Notable Residents Through History in Sebastian, Florida

The best documented notable residents of Sebastian's past are Paul Kroegel, the first federal wildlife refuge warden, the pioneer August Park, the Sembler fishing family and the treasure salvor Kip Wagner, with inlet champion Roy Couch close beside them.

This list is limited to historical figures and public officials whose lives are recorded in state markers, county and federal pages, the Sebastian Inlet District archive and university collections. Each one changed something that still shapes Sebastian: the refuge across the Indian River Lagoon, the town cemetery, the inlet to the Atlantic, the fishing trade on Indian River Drive and the treasure history of the beaches to the south.

Several of these people have fuller pages of their own in this Sebastian history series, including Paul Kroegel, the early settler families and Kip Wagner and the Real Eight company. This page gathers them in one place and adds the public roles that the single-subject pages leave out.

The table below lists each notable figure tied to Sebastian, the years of the documented role and the source that records it.

Paul Kroegel is Sebastian's best-known resident because his watch over Pelican Island led to the first federal wildlife refuge and made him, in the words of the Indian River Lagoon Encyclopedia, the first employee of the refuge system.

The encyclopedia describes him as a Sebastian resident who fought to stop the slaughter of brown pelicans in the Indian River Lagoon, and records that he died in Sebastian in 1948. Less often told is his public life on land. Indian River County Historian Ruth Stanbridge, in a Pelican Island Conservation Society reprint, writes that from 1905 to 1918 Kroegel served as County Commissioner for the northern part of St. Lucie County, the district that then included Sebastian.

Indian River County adds that Kroegel was instrumental in routing the first railroad through what is now Indian River County, working with Henry Flagler. His children appear in the record too: Stanbridge notes that his son Rodney went with the Harvard naturalist George Nelson to the Fellsmere marshes to collect specimens, and that his daughter Frieda Kroegel Thompson left the best description of Barker's Bluff, the shell mound the family lived on.

August Park, Thomas New and Dempsey Cain each left something still in use: the town cemetery, the first post office name and the name of Roseland.

The state Park Family Cemetery marker says August Park, born in Danzig in 1833, settled in the Sebastian area in 1865 as the first permanent resident of European descent and let his land be used for burials; his family later gave it to the town as the Sebastian Municipal Cemetery. The same marker lists Paul Kroegel as a notable burial there.

Thomas New, according to RICHES, started the post office called New Haven and became the village's first postmaster, giving the settlement its first name. North of the river, the Roseland marker calls Dempsey Cain the community's first citizen, settling on the north side of the St. Sebastian River in 1877 and naming Roseland for its wild roses.

Roy Couch led the long campaign for a permanent Sebastian Inlet, with a Sembler running the dredge in 1918 and his great-grandson and namesake later serving on the inlet district commission.

The Sebastian Inlet District calls Couch a figure whose name is synonymous with the Sebastian Inlet. It records that he arrived in Brevard County in 1905, pushed a 1914 petition and the 1917 ballot measure, and saw local residents form the Sebastian Inlet Association on April 25, 1918. Couch built a six-inch suction dredge that year and hired Charles W. Sembler to dredge the cut. In 1948 Couch, Harry C. Goode Sr., Jake Brannin and others used surplus Navy demolitions to blast the inlet open, and it has stayed open since.

The Sembler line returned to inlet business in 1987. The district records that Governor Bob Martinez appointed Charles W. Sembler II, the fifth generation of a commercial fishing family with deep roots in Sebastian, to fill a vacancy on the commission, and that his great-grandfather and namesake had worked the dredge in 1918. The district archive does not say where Couch himself lived, so he is listed here as a figure of the Sebastian Inlet story rather than as a town resident.

Kip Wagner, a local builder, turned coins washed out of the dunes near Sebastian Inlet by a 1955 hurricane into a salvage company, the Real 8, that recovered thousands of coins and gave the region the name Treasure Coast.

NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory explains the chain of events. In the early 1940s amateur archaeologist Charles Higgs found evidence of the Spanish salvage camps in the dunes near Sebastian Inlet, and later work by the Florida Park Service tied them to the 1715 fleet. A passing hurricane in 1955 washed away dunes around the camps and exposed artifacts and silver coins, which touched off renewed salvage by local builder Kip Wagner and his Real 8 Company.

NOAA says the company eventually recovered thousands of coins, pieces of jewelry and a number of cannon, and that the discovery led to the establishment of a state park and museum and to the area being called the Treasure Coast. The full story of the Real Eight company has its own page in this series.

The Sembler, Smith and Judah families, who ran Sebastian's fish houses, are the fishing families named in the public record, and Florida State Parks commemorates them at the Sebastian Fishing Museum.

Florida State Parks says the museum at Sebastian Inlet State Park commemorates three of Sebastian's early families that operated fish houses, the Semblers, Smiths and Judahs. The Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce identifies Archie Smith and Bascomb Judah as one of the original commercial fishing families, working from a fish house on Indian River Drive. The same Chamber page notes that Kroegel's statue stands in Riverview Park, a few blocks up the river from that waterfront.