Telling The Story Of Old Florida

The Marsh Landing's She-Crab Soup - Purchase the November 2014 issue for the full recipe!

Wandering through the quiet streets of Fellsmere, you might be forgiven for thinking you had gone back in time to the old boom and bust era of the 1920s and ΄30s, such is the topography and flavor of this small Florida city. With just over 5,000 denizens residing in an agrarian landscape, you are just as likely to see cowboys on horseback as businessmen behind steering wheels.

The dichotomy of Fellsmere is that it is a city steeped in a rich history of bygone pioneer days and according to the city’s website, a city of firsts: the first city below the Mason-Dixon line to allow women the right to vote, the first in Indian River County to have paved streets and sidewalks, the first in the county to show silent movies, the first to install telephone service and the first to build a nine-hole golf course, to name but a few. It is also the first to have an authentically restored restaurant owned and operated by a mother-daughter team whose sole mission is to preserve the past and revitalize the future. 

Marsh Landing Restaurant on Broadway is housed in the former Fellsmere Estate Building built in 1926. It was originally the sales office for a corporation founded by New Yorker E. Nelson Fell after whom Fellsmere was named – “mere” meaning “a watery place.” The corporation crashed with the Depression of 1929, and the building became home to the Fellsmere Crystal Sugar Company. Ensuing years saw it serve as a municipal building and a police station replete with holding cells before it fell into disrepair.