The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Florida state business directories, 1884–1925

Between the last issue of the Pabor Lake Pineapple in September 1897 and the first surviving run of the Avon Park Sun in 1946 there is very nearly nothing written at Avon Park that anyone can read today. The state business directories partly fill that hole. Every few years a Jacksonville or Detroit publisher sent canvassers through Florida to sell entries, and what they brought back is a list, town by town, of the population, the railway, the churches, the postmaster, the bank and every business the canvasser could find. For Avon Park that produces five snapshots — 1895, 1907, 1911, 1918 and 1924 — of a town whose own record of itself is lost.

They are commercial documents and they are imperfect. The population figures are estimates supplied locally, not census counts. A business that would not buy an entry could be left out. Names are misspelled, and the scans read by machine make that worse. But the entries are contemporary, they were compiled on the ground, and where they can be checked against other records they hold up.

Six volumes are digitized and free on the Internet Archive.

Volume Publisher Avon Park
1884-85 South Publishing Co. absent[gaz-1884]
1886-87 South Publishing Co. absent
1895 Belden Publishing Co. pop. 500, 34 entries, p. 55
1907 R. L. Polk & Co. pop. 300, 9 entries
1911 R. L. Polk & Co. pop. 300, 21 entries, p. 57
1918 R. L. Polk & Co. pop. 350, 35 entries
1924 (pub. 1925) R. L. Polk & Co. pop. 1,200, no business list

What each volume gives

1884-85 and 1886-87: no Avon Park

Neither of the two earliest volumes has an Avon Park entry, which fits a town whose founding party arrived in 1886. The 1886-87 volume does, however, carry something better: an entry for Danbury, Marion County, a colony of about fifty settlers “mostly from Danbury, Conn.,” whose manager is named as Prof. O. M. Crosby of Jacksonville, then horticultural editor of the New York journal The South.[gaz-1886] This is Crosby at work as a colony promoter before Avon Park, and it is treated separately in Finding: Crosby ran a Connecticut colony in Marion County before Avon Park.

1895: the town at its height

The fullest entry of the whole series, and the only surviving list of Avon Park’s businesses before the freeze destroyed them. Population 500, twenty miles from Fort Meade, a money-order post office and a telegraph; “an enterprising town, well laid out and under good management.”[gaz-1895] The thirty-four entries are set out in Report: Avon Park in the state business directories.

The same volume’s statewide table of Florida banks records the Bank of Avon Park, established 1894, president O. M. Crosby, cashier C. C. Chollar, capital $20,000 and deposits $5,000.[gaz-1895]

It also gives Pabor Lake its own entry: population 50, a post office and express office, reached by way of Bowling Green or Fort Meade, and “250 acres pineapples now growing.” The four names listed are M. B. Goodell, carpenter; E. A. Pabor, notary; W. E. Pabor, manager of the Pabor Lake Colony and postmaster; W. H. Pabor, carpenter; and the Welcome Inn, kept by Mrs. W. E. Pabor.[gaz-1895]

1907 and 1911: after the collapse

Population 300 in both, down from 500. Nine businesses in 1907, twenty-one in 1911. The town has a Congregational and an Episcopal church, a private bank and a telephone connection, and — the detail that dates it exactly — the nearest shipping point is Wauchula, twenty-two miles away. There is no railway at Avon Park in either volume.[gaz-1907][gaz-1911]

1918: the railway town

Population 350 and now “located on the A. C. L. Ry.” Thirty-five entries, a First National Bank with $25,000 of capital, a weekly newspaper printed at Zolfo Springs, two saw mills, a naval stores company, a brick maker, an ice maker, a bottling works, two garages and a theater.[gaz-1918]

1925: the boom arriving

No business list, but the summary tells its own story: population 1,200, Highlands County, two banks, the Highlands County Pilot as the weekly paper, and “churches of the leading denominations.”[gaz-1925]

How to use them

Search the machine-read text (https://archive.org/download/<identifier>/<identifier>_djvu.txt) rather than the site’s own search box. The entries are alphabetical by place, so AVON PARK finds the entry in one step; the surrounding text is the neighboring towns, not Avon Park, and should be discarded. Verify any name against the page image before publishing it: the machine text turns Chollar into “Challer,” Sargent into “Saigent” and Krause into “Krause” or “Kraus” indifferently.

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. South Publishing Company, The Florida State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1884-85 (1884)
  2. South Publishing Company, The Florida State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1886-87 (1886)
  3. Belden Publishing Company, Florida Railroad Gazetteer and State Business Directory, 1895 (1895)
  4. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1907 (1907)
  5. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1911 (1911)
  6. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1918 (1918)
  7. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida, "The Playground of the Nation" - a gazetteer and business directory (1925)

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