The Avon Park Guide, a Federal Writers’ Project typescript of 1936–1938

Summary

Between 1936 and 1938 a writer named Barbara Berry Darsey compiled a 220-page book about Avon Park for the Federal Writers’ Project, the New Deal program that put unemployed writers to work describing the country. It was never printed. The typescript survives at the University of Florida, which put it online in 2022, and it is the longest continuous account of the town written before Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell’s The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida forty years later.[darsey-1937]

What it is

The typescript’s own title page calls it the Avon Park Guide. Its first preface, signed by Darsey and dated 15 July 1937, explains that “the Miami Office of Federal Writers Project, Works Progress Administration, has been engaged in extensive research relating to the past and present history of the growth, development, and resources of the Southern East Section of Florida in general, and of Avon Park in particular. This book upon Avon Park has been the result of the material so collected.” A second, alternative preface names the local office rather than the regional one — “the Highlands County Office of the Federal Writers Project” — and both say the work was paid for by the sponsorship of the Avon Park Chamber of Commerce.[darsey-1937]

Darsey’s acknowledgements name the kinds of people she interviewed: “city and county officials, Librarians, Newspaper Editors, pioneer residents, officials of the State and National Park Service.”[darsey-1937] That is where its value lies. Its account of the town’s first fifty years was taken down while pioneer residents were alive to give it, and its chapters on architecture and on the fine arts describe buildings, gardens and objects that were standing or in use in 1937.[darsey-1937]

The University of Florida catalogues it as Avon Park, Florida, 220 pages, credited jointly to Darsey and to the Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida, dated 1936–1938, held in UF Special Collections under bib. AA00089075 and OCLC 1333439948.[darsey-1937]

What is in it

The contents page lists, in order: Preface; General Information; Description; Indian Legends; History, 1885–1928; City Government; Religious History; Local Flora; Fauna; Climate and Health; Economic Development and Industry; Architecture; Cultural Development and the Fine Arts; Education; Sports and Recreation; Points of Interest; Auto Tours; Chronology; the Jacaranda Tree; the Fire Control Tower; Counterfeit Lake; The Florida Home Seeker; and a Historical Summary.[darsey-1937]

Several sections are dated in the margin as they were submitted — 24 March 1937 for General Information, 19 May 1937 for the Fine Arts, 23 May for the section on the Mall’s planting, 6 May and 6 August for the auto tours — and a run of pages near the middle is headed “A Rewrite of Several Items, Economic Development and Industry,” showing the book being revised in place.[darsey-1937]

The typescript is not the same work as Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, the Federal Writers’ Project volume that was published in 1939 and that gives Avon Park two pages in a motor tour. Where the printed guide has two pages, the unpublished Avon Park book has two hundred.[darsey-1937][wpa-1939-guide]

Reading it

The whole volume is online as page images with machine-read text at the University of Florida Digital Collections, which made it public in July 2022.[darsey-1937] The machine reading of the typescript is poor: surnames come through garbled and figures are unreliable, so any name, date or number taken from the text should be read from the page image instead. Some errors are the typist’s rather than the machine’s — the typescript itself types “Byron Shockley” for Byrum Shockley, in two places.[darsey-1937]

The volume is also, in places, not what Darsey wrote. At the end of a set of rewrites she recorded an instruction to cut a sentence blaming the delay in the town’s incorporation on the freeze, and added her own note: “Sponsors objected to many references to the Freeze.”[darsey-1937] The sponsor was the Avon Park Chamber of Commerce, which had paid for the work. Where the guide is reticent about the disaster, that is why.

Darsey also left an account of why parts of the volume exist twice over. The industry section, she wrote, had been “written, as requested, in respect to each subject more or less complete in itself without continuity of topics,” and “should be rewritten or revised in a more comprehensive manner to embrace other newer industries, and to eliminate some of the repetition of other articles.”[darsey-1937] Where a passage appears twice, the rewrite is the later and more considered version.

Related

• The WPA Florida Guide of 1939 on Avon Park
• The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida
• The Bunbury House on Lake Pythias
• Lord and Lady Bunbury: a courtesy, not a title

References

• darsey-1937 — Barbara Berry Darsey and the Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida. Avon Park, Florida [Avon Park Guide], typescript for the Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida, 220 pages, University of Florida Special Collections, bib. AA00089075, OCLC 1333439948. 31 December 1938. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00089075/00001
• wpa-1939-guide — Federal Writers’ Project, Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida. Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (American Guide Series), Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration, 1939. 1939. wpa-florida-guide-1939-avon-park.md

Where this comes from

Evidence

single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.

Review

unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.

Rights

society

Sources

1. Barbara Berry Darsey and the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida, Avon Park, Florida [Avon Park Guide], typescript for the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida, 220 pages, University of Florida Special Collections, bib. AA00089075, OCLC 1333439948 (1938) · archival
2. Federal Writers' Project, Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (American Guide Series), Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration, 1939 (references/wpa-florida-guide-1939-avon-park.md) (1939) · book

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