The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
Menu
Admin Sign-In

The Avon Park department of The De Soto County News, 1905-1916

What this source is

The De Soto County News was published at Arcadia, the seat of the enormous DeSoto County out of which Highlands County was carved in 1921. Avon Park lay fifty miles north-east of it, inside the county, and the paper covered the town. It is digitized in Chronicling America under LCCN sn95026908.[ca-dsc]

For the researcher this is the closest thing to a hometown newspaper that exists for Avon Park before the 1920s.

What is actually digitized — read this first

The catalogue dates the title 1898-1924. The digitized run is nothing like that. Faceting the collection by title and date gives issues in four years only, and 196 pages across them mention Avon Park:

Year Pages mentioning Avon Park
1905 54
1906 36
1915 68
1916 38

There is nothing at all between 1907 and 1914, or after 1916. Two of the most important events in the town’s history fall inside that hole: the Atlantic Coast Line reaching Avon Park in 1912, and the incorporation of the Town of Avon Park in 1913. Do not expect to find either here, and do not read the silence as evidence.

The 1905-06 material: a whole Avon Park page

Most issues in 1905 and the first half of 1906 carry a full page headed “Department of The South Florida Sun, Avon Park, Florida,” conducted by O. R. Thacher, with a column of “Avon Park Locals” beneath it. This is the richest surviving source on the town in that decade. It is treated separately in the entity on The South Florida Sun. One printing anomaly in the 1905–06 run requires caution: page 8 of the 5 January 1906 issue is a standing-type duplicate of page 8 of the 18 August 1905 issue, reprinting the entire August “Avon Park Locals” column verbatim (including August lightning damage to A. W. Sargent’s house, Henry Bossler’s trip to Ohio, and a notice that Mr. Coy would return about 15 October).[dsc-1905-08-18][dsc-1906-01-05]

The paper’s Avon Park page did not end with The South Florida Sun. In 1915 The De Soto County News carried a boxed “Avon Park Department, S. F. Tucker, Editor,” with the standing line “All communications for this department should be handed to Mr. Tucker. Send subscriptions, advertisements and job work to the editor of this department,” and a column of local news beneath it flanked by Avon Park advertisements. It has been read on the pages of 7 January, 4, 11, 18 and 25 February and 11 and 18 March 1915.[dsc-1915-02-04][dsc-1915-02-18-dept] S. F. Tucker was the town’s assessor under the charter of 1913. The department’s columns are the kind of source the 1905–06 pages are: deaths and funerals, the ladies’ Civic League meeting in the council room, the officers of a newly incorporated land company, the Masonic lodge’s communications, the weather report kept by W. King, and the editor’s own appeals for tidy door-yards.[dsc-1915-02-04]

In 1916 the boxed department gave way to a plain column headed “AVON PARK” among the paper’s other country correspondence, set between diamond rules like the “Pine Level” column beneath it. Three complete columns survive from the spring: 23 March, 6 April, and 20 April 1916, each carrying local arrivals, church and lodge proceedings, municipal council actions, school physical improvements, and railroad projections.[dsc-1916-03-23][dsc-1916-04-06][dsc-1916-04-20]

Beyond the regular correspondence columns, the 1916 run preserves administrative and legal dispatches across thirty-eight pages mentioning the town: Mayor R. W. Swearingen visiting the county seat on municipal business in April;[dsc-1916-04-13] Love Cash appointed precinct deputy sheriff in May and assisting county deputies in liquor raids in July;[dsc-1916-05-11][dsc-1916-07-06] and the First National Bank of Avon Park designated as a county depository and school bond depository in October and December 1916.[dsc-1916-10-19][dsc-1916-12-21]

The other 1915-16 hits are of a different character. Most of them are a chancery notice repeated week after week from April into June 1915, describing the property in suit as

“Lot 2, Block 7 of the town of Avon Park, Florida, being a part of the northeast quarter of Section 22, Township 33 south, Range 28 east, and Lot 4 of Block 6 of the town of Avon Park, being part of the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 22, Township 33 south, Range 28 east, lying and being in DeSoto County, Florida,”

with a rule day of 3 May 1915. That is independent confirmation that the platted town was laid out in ordinary numbered lots and blocks across at least two quarter-sections of Section 22 — and it points at a DeSoto County chancery file that would name the parties and may cite the plat by book and page.

A United States Land Office notice of 6 January 1916 records that Charlie W. Waller of Avon Park made homestead entry No. 010327 on 18 March 1912 for the south half of the south-west quarter of Section 21, Township 33 south, Range 27 east, and would make three-year proof at Arcadia on 27 January 1916; his witnesses were D. R. Skipper and R. H. Jacobs, both of Avon Park.[dsc-1916-01-06]

The single most productive page found so far is that of 18 May 1906, which carries the railroad survey working south from Haines City, J. C. Burleigh rebuilding the upper story of his house, and the department’s own standing address line naming O. R. Thacher as its editor.[dsc-1906-05-18]

How to search it

Plain fetches of www.loc.gov are refused. Setting the HTTP User-Agent to Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html) gets a clean response. The query form is

https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/?q="avon park"&fo=json&c=100
   &at=results,pagination
   &fa=partof_title:the de soto county news (arcadia, fla.) 1898-1924

Each result carries a description field holding a long extract of that page’s optical character recognition, so the text can be harvested from the search response itself. For a page’s complete text, take the fulltext_file link from the page’s own resource JSON — it points at tile.loc.gov/text-services/word-coordinates-service and returns the whole page as JSON.

Two warnings. The search is loose: a query for “avon park” matches pages containing only “avon” or only “park,” so most of the 196 hits are noise and the real Avon Park mentions number about forty. And the endpoint rate-limits hard — roughly forty rapid requests triggered a Cloudflare challenge that persisted for some time. Pace the requests and cache what comes back.

The optical character recognition of this particular batch is poor, with words doubled and tripled and place names badly mangled. Every quotation taken from it should be checked against the page image before publication.

References

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. S. F. Tucker (department editor), The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 4 February 1915, page 5: Avon Park Department, S. F. Tucker, Editor (1915) · newspaper
  2. Library of Congress, The De Soto County News (Arcadia, Fla.), 1898-1924, LCCN sn95026908, in Chronicling America (2026)
  3. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 18 May 1906, page 8 (1906)
  4. O. R. Thacher (department editor), The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 18 August 1905, page 8: Department of The South Florida Sun (1905) · newspaper
  5. O. R. Thacher (department editor), The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 5 January 1906, page 8: Department of The South Florida Sun (verbatim reprint of 18 August 1905 page 8) (1906) · newspaper
  6. S. F. Tucker (department editor), The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 18 February 1915, page 7: Avon Park Department, S. F. Tucker, Editor (1915) · newspaper
  7. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 23 March 1916, page 5: Avon Park (1916) · newspaper
  8. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 20 April 1916, page 5: Avon Park (1916) · newspaper
  9. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 6 April 1916, page 12: Avon Park (1916) · newspaper
  10. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 13 April 1916, page 8: Local and Personal Items (1916) · newspaper
  11. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 11 May 1916, page 2: County Commissioners Proceedings (1916) · newspaper
  12. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 6 July 1916, page 3: Liquor Cases in County Court (1916) · newspaper
  13. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 19 October 1916, page 5: Board of Public Instruction Minutes (1916) · newspaper
  14. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 21 December 1916, page 2: County Commissioners Proceedings (1916) · newspaper
  15. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 6 January 1916, page 18: United States Land Office notice (1916)

Something here wrong, or incomplete? The Society would rather know. Tell a volunteer.

Have a question about this record?

← Back to collection

Ask A.P.

Ask the archive

    Try asking:

    0 / 500

    A.P. answers only from the Society's own archive and cites what it used. Questions are not linked to you; search history is stored on your device only (how it works).Ask a volunteer for anything it cannot answer.