Florida East Coast Railway in Sebastian

The Florida East Coast Railway line reached Sebastian in 1893, when Henry Flagler's railroad arrived and the depot beside the Main Street tracks opened on December 11 of that year (Florida Department of State marker).

Henry Flagler's railroad arrived in Sebastian in 1893, according to the Florida Department of State marker for the Vero Railway Station. Sebastian Daily, drawing on the history posted inside the restored building, gives December 11, 1893 as the day the original Sebastian Train Depot opened, at the railroad tracks on Main Street in Sebastian. From there the rails pushed south and reached Ft. Pierce in 1894, running past the scattered homesteads at Vero, which only got a station of its own around 1903.

The trains did not yet carry the name used today. The same state marker records that Flagler renamed his railroad the Florida East Coast Railway (FEC) in 1895, two years after the first locomotives crossed the St. Sebastian River. Sebastian Daily describes the 1893 depot as the link that tied Sebastian to the main line that would run from Jacksonville to Miami.

Before 1893 the Indian River Lagoon was the highway. A 1963 state marker titled Sebastian states that the settlement, begun in the 1870s, became an important trading and fishing center during the era of the river steamers. Boats set the pace of the place; the same marker notes that pioneers tried in 1886 to cut an inlet from the river to the ocean to improve commerce and fishing. The railroad offered something boats could not: a fixed schedule north to Jacksonville and beyond.

The railroad let Sebastian fishermen ship iced catch from the Indian River Lagoon to northern cities, turning a local river trade into a commercial fishing economy (Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce).

Rails plus ice turned the river catch into an export. The Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce history says that with the arrival of Flagler's locomotives along with the development of icehouses for pack, commercial fishing became a stronghold in Sebastian. The same history notes that by the 1890s Sebastian, as well as Roseland, had a post office, a sign of two small river communities now tied to the outside world by mail and freight.

The working chain lasted for decades. Sebastian Daily, writing in March 2022 about the Archie Smith fish house on Indian River Drive, described it step by step: fishermen worked the Indian River mostly at night, the fish were cleaned and packed in barrels with shaved ice, a trolley carried them to Indian River Drive, and trucks would then transport the seafood to the railway before it was delivered to cities like New York. Archie Smith purchased the property in 1927, a generation after the depot opened, and the shipping pattern still ended at the FEC tracks.

The Sebastian Inlet District history carries the thread into the 1930s, when commercial fishing was the lifeblood of the town of Sebastian and railroads helped transport fish to northern markets while new ice plants cut losses and steadied prices. The railroad was not everyone's ally on the water. In its account of the 1918 inlet cut, the district repeats a rumor that a night crew organized by influential area residents, who opposed the inlet to protect grove, cattle farms and railroad interests, set out to plug the new channel.

Sebastian became the Fellsmere junction in 1910, when a 10-mile railroad from Fellsmere began delivering logs and freight to the FEC main line at Sebastian (Fellsmere Railroad marker).

For four decades Sebastian was where an inland line met the FEC. The Florida Department of State marker for the Fellsmere Railroad, placed in 2011, records that the standard-gauge Fellsmere Railroad was completed in 1910 with 60 lb. rail, replacing the old Sebastian & Cincinnatus narrow-gauge railroad built between Sebastian and Fellsmere. From September 1910 the Fellsmere Farms Company used the 10-mile line for carrying logs to the Florida East Coast Railway in Sebastian and for hauling heavy machinery used to dig drainage canals at Fellsmere.

Passengers followed the freight. The marker states that the railroad opened to the public on May 1, 1911, and ran four passenger trains daily between Sebastian and Fellsmere, with only two on Sunday. On January 23, 1913 a 12 by 32 foot depot opened in Fellsmere, and by April 1915 the track ran 6 miles farther west to Broadmoor, a town that no longer exists.

The branch changed hands in the 1920s. On June 2, 1924 the Trans-Florida Central railroad, known as the Dinky Line, took over operations, and on November 30, 1952 the railroad officially ceased operations after 42 years of service. For the whole of that period, freight and passengers moving between the Fellsmere farmlands and the coast changed trains at Sebastian.

Sebastian's 1893 depot went to Ft. Pierce, came back to Cleveland Street in March 2017 and reopened to the public in January 2021 (Sebastian Daily).

The depot corner still anchors the oldest part of Sebastian. The National Park Service record for the Old Town Sebastian Historic District, East, published August 4, 2003, gives its location as Main and Washington streets, Riverside Drive and the FEC Railroad, with community planning and development as its area of significance. A companion listing, the Old Town Sebastian Historic District, West, bounded by Palmetto Avenue, Lake Street and Main Street, was published January 6, 2004 and names 1890 as a significant year.

The building itself spent years away. Sebastian Daily reported on March 13, 2017 that the original train depot of Sebastian had come back from Ft. Pierce, where it had gone to a group of train enthusiasts after the City of Sebastian gave it up. The city decided not to take ownership of the old train station because of the cost of moving it, so a private individual paid for the move of about 3 hours and set the building on Cleveland Street near U.S. Highway 1.

In January 2021 Sebastian Daily reported that the restored Sebastian Train Depot was officially open to the public as a restaurant, with the history of the Florida East Coast Railway and the December 1893 opening posted inside. The depot now sits a short distance from the Main Street crossing where it served the railroad for its first decades.

Today the FEC corridor still crosses the St. Sebastian River on a line first bridged in 1926 and carries Brightline trains through town, but no passenger station serves Sebastian (Vero News).

The railroad's crossing of the St. Sebastian River north of town dates from 1926. Writing in January 2022 about Brightline test runs, Vero News identified the 1,625-foot bridge built that year and reported that Brightline was putting in twin concrete railroad bridges in its place as part of the line's extension to Orlando.

Passenger trains have not stopped in the area for more than half a century. The state marker for the Vero Railway Station records that the Vero Beach Station closed when passenger service was suspended in the late 1960s. When Brightline planned its fast trains through Indian River County, Vero News reported in September 2018 that Brightline will not be building a station on City of Sebastian property, because city officials found no city land that met the company's criteria.