Paul Kroegel, First Refuge Warden in Sebastian, Florida

Paul Kroegel was a German-born Sebastian homesteader and boatbuilder who protected the pelicans of Pelican Island and became its first federal warden in 1903.

The Indian River Lagoon Encyclopedia gives his birth as January 9, 1864, in Chemnitz, Germany. By age seventeen he and his father had settled in Sebastian, making their home on an Ais shell mound on the west bank of the Indian River. The Florida Historical Society puts the move in 1881, when a German immigrant named Paul Kroegel came to the Sebastian River area and noticed the unusual gathering of birds on a small island across the water.

That island was Pelican Island, the rookery that Kroegel watched from his front yard for more than two decades before Washington took notice. He was not a scientist or a wealthy patron. The encyclopedia describes a man who put his sailboat and his five foot six inch frame between market gunners and the nesting colony, wearing a big hat and carrying a double-barreled 10 gauge shotgun, years before any law gave him the authority to do it.

His life spanned the whole arc of the young settlement. When the Kroegels arrived the community was still called Newhaven; the Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce records that it was renamed Sebastian in 1884. When he died in Sebastian in 1948, the town had been incorporated for more than two decades and Pelican Island had become the first unit of a national refuge system.

The Kroegels lived on a 160 acre homestead on the west bank of the Indian River, built around the Ais shell mound called Barker's Bluff, south of the old Newhaven settlement.

Indian River County Historian Ruth Stanbridge, in an article reprinted by the Pelican Island Conservation Society, writes that C. F. Gottliob Kroegel and his sons, Paul and Arthur, filed for one of the first homestead patents in the area in 1881. Under the federal homestead rules of the time, five acres had to be cleared and held for five consecutive years. In June of 1889 the family was awarded a homestead of 160 acres, with 143 and 18/100ths acres of upland and the rest lying in the Indian River.

The land included Barker's Bluff, one of the largest shell mounds along the Indian River and a landmark for river travelers. Stanbridge quotes Paul's daughter, Frieda Kroegel Thompson, describing the mound as 1,000 feet long, 400 feet wide at its widest point and higher than the tallest palm trees. From the top of it Paul could see the mangrove island where hundreds of brown pelicans roosted and nested year after year.

Part of that ground survives in public hands. 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 Kroegel's son Rodney. The county lists it at 2.6 acres and not open to the public, with long term plans for a walking path and signs explaining the site.

Kroegel moved from unpaid guardian to commissioned warden in stages: a game warden appointment in 1893, an Audubon warden post after 1901, and the federal appointment on April 1, 1903.

Stanbridge writes that in 1893 the American Ornithologists' Union made Paul a game warden and that he began to lobby for protection of the pelicans. The encyclopedia adds that Florida passed a law in 1901 to protect non-game birds and that the Florida Audubon Society hired four wardens to enforce it, with Kroegel covering the Pelican Island area. Frank Chapman, the ornithologist, wintered at Mrs. Latham's Oak Lodge across the Indian River from Micco, and Stanbridge records that the mail boat carried word to Kroegel when a useful visitor was coming.

The Florida Historical Society says naturalists including Chapman visited Kroegel and appealed to President Theodore Roosevelt on his behalf. Roosevelt signed the order creating the Pelican Island Reservation on March 14, 1903, and Stanbridge records that on April 1, 1903, Paul Kroegel was appointed the nation's first warden. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service phrases the same step this way: Audubon hired Paul Kroegel as the first warden of Pelican Island.

Sources describe the pay differently, and both versions are on the record. Stanbridge gives a salary of $1 a month. The encyclopedia says Kroegel was paid $12 a year by the federal government, raised to $15 in 1909, and $7 a month by the Florida Audubon Society, and that he had to supplement it with boat building and farming because Congress did not appropriate money to guard the early refuges.

The dates below trace Kroegel from his arrival on the Indian River in 1881 to his death in Sebastian in 1948, with the source for each line.

The end date of his federal service is the one place the record splits. Stanbridge writes that he was warden until 1920, when the federal government discontinued the services of a warden. The encyclopedia says the pelicans abandoned the island in the fall of 1923 and that, without pelicans to protect, Kroegel was terminated from federal service in 1926.

The warden of Pelican Island kept boats and gunners away from the nesting colony off Sebastian, working alone from his own sailboat with a badge, a shotgun and a flag.

The encyclopedia says his primary duty was to warn off trespassers and vandals, and that he defined the reservation's boundary loosely as the waters around Pelican Island within gun range. One of his first acts was a large sign on the island reading U.S. Reservation, Keep Off; the sign scared the birds, and he later took it down. The encyclopedia also says he raised the U.S. flag on a 50 foot flagpole so passing boats could see the island had become federal property.

Stanbridge tells the flag story with a local twist. She writes that Kroegel was given a large flag for Pelican Island but put it by his own dock on the Sebastian shore instead, so approaching boats would blow their horns in respect. The horn was his signal to get into his sailboat and place himself between pleasure boats and the island.

He could guard Pelican Island but not the birds' choices. After a hurricane in 1910 many of the pelicans moved to a nearby island before returning a few years later, and in the fall of 1923 they left again, according to the encyclopedia.

Beyond the refuge, Kroegel served as a county commissioner for the Sebastian end of St. Lucie County from 1905 to 1918 and worked with Henry Flagler on the railroad route through the area.

Stanbridge records the commission service and explains the county changes that framed it. Sebastian was part of Brevard County when the Kroegels arrived; St. Lucie County was created from Brevard in 1905, and Indian River County was created from St. Lucie in 1925. For thirteen of those years the warden of Pelican Island also sat on the board governing the northern part of St. Lucie County.

Indian River County adds that Kroegel was instrumental in the routing of the first railroad through Indian River County through his collaboration with Henry Flagler. The same county page describes the homestead as including a large prehistoric shell midden known as Barker's Bluff, the Ais site that ties the Kroegel story to the much older history of the Indian River Lagoon.

Stanbridge also notes that from 1901 the Harvard naturalist George Nelson came to Florida to study brown pelicans in winter, and that Kroegel's son Rodney went with him to the Fellsmere marshes to collect live specimens.

Kroegel is remembered by a statue in Riverview Park on the Indian River, by his grave in the Sebastian Municipal Cemetery and by the county conservation area on his old homestead.

The Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce notes that his statue stands in Riverview Park. The encyclopedia says the memorial statue was unveiled in 2003 and shows Kroegel looking out at Pelican Island, smoking his pipe, with pelicans at his feet; the plaque reads One person can make a difference. The City of Sebastian places Riverview Park at U.S. 1 and C.R. 512, Sebastian Boulevard, along the shores of the Indian River.

The Park Family Cemetery marker, placed by the Florida Division of Historical Resources in 2022, lists one notable burial in the Sebastian Municipal Cemetery: Paul Kroegel, the manager of the first national wildlife refuge, instrumental in establishing Pelican Island as the first federal bird reservation.