Celebrating Sebastian: A Big Small Town

The City of Sebastian turns 100 this year, and the proud residents are showcasing its colorful history with celebrations throughout the year, culminating with a centennial birthday event December 8 at Riverview Park.

According to local historian Ellen Stanley, author of Pioneering Sebastian and Roseland, “The people who created Sebastian were families who relished a sense of community; their goal was to establish a town. They differed from their neighbors to the south, where Vero Beach’s development was driven by the Indian River Farms Company and strong civic leaders. Sebastian’s development was driven by the individuals who settled the area.”

After World War I, people were restless and on the move. “It was sort of like everyone felt after COVID,” Stanley says. They had new automobiles, and many drove them over rough roads of gravel and marl to Florida. They came to drain and develop Florida and to participate in the land boom of the ’20s, which ended with the crash of 1929.

In earlier days, the people who pioneered the Sebastian area, whether of European or Indigenous descent, relied on fishing as an important food source; it later became a major industry for Sebastian residents who made their living as commercial fishermen. Prominent commercial fishing families whose fish houses dotted the riverfront include the Semblers from New York State, who settled in Sebastian in 1901 and are still in the business today; the family of Archie Smith, who arrived in 1924; and the Judahs, who came several years later.

Pioneer settler August Parks had arrived in the 1860s and built a home for his family on a huge shell mound, which was composed of discarded oyster shells deposited by Indians and other early inhabitants of the area for hundreds of years.

“The Parks property was 43 acres from what is now U.S. 1 to Indian River Drive on the river,” says Kathy McDonald, past president of the Sebastian Area Historical Society. The Parks family started the cemetery, which is now the Sebastian Municipal Cemetery on North Central Avenue.

The Gottlob Kroegel family came next. “One of the sons, Paul Kroegel, who was a great lover of nature, became the first game warden of Pelican Island,” McDonald says. By the 1890s, the slaughter of wild birds to provide plumage to top fashionable ladies’ hats was rampant among visiting hunters to the Sebastian area. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt designated Pelican Island in Sebastian the nation’s first migratory bird refuge.

McDonald adds, “Paul would hide out on an island and watch for tourist hunters, and then he would fire his gun to alert the birds to fly away. The nation’s third game warden was named in Key West, and he was murdered by hunters who valued the feathers over human life. It was dangerous business.”

McDonald serves as one of the guides at the Sebastian Area Historical Museum, located in the former Sebastian Elementary School, built in 1927 at 1235 Main Street. Items donated by longtime Sebastian residents make up much of the collection on display. To learn more about Sebastian’s rich history and to hear many interesting tales, it would be well worth a visit to the museum.

A look back with residents who spent their childhoods in Sebastian some 70-plus years ago reveals what the community was like when the population numbered fewer than 400.

Dot Redfern Judah offers a glimpse of the commercial fishing industry that thrived along Sebastian’s waterfront. She and her family, originally from Georgia, arrived in Sebastian in 1950 in time for her to attend Vero Beach High School. “There was no high school in Sebastian, and we were bused to Vero Beach,” she says.

Her father was a fisherman, and the teenager, after graduating from high school in 1953, married Clarence Judah. Clarence; his father, Bascomb; and brother, Coolidge, had moved down from the Panhandle and operated Judah and Sons commercial fishing business in Sebastian for 70 years; it just closed in 2019.

Some fishermen fished all night, but the Judahs went to work at 4:30 each morning. Their netted catch was mostly mullet, Dot Judah remembers. They packed the fish on ice, and every week one or two trucks came from New York to stop at each fish house and buy and load crates of fish to take north. “I wish you could have seen the hundreds of white pelicans that hung around the fish house when a boat came in. It was a beautiful sight,” she says.

Clarence Judah fished six days a week, and on Sundays he mended the nets and did other repairs. It was also a special day for the family, she says. “After Sunday school, we took our two boys, and Richard and Mary Lou Brown took their five kids, and we would all go out to an island and cook hot dogs and oysters and water ski. Those were the good old days, the best time of my life.”

Patrick Morgan, the current president of the Sebastian Area Historical Society, moved with his family to the area in the 1950s, and he attended Sebastian Elementary School. “There wasn’t much here at the time,” he says, describing the downtown. The Vickers family had the building on the corner of Main Street and U.S. 1 and operated a grocery store on one side and a hardware store on the other. There was a small post office and Ponders Drug Store.” If the residents needed something they couldn’t find there, they traveled to Vero Beach or Melbourne to shop.

For fun, Morgan and his friends went fishing or played softball on the ball field at the grammar school. “It was a great place to grow up,” he says. Morgan left Sebastian when his father took a job in Sanford, but he returned with his own family in the 1970s.

Both Dot Judah and Patrick Morgan enjoyed the friendly nature of the young city of Sebastian. “The people living here had no pretentions, and they took care of one another,” Morgan says. “Of course, it was small enough that we knew everyone in town.”

The growth of Sebastian was slow until the 1970s, when General Development Corporation, a major developer in Florida, bought and platted some 1,345 acres in what is now the Sebastian Highlands subdivision. General Development advertised its quarter-acre, $500 lots throughout the Northeast, attracting retirees looking for affordable housing and great weather. The affordable housing also drew people who worked in Vero Beach. Sebastian’s population has increased steadily to today’s 28,000, making it the most populous municipality in Indian River County.

Sebastian’s service industry and public sector employs a significant number of the city’s residents. The working waterfront is home to the commercial fishing, clamming, and oystering industries and is also a mecca for dining and entertainment.

“The biggest challenge we have,” says Sebastian Mayor Ed Dodd, “is handling the inevitable growth.” However, he believes it can be done to the satisfaction of residents, from young families to retirees who prize their current way of life.

He adds, “We did a survey of the citizens a few years back and asked what they like best about Sebastian. The number one thing by a large margin was its parks.” The city maintains a robust park system, from Riverview Park on U.S. 1 to the numerous pocket parks throughout the city and the Barber Street Sports Complex with football, baseball, and soccer fields as well as a skate park.

“We are an outdoor-focused community,” Dodd says, and indeed residents and visitors enjoy fishing, biking, hiking, playing golf at Sebastian Municipal Golf Course, skydiving at the airport, and visiting such treasures as Sebastian Inlet State Park and the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge.

For shopping, residents may still head north or south to purchase items not available at Sebastian’s retailers, to see a movie, or to experience certain dining and performing arts offerings in Vero Beach and Melbourne.

Some of these amenities may never be available in Sebastian, but that doesn’t seem to bother the residents. “People love Sebastian the way it is,” Dodd says. “It has an ‘Old Florida’ feel to it and a great quality of life that is what the residents and visitors want to retain.”

Visit cityofsebastian.org for a full listing of events to commemorate its centennial throughout the year, and join in celebrating Sebastian’s Old Florida charm and the sense of community its founders created.