The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The Florida Agriculturist, 1878–1911

A weekly farm paper published at DeLand from 1878 to 1911, available complete in Chronicling America and the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC), and — until now — unworked for Avon Park.[fa-title] One hundred and forty-six of its pages name Avon Park.[fa-search] No other digitized source comes near that. The Pabor Lake Pineapple is closer to the town and better for its own four-mile neighborhood, but it stops in September 1897; The De Soto County News carries Avon Park properly only in 1905–06 and 1915–16. The Agriculturist runs through the whole of the period in which Avon Park was founded, grew, was ruined and began again, and it is a state paper, so what it prints about Avon Park is what the rest of Florida was being told about Avon Park.

What it carries

Four kinds of Avon Park material, and they are worth separating because they are worth different things.

Growers’ own words. The best of it. The Agriculturist reprinted papers read before local horticultural societies, and one of those is William King’s account of planting the first pineapple slips at Avon Park — the only substantial first-person writing by a founding Avon Park settler located anywhere. See Finding: William King planted Avon Park’s first pineapples in August 1887.

Reporting from the town. A correspondent’s tour of the Avon Park pineapple growers in September 1897, naming six of them; the burning of the school house in December 1895; a visitor’s description of the place in April 1890; and the opening of an ancient burial mound east of town reported in July 1899. Short state-news paragraphs about Avon Park appear throughout.

The weather. Avon Park was a United States Weather Bureau reporting station from 1892, and the Agriculturist printed the Florida monthly climatological summary in full — temperature maxima and minima with the dates they fell, mean temperatures, precipitation, thunderstorm days, frost dates — with Avon Park in the table alphabetically at or near the top. For a town with no surviving newspaper this is a month-by-month instrumental record of the thing that mattered most to it.

Advertisements. O. M. Crosby’s Florida Homeseeker advertised in nearly every issue through 1893. The advertisement is the only surviving text of a newspaper otherwise entirely lost.

Reading it

Full-text search at https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/ with the paper as a facet:

?q="Avon Park"&fa=partof:the florida agriculturist (deland, fla.) 1878-1911&fo=json

Two things worth knowing. The search behaves as an AND across terms, contrary to what this project’s source register previously recorded, so "Avon Park" "turpentine" really does return only pages holding both. And the machine-read text of a page is reachable directly: fetch the page’s JSON (.../resource/sn96027724/<date>/ed-1/?sp=<n>&fo=json) and follow resource.fulltext_file, which returns the whole page as text. The OCR is poor — it doubles words and mangles proper names — but it is good enough to find things, and the page images are there to read properly once found.

The legacy chroniclingamerica.loc.gov domain is blocked to automated tools. www.loc.gov works, and works better with a plain crawler user-agent. It rate-limits hard: about one request every two seconds is sustainable, faster than that returns empty bodies.

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. Library of Congress, U.S. Newspaper Directory, The Florida Agriculturist (DeLand, Fla.) 1878-1911, LCCN sn96027724 (2026)
  2. Library of Congress, Chronicling America full-text search for "Avon Park" within The Florida Agriculturist (2026)

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