On July 1, 1910, the front page of the St. Lucie County Tribune carried an announcement from the north end of the county: improvements valued at a million dollars were beginning at Sebastian, along with a new railroad project. The paper described the town as it stood that summer. It sat on the bank of the Indian River, within two miles of where the Sebastian River joins it, with heavy tropical growth along the river front. Most of the town was built on the slope between a high red hickory ridge and the river, and many good houses stood along the ridge itself.
Four fish houses
Fish had made Sebastian. The Tribune wrote that catching and shipping fish had been the town’s chief industry since its beginning, and named the four wholesale houses then working: the Eagle Fish Co., the Sebastian Fish Co., a Hicks firm, and Parks Bros. One of the town’s fish dealers, George A. Braddock, was in Fort Pierce that March for a meeting of the county executive committee, of which he was a member, and the Fort Pierce News called him a prominent fish dealer of Sebastian.
By 1910 the paper thought citrus had overtaken the fish. It counted many groves of orange and grapefruit in every direction from the town, and said the section’s citrus acreage was the second largest in St. Lucie County, behind only the groves west of Fort Pierce.
The Russell tract
The new money was aimed at land west of the town. For years, the Tribune explained, a tract of 115,000 acres had been tied up in the state courts. W. W. and George Russell of the United States Playing Card Company of Cincinnati had bought it some years before and built a small railroad from Sebastian out to their holdings, and Cincinnatus Farms became a busy place. When the owners died the work stopped, and the improvements went to waste. A legal notice in the News in August 1909 still listed the railroad known as the Sebastian and Cincinnatus Farms railroad, with the land it ran on.
In 1910 a new company owned the tract. The Tribune named it the Sebastian and Fellsmere Farms Railroad Co., capitalized at $2,000,000, and said it was made up of well-known Eastern capitalists. Its plans, as the paper printed them, were these:
- rebuild the old railroad from Sebastian to the western edge of the property, nearly twelve miles;
- dig drainage canals 120 feet wide at the surface and 60 feet at the bottom, across the land north and south and east and west;
- lay out a small city with streets, stores, houses, a church and a schoolhouse, with a $20,000 hotel on the public square as its first building;
- spend $1,000,000 in all, and when the work was done, which the company expected by early the next spring, sell building lots and ten-acre farm tracts.
The company had hired R. A. Conkling of Tillman as its experimental gardener, to plant half-acre plots of every crop that could be grown in Florida, so the garden would be at its best when the first colonists arrived the next spring. All of this was a plan in July 1910. The papers of the following months say how much of it was built.
The railroad goes west
The Tribune’s Sebastian column followed the work. On Sunday, August 14, 1910, the Fellsmere Farm Company brought in a new locomotive, and the column noted that E. H. Every, secretary of the company, was off to Jacksonville again. In the issue of September 9 it reported the railroad completed to the site of the future city of Fellsmere, and the contractors gone on to other work. In late October the column reported considerable damage to the track and to the new bridge over the south prong of the Sebastian River, which was being repaired quickly.
In December 1910 the Tribune printed the articles of incorporation of the Fellsmere Farms Company, with its principal office in the town of Fellsmere, St. Lucie County. Its stated business was to buy, improve, drain, irrigate, cultivate and develop land, and to work its timber. The same month the News ran a front-page report headed “Sebastian Real Estate Busy,” with several real estate deals made in the village.
A shell mound and a bridge
The county was busy at Sebastian that year too. In May 1910 the commissioners had Commissioner Austin arrange a survey of the shell mound at Sebastian. At their June meeting, printed in both papers, they accepted a railway company’s proposal to build a spur track into the mound, and resolved to buy the Kroegel shell mound near Sebastian for $3,430. The deed was to be a warranty deed, and the land was to go back to its owner once the shell was used up. The minutes do not say what the county meant to do with the shell.
At the same meeting the board authorized its chairman to confer with the commissioners of Brevard County about building a bridge across the Sebastian River at Moores Point. The bridge was to join the two counties, and in July the News recorded that plans and specifications for the bridge had arrived from Brevard. St. Lucie County had been cut from Brevard only five years before, a story told on the page on the formation of St. Lucie County, and in September the Sebastian correspondent joked that young St. Lucie and mother Brevard would soon meet in the middle of the intercounty bridge.
Fellsmere, 1911
By early 1911 the new town had its own column in the Tribune, headed FELLSMERE. On March 3 it reported that a painting crew had covered most of the buildings, and that the first baby born in the city of Fellsmere had arrived on Monday, February 27. Ernest H. Every, now described as secretary and general manager, had gone to Fort Pierce on company business. A week later the column promised a post office soon, “and then you can write home from Fellsmere.”
Sebastian’s own news
The town’s best-known resident was Paul Kroegel, the warden of Pelican Island and one of the county’s first commissioners. In March 1910 the Tribune’s announcement column carried the card of P. Kroegel of Sebastian as a candidate for county commissioner of the first district.
Most of Sebastian’s news was smaller. In October 1911 the column reported the town nearly emptied on the evening of Tuesday, October 10, when everyone, old and young, went to spend a few hours on the ocean beach under that week’s bright moon.
Sebastian, Florida, in the county of 1905
Sebastian was one of the north-end towns of the new St. Lucie County. In 1925 the north of the county, Sebastian and Fellsmere with it, became Indian River County. For other north-end settlements of the same years, see Viking; for the river settlements to the south, see Ankona and Eden.
Sources
This story is drawn from the two Fort Pierce weeklies of the day, The St. Lucie County Tribune and the Fort Pierce News, digitized by the Library of Congress in Chronicling America and in the public domain. The July 1910 account of Sebastian, its fish houses and groves, the Russell tract and the new company is in the Tribune of July 1, 1910 (page 1). George A. Braddock is in the News of March 18, 1910 (page 5), and the Cincinnatus Farms railroad notice in the News of August 20, 1909 (page 6).
The Sebastian column’s railroad news is in the Tribune of August 19, 1910 (page 3), September 9, 1910 (page 3) and October 28, 1910 (page 3); the Fellsmere Farms Company’s articles of incorporation in the Tribune of December 9, 1910 (page 9); and the real estate report in the News of December 23, 1910 (page 1). The commissioners’ minutes are in the Tribune of May 13, 1910 (page 3) and June 10, 1910 (page 4), and in the News of June 17, 1910 (page 1) and July 15, 1910 (page 1). The intercounty bridge remark is in the Tribune of September 16, 1910 (page 3).
The Fellsmere column is in the Tribune of March 3, 1911 (page 4) and March 10, 1911 (page 4). Kroegel’s candidacy is in the Tribune of March 25, 1910 (page 4), and the moonlight evening in the Tribune of October 13, 1911 (page 3).
The News has no surviving issues from September to November 1910, so the railroad’s completion and the bridge remark survive in the Tribune only. Two columns in the same issue of the Tribune disagree on whether Fellsmere’s first baby was a boy or a girl, so this page says neither. Names are given only where the scanned text reads them clearly.