Sebastian Trivia and Firsts

Sebastian's most famous first is Pelican Island, the Indian River Lagoon island that President Theodore Roosevelt made the first federal bird reservation on March 14, 1903, the act the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service treats as the start of the National Wildlife Refuge System.

Roosevelt acted with the encouragement of Frank Chapman and the Florida Audubon Society, and Audubon hired Paul Kroegel as the first warden of Pelican Island (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). By the end of his presidency, Roosevelt named nine more reservations in Florida and 55 bird reservations and national game preserves in all. More than 567 refuges have been created nationwide since the 1903 designation at Pelican Island.

Two later honors make the island a double landmark. The Secretary of the Interior designated Pelican Island a National Historic Landmark in 1963, and 30 years later, in 1993, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands recognized the refuge as a Wetland of International Importance (FWS). Only 10 of the more than 2,600 National Historic Landmarks sit on Fish and Wildlife Service lands, and Pelican Island is one of them.

People used the island long before any warden. The Service records that Pelican Island and the surrounding area were first inhabited by the Ais people between 2000 BCE and the mid-1600s (FWS).

Pelican Island is the smallest unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System, and the island off Sebastian has shrunk from 5.5 acres to roughly 3 acres (FWS).

Congress made Pelican Island a wilderness area in 1970, when it covered 5.5 acres. The Service reports that the island began to shrink around 1943, eroded by natural and human-induced wave action, and that by 2000 it was less than half its original size. A large shoreline enhancement project at Pelican Island was completed in 2001 (FWS).

The current figure is lower still. Pelican Island Proper is now roughly 3 acres due to years of boat-induced wave action and sea-level rise, the refuge states. Any 5.5-acre figure describes the Pelican Island of 1903 and 1970, not the island of 2026.

The land-side view of the island is from the Centennial Trail, dedicated on March 14, 2003, a three-quarter-mile footpath that leads to a boardwalk and observation tower (FWS). The trail is ADA accessible, bicycles are not allowed on refuge trails, and its address is 11455 Jungle Trail, Vero Beach, on the Historic Jungle Trail off A1A 3.3 miles south of Sebastian Inlet (Pelican Island Visit Us).

The refuge page carries two sets of hours. Its visitor notes say the Pelican Island public use areas are open daily from 7:30 am until sunset, while its contact panel lists sunrise to sunset (FWS). A visit after 7:30 a.m. fits both.

Sebastian dates its European settlement to 1865, took its name from a post office renamed Sebastian in 1884 and became a municipality in 1924, the year before Indian River County existed.

The settler was August Park, born in Danzig, Germany, in 1833. A 2022 state marker records that Park settled in the Sebastian area in 1865, the first permanent resident of European descent, bought 43 acres and lived there for 30 years (Park Family Cemetery marker). After his death in 1895 his family donated the burial land to the town, creating the Sebastian Municipal Cemetery, where veterans from the Civil War through the Korean War and Paul Kroegel are buried. The marker stands at 1921 N Central Avenue.

The name came by way of the post office. A historical timeline in the city's Community Redevelopment Agency master plan records that Reverend Thomas New opened a post office in the Sebastian area in 1882 and named it Newhaven, and that in 1884 Silvanus Kitching took it over and renamed it Sebastian (City of Sebastian CRA Master Plan). The same timeline records that Sebastian was incorporated as a municipality in 1924, by which time it had a municipal power and light plant, a telephone company and an ice plant.

The railroad came first. In 1893 Henry Flagler's railroad arrived in Sebastian and reached Fort Pierce in 1894, bypassing the tiny community of Vero; Flagler renamed the line the Florida East Coast Railway in 1895 (Vero Beach Railway Station marker).

The county is younger than the city. Indian River County officially became a county on June 29, 1925, after Vero residents broke away from St. Lucie County, and the land had earlier been part of St. Lucie, Brevard, St. Lucia and Mosquito counties (Indian River County). The new county kept the elk seal it took from St. Lucie County, and the Indian River County Clerk of Court still uses it.

Sebastian Inlet stayed open for good only in 1948, after a string of cuts dating to about 1872 filled back in with sand (Sebastian Inlet District).

The Sebastian Inlet District traces the first known attempt, D.P. Gibson's cut, to 1872. At least six substantiated attempts were made by 1905, and all were closed by sand and storms almost as soon as they opened. Roy O. Couch arrived in Brevard County in 1905 and spent decades on the cause (District history).

A public body took over in 1919. On May 23, 1919, the Sebastian Inlet District was formed with a charter of maintaining the channel between the Indian River and the Atlantic Ocean. The inlet opened again in June of 1923 at its current location, with small jetties of coquina rock hauled on barges and moved by a Model T Ford that Couch converted.

World War II undid that work. A nor'easter closed the inlet in 1941, it stayed shut through most of the war, and the site became a U.S. Navy amphibious training ground for demolition squads. In 1948 Couch, Harry C. Goode Sr., Jake Brannin and others used surplus U.S. Navy demolitions to blast the inlet open again, and it has remained open ever since (Sebastian Inlet District).

The inlet also moved a county line and made a surf break. When the bridge opened on February 27, 1965, Brevard County ceded almost 3 miles of land south of the inlet to Indian River County in return for help completing the bridge and paving A1A. A later North Jetty extension created the wave surfers named First Peak, which produced champions including Kelly Slater; surfers and fishermen signed a peace pact in April 1970, and Sebastian Inlet State Park followed in 1971 (District).

The next change is under way. The District notes that the Florida Department of Transportation will begin replacing the 1965 bridge in 2026, and its truck haul beach project brought contractor ATL back in November 2025 to dredge an additional 130,000 cubic yards from the inlet channel and sand trap for the beaches south of Sebastian Inlet.

Fellsmere, west of Sebastian, holds Florida's first woman voter, and Roseland, on the St. Sebastian River, owes its name to wild roses.

At a February 1915 meeting at the Dixie Theater, Fellsmere citizens unanimously accepted a charter that granted women full and equal suffrage in municipal elections; the provision went unnoticed in Tallahassee, and Governor Park Trammell signed it into law (equal suffrage marker). In the June 19, 1915 city election, Zena M. Dreier was the first woman to cast a ballot in Fellsmere, in all of Florida and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, four years before the 1919 constitutional amendment. The 2004 marker stands on Broadway, block 99, in Fellsmere.

Roseland's marker reaches back further. The Ays lived where the St. Sebastian River meets the Indian River when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, and in 1816 George Fleming received a large land grant on both sides of the St. Sebastian River (Roseland marker). Dempsey Cain settled on the north side of the river in 1877 and is credited with naming the south-side community Roseland for the wild roses that grew there in abundance.

Roseland got a post office in 1892, and in 1893 a depot and water tower were built for Henry Flagler's East Coast Railway. The 1926 Roseland Community Center was built of lumber salvaged from the first bridge across the St. Sebastian River, and it still stands, according to the 2014 marker at 12973 Bay Street (Florida Division of Historical Resources).

Sebastian Inlet lies within the stretch of coast between Melbourne Beach and Wabasso Beach that Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge protects as the most significant loggerhead sea turtle nesting area in the world (FWS).

The refuge stretches across 20.5 miles of beach between Melbourne Beach and Wabasso Beach in Brevard and Indian River counties, and it was established in 1991 in honor of Dr. Archie Carr Jr. (Archie Carr NWR). It is also the most significant area for green turtle nesting in North America, and these beaches hold 20 to 35 percent of all loggerhead and green sea turtle nests in the United States.

Most of the Sebastian firsts can be seen at five public sites, from the Pelican Island Centennial Trail to Sebastian Inlet State Park, each listed below with its address and access details.

Sebastian Inlet State Park is listed as open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with an $8 per vehicle fee, and two museums tell its history: the McLarty Treasure Museum on the 1715 Spanish treasure fleet and the Sebastian Fishing Museum on the area fishing industry (Florida State Parks).

The 24-hour listing now has limits. Effective Nov. 12, 2025, the South Ranger Station at Sebastian Inlet State Park keeps standard park hours of 8 a.m. to sunset, with after-hours entry only for registered campers or annual pass holders with a permit, while the North Ranger Station stays open 24 hours a day (Florida State Parks). The park also warns that the north side may reach capacity on weekends and that beach access from the south side is unavailable during bridge construction, which leaves the north entrance as the only round-the-clock way in, and a weekday arrival there avoids the weekend capacity closures.