WWII and Postwar Era in Sebastian, Florida

During World War II Sebastian lived under coastal blackout rules, its inlet stayed closed, and citizen spotters watched the shore from towers for German submarines.

The war reached the lagoon before Pearl Harbor did. A strong nor'easter closed Sebastian Inlet in 1941, and the Sebastian Inlet District history says the inlet then remained closed through most of the war for safety reasons. The same account records that lights of any kind were illegal along the coast because of the U-boat threat, and that towers were built along the shore and manned by citizen spotters.

Movement across the lagoon was watched as well. The state historical marker at the Wabasso bridge on County Road 510, south of Sebastian, says that during World War II the bridge to Orchid Island was limited to people who lived on the island, and the bridge tender checked the credentials of anyone crossing (A.B. Michael (Wabasso) Bridge marker).

The war years also mark a turning point for Pelican Island, the refuge in the lagoon off Sebastian. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the island measured 5.5 acres in 1903 and began to shrink around 1943, eroded by natural and human-caused wave action, a loss that later drove a 2001 shoreline project.

The Navy turned the closed Sebastian Inlet into an amphibious training ground for demolition squads late in the war, while Naval Air Station Vero Beach, south of Sebastian, trained aviators from 1942 to 1945.

The Sebastian Inlet District history states that during late World War II the inlet site was turned over to the U.S. Navy as an amphibious training ground for its demolition squads.

The bigger installation was at the Vero Beach airport. The state marker there says Naval Air Station Vero Beach was commissioned on November 24, 1942, to train more than 2,700 men plus 300 WAVES and women Marines, and that the city airport grew from 100 acres to 2,500 acres (U.S. Naval Station, Vero Beach marker). Its mission moved from dive bombers to daytime pilots and finally to night fighters.

The cost was real. The marker records more than 100 lives lost in flight training accidents and 237,102 hours of flight time logged between the first flight in December 1942 and September 2, 1945. The station was placed in caretaker status in June 1946 and deeded back to Vero Beach, ending the wartime military presence in north Indian River County.

Sebastian Inlet was blasted open for good in 1948 using surplus Navy explosives left behind after the war, and it has stayed open since.

After several short-lived openings, work resumed in 1947, and in 1948 Sebastian Inlet District commissioners Roy O. Couch, Harry C. Goode Sr., Jake Brannin and others used leftover Navy demolitions to open the channel, according to the district's history. Through the 1950s the district dredged to deepen and widen the channel and extended both jetties.

The reopening came only a few years after the Sebastian Inlet District's 1939 dredging project, which had removed an estimated 61,000 cubic yards of sand for $6,000 before the 1941 storm sealed the channel again. The full story of the cut, from the 1872 attempt to the 1948 blast, is told on this site's Cutting Sebastian Inlet page; here the point is that the war first shut the inlet and then supplied the means to reopen it.

Postwar Sebastian was a fishing town of fewer than 400 people, with no high school and a short Main Street at U.S. 1.

Vero Beach Magazine reported in July 2024, drawing on residents who grew up in Sebastian some 70-plus years earlier, that the community then numbered fewer than 400 people. A family that arrived in 1950 recalled that there was no high school in Sebastian, so teenagers were bused to Vero Beach High School. Commercial fishing families netted mostly mullet and packed it on ice for trucks bound for New York.

Downtown was small. The magazine describes a grocery store and a hardware store sharing the building at the corner of Main Street and U.S. 1, a small post office and a drugstore; for anything else, residents drove to Vero Beach or Melbourne. Children fished or played softball on the grammar school ball field. The 1927 Sebastian school building at 1235 Main Street now houses the Sebastian Area Historical Museum.

Much of that town survives on the map. The National Park Service lists the Old Town Sebastian Historic District East, around Main and Washington streets, the riverfront drive and the FEC railroad, with periods of significance that include 1925 to 1949 and 1950 to 1974 (NPGallery, NRIS 03000728).

Three postwar developments reshaped Sebastian: General Development Corporation's late-1950s street grid, the push to expand Pelican Island refuge, and the 1960s rediscovery of the 1715 Fleet.

The City of Sebastian says that in the late 1950s General Development Corporation designed and built the street and drainage system for about 15,000 single-family home sites, most of which were developed by the late 1990s. Vero Beach Magazine adds that General Development platted some 1,345 acres in what is now the Sebastian Highlands and advertised $500 quarter-acre lots across the Northeast, and that growth stayed slow until the 1970s; today Sebastian is the most populous municipality in Indian River County.

Conservation grew alongside the lots. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service credits Joe Michael, an Orchid Island citrus grower, with forming the Indian River Area Preservation League in 1959 and leading a nine-year campaign that expanded Pelican Island refuge from a few islands to more than 5,400 acres. The refuge was named a National Historic Landmark in 1963.

Offshore, the 1715 treasure fleet came back into view. The 1715 Fleet Society says the modern age of treasure hunting began in 1960 with the Real Eight group, whose first site, the Cabin Wreck, lies about two miles south of Sebastian Inlet.

The barrier island opened up last. The bridge carrying A1A over Sebastian Inlet opened on February 27, 1965, and in return for helping finish the bridge and pave A1A, Brevard County ceded almost 3 miles of land south of the inlet to Indian River County, the Sebastian Inlet District records. The state then bought the land around the inlet, and Sebastian Inlet State Park was established in 1971.