Books about Sebastian and the Treasure Coast — Sebastian, Florida

The books that document Sebastian center on the 1715 Fleet, led by Kip Wagner's Pieces of Eight (1966), and on Pelican Island, plus Archie Carr's sea turtle writing and Indian River County Historical Society publications.

Sebastian's written record follows the two events that put the town on national maps. The first is the wreck of the 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet on the beaches near the city, and the modern salvage that began here in the late 1950s. The second is March 14, 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt made Pelican Island in the Indian River Lagoon the first federal bird reservation (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). A third, smaller shelf belongs to Archie Carr, whose books made the turtle beaches east of Sebastian Inlet internationally known.

The table below lists the titles that primary sources tie directly to Sebastian, with the years those sources give. It is a starting list, not a full bibliography; the Archive Center at the county's Main Library holds local history collections beyond it.

The key 1715 Fleet books for Sebastian are Bernard Romans' 1775 natural history, whose map located the wrecks, Kip Wagner's Pieces of Eight (1966), and Mendel Peterson's The Funnel of Gold (1975).

The oldest is the one that started the modern search. According to the 1715 Fleet Society, the salvage team's research pointed to A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, written by Bernard Romans and published in 1775. Dr. Kip Kelso traveled to the Library of Congress in the summer of 1959 and found a copy with a map marking where the admiral commanding the Plate Fleet perished, the exact area where Wagner was finding coins on the beach near Sebastian.

Wagner's own account came next. The Real Eight Company was incorporated in 1961, and the society notes that the story of its state salvage agreement is outlined in Kip Wagner's famous book Pieces of Eight, published in 1966 (1715 Fleet Society). Wagner (1906 to 1972) started by picking up silver coins while walking the beach for driftwood; the society calls his book a classic in the shipwreck community (1715 Fleet Society tribute).

For the economics of the fleet, the society's history cites historian Mendel Peterson's 1975 book The Funnel of Gold, which estimated the registered cargo of the combined fleet at 7,000,000 pieces of eight, a figure the society calls clearly an underestimation (1715 Fleet Society history). Read together, the three books cover the fleet's loss, its rediscovery off Sebastian and the dispute over what it carried.

The best local writing on Pelican Island is Indian River County Historian Ruth Stanbridge's article Paul Kroegel and the Story of Pelican Island, published in The Express in Spring 2009, plus a 90th anniversary booklet.

The Stanbridge article ran in the newsletter of the Indian River County Historical Society and is reprinted with permission by the Pelican Island Conservation Society (Pelican Island Conservation Society). It covers the Kroegel homestead, filed in 1881 and awarded in June 1889 as 160 acres, and the Ais shell mound called Barker's Bluff on the Indian River. It also records that in 1884 the fishing community of Newhaven was renamed Sebastian, then part of Brevard County. The article quotes Paul's daughter, Frieda Kroegel Thompson, who wrote that the mound was 1,000 feet long and 400 feet wide.

The same source describes a shorter publication: for the 90th anniversary of the refuge, the Sebastian Area Historical Society and the Indian River County Historical Society composed a booklet on the preservation of Pelican Island. The federal side of the story is summarized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which credits Frank Chapman and the Florida Audubon Society with encouraging Roosevelt's 1903 order and records that Audubon hired Paul Kroegel as the first warden of Pelican Island.

Archie Carr's books, especially Handbook of Turtles (1952) and The Windward Road, are the classic works on the sea turtles that nest on the refuge beaches north and south of Sebastian Inlet.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service profile of the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge states that Carr wrote 11 books and over 120 scientific articles about sea turtles and their habitats before his death in 1987. He spent his entire career at the University of Florida, which awarded him its first Ph.D. in zoology in 1937. The Service writes that he published his first sea turtle paper in 1942, but that his Handbook of Turtles (1952) is what turned his research toward sea turtles.

The Windward Road is the title most tied to the beaches across the lagoon from Sebastian. The Service says Carr described the plight of sea turtles in that book, particularly in the chapter The Passing of the Fleet, which it calls a call to arms that resulted in global efforts to save sea turtles from extinction. The refuge that carries his name runs 20.5 miles between Melbourne Beach and Wabasso Beach, so the book's legacy is on the sand a few miles from the Sebastian city limits.

These books can be borrowed or requested through the Indian River County Library System, whose North branch is at 1001 Sebastian Boulevard, and studied at the Archive Center in the Vero Beach Main Library.

The county system includes a Main branch in downtown Vero Beach, a North branch in Sebastian, the Brackett Library on the Indian River State College Mueller Campus, and the Marian Fell Library in Fellsmere (Indian River County Library). The Sebastian branch is open 10am to 8pm Monday through Wednesday, 10am to 5pm Thursday and Friday, and 10am to 4pm Saturday, and is closed Sunday. The system also lists eBooks through Overdrive. A card is issued at any branch to anyone who shows proof of residency within Indian River County (Library Card policy).

For older and rarer material, the Julian W. Lowenstein Archive Center and Genealogy Department occupies the second floor of the Main Library at 1600 21st Street (Indian River County). The county describes it as a 4000 sq ft repository for local collections, with books and periodicals, local history collections, microfilm, maps and newspaper databases. The Main Library opened 1 February 1991. It is the county's main repository for research on Sebastian families, the Kroegel homestead and the Real Eight years.

Sebastian readers who want to own Florida and Treasure Coast history books can browse Florida book collections, while the county library stays the free route to older titles such as Pieces of Eight (1966).

Digital Towns Market is our marketplace. Its Florida books collection gathers Florida history and nature titles, and its general books collection covers the wider shelf. Availability of specific 1715 Fleet or Pelican Island titles changes, so the county library catalog remains the dependable way for Sebastian residents to read the older books on this list.