spawned Martin and Indian River County. The first concerted development the area occurred with the extension of Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railroad into the area. The railroad reached Titusville in 1886 and Melbourne in 1894. With the railroad came increased settlement and the first tourists. The first major land boom began in the 1920s after the end of World War I. People flooded into the state of Florida, both tourists from northern winters and new full-time residents, and land prices soared. The Great Depression temporarily stopped growth in Florida. Before the start of World War II, the largest industries in Brevard were commercial fishing, citrus, and tourism. In 1940, the government built Naval Air Station Banana River (now Patrick Space Force Base). This military installation was the first of major federal investment in projects to aid the development of Brevard County. The federal government also funded construction of what is now Florida State Road A1A, paralleling the ocean and providing vehicle access to the NAS. Beginning in the 1930s, Harry T. Moore was a civil rights leader, teacher, and founder of the Brevard County NAACP. After the war he became president of the state NAACP. After the Supreme Court had ruled in 1944 that white primaries were unconstitutional, he conducted voter registration drives and succeeded in registering 31% of black voters in Florida, a higher percentage than in any other southern state. The white establishment resisted, firing both him and his wife Harriette in 1946 from their teaching positions as economic blackmail against them because of their activism. On Christmas night, 1951, a bomb exploded under their home, fatally injuring both of them. The murders were racially motivated and believed committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Four separate investigations were conducted, including the first by the FBI in 1951–1952, and the last in 2005 by the state. No one was ever prosecuted. In the late 1950s, the government opened the Long Range Proving Ground. This later became the Kennedy Space Center. This helped stimulate development in the county; where Brevard had once been considered a "backwoods" area of Florida, it attracted more educated workers and scientists associated with the program. Beginning in the 1960s, new bridges constructed across the waterways were designed as high-rise steel, designed to be high enough to allow passage of boats underneath. As the county was long, people in the southern, more populous