The Porcher House, 1916: Cocoa's coquina mansion and what it cost to build it

The Porcher House is a Classical Revival mansion at 434 Delannoy Avenue in Cocoa, completed in 1916 for citrus magnate Edward Postell Porcher and his wife Byrnina Peck Porcher. It’s built of locally quarried coquina, a soft shellstone the masons cut from the Anastasia Formation outcrops along the Atlantic. The house listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, the City of Cocoa bought it in 2000, and today it functions as a municipal event venue. None of which gets at the real story. The real story is that the Porcher House is what citrus money looked like in Cocoa right before the 1925 land bust ended the era.

Edward Porcher arrived in Cocoa in 1881 from Charleston, South Carolina, sixteen years old, an orphan, dropped off with relatives. By 1916 he ran the largest citrus operation between Daytona and Fort Pierce. The house is what he built when he stopped reinvesting every dollar back into groves.

Detail view of the Porcher House, Cocoa, 1916. — Detail of the Porcher House facade. The coquina blocks were quarried at St. Augustine and barged south, an unfashionably expensive choice in 1916. *Ebyabe via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.*

The building, in specifics

Address: 434 Delannoy Avenue, Cocoa, FL 32922.
Built: 1916. Architect: J.A. Wood of New York and Cocoa (also responsible for several FEC Railway hotels on the East Coast).
Construction: Coquina-block exterior walls roughly 14 inches thick, quarried at St. Augustine and barged south. Interior: heart pine, cypress, and oak.
Square footage: Approximately 8,000 ft² across two stories plus a finished attic.
Original cost: Approximately $35,000 in 1916 dollars (roughly $1.1 million in 2026 dollars by CPI). Documented in the Cocoa Tribune coverage of the construction.
NRHP listing: Added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 5, 1986. Reference number 86001246.
Current owner: City of Cocoa, since 2000.

The coquina is the architectural signature. Coquina was the building stone of Spanish colonial Florida, the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine is the famous example, and by 1916 it was already an unfashionable, expensive way to build a house. Most Florida boom-era mansions of the period were stucco-over-frame or, after 1920, hollow tile. Porcher’s choice to build in coquina was a statement about permanence. He’d watched the 1894–95 freeze kill most of north Florida’s citrus and most of his neighbors’ fortunes; he wanted a house that wouldn’t be touched by the next disaster.

Workers grading citrus at a Fort Pierce packing plant, period photograph. — A Florida citrus packing plant of the era. The Porcher fortune that paid for the 1916 house came from operations like this one running on FEC reefer-car contracts. *Library of Congress FSA/OWI Collection. Public domain.*

Who Edward Porcher was

Born 1865, Charleston, South Carolina. Orphaned by the end of Reconstruction. Migrated to Brevard County in 1881 at sixteen to live with the Magruder family on a Cocoa orange grove. By the 1890s he’d bought his own grove, then several more. In 1893 he co-founded the Indian River and Lake Worth Pineapple Growers Association, Florida pineapples were a brief, lucrative crop on the lagoon before the freeze and the Hawaiian competition ended the run.

By 1910 Porcher’s holdings included groves in Cocoa, Rockledge, Eau Gallie, and Fort Pierce, and he sat on the board of the Indian River Citrus Exchange. By 1916, when he commissioned the house, his estimated net worth was around $500,000 (roughly $15 million in 2026 dollars).

He had a particular reputation for shipping discipline. While most of his neighbors were grading their own fruit on porch tables and shipping in whatever crates they had, Porcher had standardized grades, branded crates, and a contract with the Florida East Coast Railway for guaranteed reefer-car (refrigerated rail car) allocations. His “Deer Park” brand was a known label on northern markets, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago.

What happened to it

Porcher died in 1937, age 71, in the Cocoa house. Byrnina Porcher continued to live there until her own death in 1958, by which point the house was the only Porcher-family asset that mattered. The citrus business had been sold off through the 1940s, dissolved into the post-war Florida Citrus Mutual cooperative system.

After Byrnina’s death the house passed through three private owners, two of whom converted parts of the ground floor into commercial space, a tea room in the 1960s, a real-estate office in the 1980s. The city bought it in 2000 with grant support from the Florida Department of State Division of Historical Resources.

Restoration ran from 2000 through 2003. The original heart-pine floors survived, as did most of the millwork. The coquina exterior was cleaned with low-pressure water (high-pressure would have eroded the soft stone) and a few replacement blocks were quarried and matched. Today the house functions as a municipal event rental and is open for occasional public tours during Cocoa Village events.

The coquina, and what it meant in 1916

Coquina is a sedimentary rock composed almost entirely of broken mollusk shells, cemented together over time in high-energy marine environments. In Florida it occurs in the Anastasia Formation, a coastal limestone band that runs from north of St. Augustine in St. Johns County down to southern Palm Beach County. The Spanish quarried it on Anastasia Island starting in 1598 for a powder house, and from 1672 onward to build the Castillo de San Marcos. The Castillo’s coquina walls famously absorbed cannonballs rather than shattering, which is why a fortress built of soft shellstone outlasted Spanish, British, Confederate, and U.S. military use.

Quarried coquina behaves unlike other building stone. It comes out of the ground saturated and so soft a metal blade can score it. It then has to be left out to cure for one to three years, during which it hardens into a usable but still comparatively soft form. By the late 19th century almost no one in Florida built private residences from it. Stucco-over-frame was cheaper. Hollow tile was faster. Brick was both. Porcher chose coquina anyway, which meant ordering blocks from a St. Augustine quarry, waiting through the cure, and barging the cured stone roughly 130 miles south to the Cocoa wharf. The 1915–1916 Cocoa Tribune construction coverage notes the barging schedule as the longest-lead-time item in the build.

The 14-inch wall thickness reflects coquina’s structural character. Because the stone is soft, walls have to be substantially thicker than equivalent brick or limestone construction to carry comparable loads. The Castillo’s walls are roughly 14 feet thick at the base; the Porcher House walls are 14 inches, on the lower end of what coquina can carry for a two-story residence with a finished attic. The 2000–2003 restoration’s low-pressure water cleaning was a direct response to that material softness; high-pressure equipment would have eroded the shell matrix the way wave action erodes the Anastasia outcrops.

Why it matters more than the postcard

Every Florida town has a Victorian mansion someone built when they got rich. Most of them were torn down in the 1960s. The Porcher House survived because of three things: coquina construction that didn’t decay the way wood frame did, a single family that owned it for 42 years uninterrupted, and a city government in 2000 that had the political will to buy a deteriorating building instead of letting it become a condo site.

If you want to understand what Cocoa was before NASA, before Patrick Air Force Base, before Cocoa Beach was Cocoa Beach, the Porcher House is the document. It’s a citrus packing house’s profits, in coquina, sitting on a 1.2-acre lot in what is now downtown Cocoa, still standing 110 years after it was finished.

Sources

National Register of Historic Places, registration form for Porcher House, NRHP reference 86001246, listed June 5, 1986. Available via the National Park Service NRHP database.
City of Cocoa, “Porcher House” historic property page, verified May 2026.
Florida Master Site File, Florida Division of Historical Resources, Porcher House record.
Cocoa Tribune, construction coverage, 1915–1916 (microfilm via Brevard County Library System).
Florida Historical Society, Florida Historical Quarterly, biographical material on E.P. Porcher.
U.S. Census, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, Porcher household records via Ancestry / National Archives.
Florida East Coast Railway annual reports, 1900–1925, reefer-car allocations to Brevard shippers.
Florida Citrus Mutual archives on Indian River District shipping brands, 1900–1945.
Florida Geological Survey, “Anastasia Formation” stratigraphic descriptions, coquina geology and distribution.
National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, historical record of coquina quarrying at Anastasia Island, 1598–1756.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Secretary’s Standards for Rehabilitation, 36 CFR Part 67 (governing the 2000–2003 restoration approach).