Early Settler Families in Sebastian, Florida

The first settler families in Sebastian were the Parks, from 1865, followed in the 1870s and 1880s by the Gibson, New and Kroegel households, Dempsey Cain at Roseland and the fish house families who made the place a fishing village.

The state's 2022 Park Family Cemetery marker names August Park as the first permanent resident of European descent, settling in the Sebastian area in 1865. The Sebastian Inlet District says the first settlers began reaching the Sebastian River area in the mid-1800s and names two of them, Reverend Thomas New and D.P. Gibson. The University of Central Florida's RICHES collection calls Gibson and New the first non-indigenous settlers of the early 1880s, a claim the newer state marker for Park now predates by more than a decade.

Life on the river was hard. Indian River County Historian Ruth Stanbridge, in an article reprinted by the Pelican Island Conservation Society, describes the Sebastian area of the 1880s as having no roads and very few trails, with the Indian River serving as the highway, and a frontier of alligators, snakes and mosquitoes. Federal homestead law opened land to settlers who cleared five acres and held them for five consecutive years.

August Park was a Danzig-born settler who reached the Sebastian area in 1865, bought 43 acres, raised seven children and gave the land that became the Sebastian Municipal Cemetery.

The Florida Division of Historical Resources marker traces his route: born in Danzig, Germany, in 1833, he emigrated to New York and later moved to Fort Pierce before settling near Sebastian. He lived on his 43 acres for 30 years and married Polly Anna Gore of Washington, North Carolina. The couple had seven children.

Park's house worked as the settlement's first waystation. The marker says he opened his family's home to other settlers coming to Sebastian and let them live with him until they found a permanent place. He also let neighbors bury their dead on his land, beginning with a father whose son had died. After Park died in 1895 his family donated that burial ground to the town, and it became the Sebastian Municipal Cemetery, which the City of Sebastian still runs at 1921 N. Central Avenue.

Gibson and Reverend Thomas New were early Sebastian settlers who each tried to cut an inlet to the ocean, Gibson around 1872 and New in 1881, and New opened the New Haven post office.

The Sebastian Inlet District explains that for years Reverend Thomas New was thought to have made the first attempt at a cut in 1881. A U.S. Geodetic Survey map drawn in the winter of 1880 to 1881 and held in the district's collection already shows Gibson's Cut as a feature, and with other evidence the district concludes Gibson's attempt came first, most likely in 1872. Both channels filled with sand.

New left a more lasting mark on the map. According to RICHES, he started a post office called New Haven and became the village's first postmaster, which is why the settlement was known as New Haven, or Newhaven, until it took the name Sebastian in 1884.

The table lists the early Sebastian and Roseland households documented in state, county and park records, with the date each is first placed in the area.

The Kroegels claimed a 160 acre homestead on the Indian River south of the village from 1881, while Dempsey Cain settled north of the St. Sebastian River in 1877 and gave Roseland its name.

Stanbridge writes that C. F. Gottliob Kroegel and his sons, Paul and Arthur, filed in 1881 for one of the first homestead patents in the area, and that the family was awarded 160 acres in June 1889, most of it upland and the rest lying in the Indian River. The claim took in Barker's Bluff, an Ais shell mound south of Newhaven. Paul later became the warden of Pelican Island; his story has its own page in this series.

Across the river, the Roseland marker says the community's first citizen was Dempsey Cain, who settled on the north side of the St. Sebastian River in 1877 and is credited with naming the community on the south side Roseland after the wild roses that grew there. More settlers followed: Roseland got a post office in 1892, and in 1893 a depot and water tower went up for Henry Flagler's railway.

The Sembler, Smith and Judah families ran the fish houses that made Sebastian a commercial fishing village, and Florida State Parks commemorates all three at the Sebastian Fishing Museum.

Florida State Parks says enterprising settler families came to the Sebastian Inlet area in the 19th and 20th centuries to set up seasonal and permanent fishing camps, and that the Sebastian Fishing Museum commemorates three early Sebastian families that operated fish houses, the Semblers, Smiths and Judahs. The museum holds a replica of an original fish house and dock, a homemade fishing boat, nets and photographs of fishing in the lagoon.

The Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce names Archie Smith and Bascomb Judah as one of the original commercial fishing families, working from a fish house on Indian River Drive. The Sembler name runs through the inlet story too: the Sebastian Inlet District records that Roy O. Couch hired Charles W. Sembler in 1918 to run the suction dredge on that year's attempt to open the inlet.

The city has tried to keep that trade visible. The City of Sebastian says that in early 2009 staff began work to revive a working waterfront on the Indian River Lagoon as part of the city's fishing village heritage, and that Florida Communities Trust awarded more than $3.1 million in Florida Forever funds to buy the property.

Much of the settler families' land in and around Sebastian passed into public use: the Park burial ground became the town cemetery, part of the Kroegel homestead is a county conservation area, and Roseland kept its 1926 community building.

On the Kroegel claim, Indian River County manages the Rodney Kroegel Conservation Area on Indian River Drive, a portion of the original homestead that was given to and farmed by Paul Kroegel's son Rodney. The county lists the site at 2.6 acres and not open to the public, with plans for a walking path and signs telling the story of the homestead and Barker's Bluff.

At Roseland, the state marker records that the A.A. Berry Land Development Company bought the remnants of the old Fleming land grant in 1910, opening the river shore to a new round of buyers. The Berry Land Office building still stands, as does the 1926 Roseland Community Center, built of lumber salvaged from the first bridge across the St. Sebastian River.