of Florid Institute of Technology begins with a big question, and an answer that could only be found here, along America's Space Coast.

If the United States was going to launch rockets, who was going to train the people behind them?

>>In 1958, America was a launching its future as a space faring nation.

A young physicist named Jerry Keuper was hired to lead the systems analyst division of wha was the RCA program at the Cape.

We did not want to become the Kittyhawk of the space program, that there needed to be an intellectual presenc for the men and women who came and would launch America into the space age.

And so he and a group of his friends launched this idea of forming a university.

>>The idea of a university started small, in borrowed classrooms at night.

People who spent the day helping America reach space sat down with pencils and a new kind of mission.

The school first opene as Brevard Engineering College.

In 1966, its mission grew beyond engineering and became Florida Institute of Technology.

>>If you look at the American Census in 1940, Cocoa Beach had a population of about 38 people.

Melbourne, Florida 2,000 people.

By 1950, Melbourn had grown to 4,000, but between 1950 and 1960, 75,000.

75,000 scientists, technicians, engineers, building contractors came to this bit of land along Florida's east central coast and created a new world.

We are the Space Silicon Valley.

In fact, Silicon Valley should probably say we've become Space Coast because we are where America transformed itself.

>>Florida Tech became par of that shift, bringing ideas, ambition and opportunity to the Space Coast.

>>In some respects, on needs a time machine to go back to see the kinds of things that were coming together men and women doing new things that never been done before.

Reaching and trying to find solutions to questions that had never been asked.

I look at this university as establishing an intellectual hub on the Space Coast, but it also became an anchor for a burgeoning aerospace industry.

>>During that burgeoning era, the school faced a defining choice.

The decision would shape what it stood for.

>>In 1958, we rented three classrooms from the Brevard School District.

And when the Brevard School District discovered that three of those students were African-Americans, they offered Jerry Keuper a rather draconian choice.

Expel those students or we wil expel you from the classrooms.

And what happened was one of those students, Julius Montgomery, went to Jerry Keuper and said, we'll step back, but we want to come when you have a place which we can break this Jim Crow.

And so they did.

Jim Crow didn't leave Florida.

It wasn't until 1967 that the schools in Brevard County were fully integrated in this part of Florida.

>>While Florida Tech was still young, the school's reach quickly stretched beyond Melbourne.

The first honorary PhD went to a Mercury astronaut with other famous names from the atomic and space age entering the school's orbit.

>>This is a place where I've met lots of people.

Six of our students have been astronauts.

Two of my colleagues have been astronauts.

>>That spirit of discovery still defines Florida Tech.

While the questions have changed over the years, the drive to go deeper while looking inward stays the same.

>>This is a place in which I think we're only bounded by our imagination.

This university has been messing things up for almost 70 years, messing up people's expectations about race, messing things u about what we can do in terms of launching rockets to the moo and to further, further places.

This is a place that is profoundly committed to messing up the expectations of mediocrity and finding excellence.

That's a pretty high ideal to live to.

So I'm proud to say that for 4 years, I've had the opportunity to mess things up with some remarkable people.

♪♪ >>I gotta be honest.

This might be the first interview I've tried to conduct where I'm not entirely sure who's in charge.

And honestly that's perfect for Brevard Zoo because it's the type of connection you feel when you get this close to an animal that makes all the difference.

And I'll tell you that the community here made all the difference at Brevard Zoo from the very beginning.

>>We had a group of citizens in the area that saw all the growth that was coming to Brevard County, and they said, we need to preserve a space where people will be able to connect with nature, wher they'll be able to see wildlife and not lose that connection as the area grows.

>>That idea grew into something bigger, something the entire community would help build.

>>Once a nonprofit had been formed and they started to develop this idea of building a world class zoo, they needed the money.

They needed the labo to really bring it into reality.

By the tim the zoo opened in March of 1994, more than 16,000 people had helped physically build Brevard Zoo.

It is this amazing story of community care and collaboration that brought this together.

>>That community spiri did not end when the zoo opened.

You can still see the community at work in the volunteers that assist every day.

>>The best way to do it is come to the zoo.

Take a walk and look for people in hibiscus colored shirts.

Those are our volunteers.

We have more than 55 active volunteers at Brevard Zoo which is a huge number for a zoo our size.

Part of that story is right under your feet.

Some of the zoo' first story tellers were kids, leaving their mark one brick at a time.

One of the first things that you see are pavers in front of you.

And the pavers are not just for traditional off the shelf pavers.

They are bricks and every brick is unique.

And that's because those bricks were decorated and made by elementary school kids during that community build.

One of the ways that they engage the community at the time was having kids customize bricks.

>>The same Hands-On feeling is one reaso why this zoo stands out today.

The experience can feel close, personal and maybe a little unexpected.

>>One of the other things that's really neat about the zoo is the fact that we do still have animals that were part of the original zoo, and so some of our longest residents are American crocodiles.

One of the goal was to really try and preserve as much of the original native landscape as we could.

And so particularly when you walk through our wild Florida loop, when you walk through our rainforest loop, you see these huge, towering oak trees that help create thi immersive experience for guests.

>>Preserving the landscape became the start of how the zoo would make an impact.

>>We were built to be a place for people to connect with wildlife.

But as we grew, people started coming to us and asking for help.

And in the early days, we really developed this model of the idea that we answer the call for wildlife.

What is, I think, so specia about the conservation program at that point, and then still today, is how much of it focuses on the Florida environment.

>>That Florida focus includes sea turtles, black bear cubs, manatees, Florida scrub jays, and other endangered birds.

>>Florida grasshopper sparrow are one of the most endangered songbirds in all of North America.

They're endemic to Florida.

They have a couple of pockets of habitat in the central Florida prairies and estimates a few years ago were that there were only a couple hundred of them left in the wild like we had done so many times with other conservation projects.

We turned back to our community and we said, here's a project that's in front of us.

We'd like to be able to support it.

This community put together more than $100,000 to build a breeding facility for a tiny little brown bird that nobody's ever heard of, and no zoo guests will ever get to see.

>>And then there is the water.

The Indian River lagoon as a system shaping life here and facing real challenges.

>>Restore Our Shores program really focuses on habitat restoration and research and water quality for the Indian River lagoon.

The Indian River lagoon is this incredible estuary that runs across the eastern coast of Florida.

It stretches about a third of the length Atlantic coast of Florida, one of the most biodiverse estuaries in all of North America.

>>From conservation to close encounters.

Brevar zoo is a Melbourne success story grounded in what a community can build and protect.

>>When we think about a future where wildlife and people thrive, what we're talking about is coexistence.

We're talking about learning how to live alongside nature and as part of nature, and to encourage that and to engage people in that idea.

You have to start with a sense of connection.

You have to remind ourselves and everyone that we are all part of the environment around us.

So we want them to understan the universal needs and concepts that tie us all together as living things, so that we can start to see the similarities more than the differences and walk away with an idea that we really are all in this as one and we're better together.

>>From rocky waters to rocket science, Melbourne has always faced forward.

As we learn together history, community and a few surprises along the way helped form the Melbourne of today.

Thanks for joining us for Florida Road Trip.

I'm Scott Fais.

We'll see you down the road on our next episode through history.

Until then, safe travels everyone.

♪♪ >>This program is brought to you in part by the Paul B. Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation, a proud partner of WUCF and the Central Florida community.

We.