Paul Kroegel
Paul Kroegel was a German immigrant to the United States who helped establish Pelican Island as a bird sanctuary in Florida. Kroegel is listed as a Great Floridian.
Kroegel was born in Chemnitz, Germany. He arrived in Sebastian, Florida in 1881 and homesteaded with his father on a shell midden on the west bank of the Indian River Lagoon overlooking Pelican Island. The island consisted of a five-acres of mangrove where thousands of brown pelicans and other water birds would roost and nest. Kroegel protected the island's avian inhabitants with his shotgun and would stand guard at a time when neither state nor federal laws protected the animals.
Influential naturalists visited and stayed at the nearby Oak Lodge from the 1880s to the early 1900s, including ornithologist Frank Chapman .
He was a founding member of the St. Lucie County Board of Commissioners in 1905.
He died in Sebastian, Florida in 1948.
