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 bright. New roads and drainage projects kept the 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, Inc.
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.S
Brevard County, Florida : A Short History to 1955
Wikipedia Article on Joe H. Wickham
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/keyword/wickham