The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The National Register nomination for the Avon Park Historic District, 1990

This is the fullest architectural and documentary account of Avon Park’s Main Street that anybody has written, and it contains a set of specific facts — builders, financiers, dates, bond issues, subdivision counts — that appear nowhere else.

It is also wrong in several places, and those are marked at the end.

What the document is

A National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for the Avon Park Historic District, reference 90000486, prepared in February 1990 by Stephen A. Olausen and Barbara E. Mattick of the Bureau of Historic Preservation in Tallahassee, and listed on 22 March 1990. The boundary runs along Main Street from South Delaney Avenue to U.S. 27 and takes in “the Main Street Mall and the historic properties closely associated with it.”[nrhp-90000486]

Sixteen contributing resources against four non-contributing, all dating from 1912 to 1935: the Mall itself (a site), one object, one structure, and thirteen buildings.[nrhp-90000486]

The inventory

Address Resource Style Date
1-9 West Main Street First National Bank masonry vernacular 1912
15-21 West Main Street Coen Building masonry vernacular 1921
101-111 West Main Street Max Wild Building masonry vernacular 1921
115 West Main Street Second Whidden Building masonry vernacular 1921
117-123 West Main Street First Whidden Building masonry vernacular 1913
309 West Main Street Ridge Chevrolet and Oldsmobile Building masonry vernacular 1923
in the Mall Bandstand frame vernacular 1897 / 1922
in the Mall Davidson Flagpole (object) 1922
2-12 East Main Street Brickell Building masonry vernacular 1921
7-23 East Main Street Jacaranda Hotel masonry vernacular 1926
20 East Main Street (no name) Spanish Eclectic c. 1930
22 East Main Street Avon Park Book Exchange frame vernacular c. 1915
36 East Main Street Park Theater Art Deco 1935
110 East Main Street Avon Park City Hall Neoclassical 1928
Main Street, South Delaney to U.S. 27 Main Street Mall (site) 1920-1927
North Museum Avenue Seaboard Air Line Railroad Station Spanish Eclectic 1925

Non-contributing: 16, 18, 28 and 30-34 East Main Street.[nrhp-90000486]

The Mall, year by year

This is the most useful single passage in the document, because it dates the Mile Long Mall’s construction step by step.[nrhp-90000486]

  • Before 1920. “As originally platted in 1892, Main Street was a narrow, one lane road in the center of Avon Park.” The arguments for the Mall were made on safety — a one-lane street with tourist-season motor traffic — and on fire, since widening meant moving or razing the wooden buildings on the north side, which were themselves considered hazards.
  • May 1920. The City Council voted its first bond issue expressly for the creation of a mall.
  • 1920-21. Progress was slow: property owners on the north side would not give up their buildings. The city persuaded some to move theirs; “others, like the owners of the Ford Motor Company, presented stubborn opposition.”
  • 1921. The first area cleared was between Lake and Butler Avenues. Local businessmen raised a beautification fund and pressed the Council to hire a landscape architect. In October a further $20,000 in bonds was issued to extend the Mall and to grade and pave Main Street.
  • 1922. The Mall was extended west to the Atlantic Coast Line tracks. The William P. McDonald Construction Company was contracted to pave Main Street and the intersecting avenues. Colonel and Mrs. R. P. Davidson donated the flagpole, erected between Butler and Forest Avenues and dedicated at the Armistice Day Carnival on 11 November 1922 in memory of those who served in the First World War. By the end of the year the bandstand had been moved to its present position and some curbs and gutters laid.
  • 1923. The Ford Motor Company building was razed — the last obstacle to the first stage. Landscape architect W. A. Cook was hired to design the planting; his plan called for exotic plants and shrubs around a series of fountains and a large pool. In June the Council contracted with the Reasoner Brothers Nursery of Oneco, Florida for the foliage, and “at the behest of Donaldson” ordered jacaranda, palm, royal poinciana and live oak for the Mall.
  • 1924. The Council proposed extending it west of the railroad and completed negotiations for the final eastern extension. In October it proposed a $175,000 bond issue, $55,000 of it for extending the Mall to Verona Avenue on the east and Central Avenue on the west. Similar outlays followed for three years.
  • 1927. The Mall reached its present length, “just as Avon Park, along with the rest of Florida, was heading into a protracted economic depression.”

The Mall as described in 1990: sixteen rectangular greenspaces, about a mile long, running west from Lake Verona to U.S. 27, bounded by the two lanes of Main Street and the intersecting avenues and railroad rights of way.[nrhp-90000486]

The landscape architect of the 1923 planting was W. A. Cook. And the man who chose the trees was Donaldson — almost certainly Mayor C. S. Donaldson, for whom Donaldson Park is named.

The bandstand

When built in 1897, the bandstand was located on the banks of Lake Verona. About 1912, it was moved to the northwest corner of Main Street and Lake Avenue. At that time, the original character of the bandstand was lost with the removal of windows and a door which had provided light and access to the bottom section of the structure. Also, the original drop siding exterior wall fabric was replaced with weatherboard. When the Mall was extended in 1922, the bandstand was moved to its present location. By the 1970s the bandstand had suffered from neglect, and its restoration to its 1922 appearance was Avon Park’s official Bicentennial Project in 1976.[nrhp-90000486]

That is a three-site history for a building otherwise recorded only as “1897, restored 1976.”

The buildings and the people who built them

The First National Bank building, 1-9 West Main Street, 1912 — “the first brick structure erected in Avon Park,” built by local contractor William L. Smith, who also built the Methodist Church, the Coen Building and the Whidden Building at Avon Park and brick buildings at Charlotte Harbor, Venus, Haines City and Mountain Lake. Remodeled in 1920, when its original marble corner column was removed; the column now stands in the Mall in front of the building as a monument.[nrhp-90000486]

The Brickell Building, 2-12 East Main Street, 1921 — financed by E. M. Brickell, an investor from Pittsburgh, and designed by William J. Heim, then a Pittsburgh architect, who after completing the drawings moved to Avon Park and set up his office in the building. Its second floor held a large auditorium used for Town Council meetings, lodge meetings and dances. Architecturally it is the oddest thing on the street: a broken swan’s-neck pediment, polychromatic brickwork, seven bays with oriel projections on the first, third, fifth and seventh.[nrhp-90000486]

The Jacaranda Hotel, 7-23 East Main Street — Heim’s largest commission. Foundations laid in late 1923; completed for the spring tourist season of 1926. It was funded by John Raab, an associate of the architect Daniel H. Burnham, and Harry Winter, a developer from Chicago, both of whom “lost heavily during the economic depression and were forced to give up their interests.” The nomination states that by 1990 the building had been purchased by Highlands County and served the community college as a hotel and restaurant training center; in fact, Highlands County never held title, and the building was acquired by the South Florida Community College Foundation, Inc. (which assumed operations in 1988 and took fee-simple title from Preston B. Weeks by warranty deed on 29 June 1990 for $600,000).[nrhp-90000486][hcor-1114-1378][hcpao-jacaranda]

Avon Park City Hall, 110 East Main Street — Heim again. Until 1928 the city offices had been “in various commercial structures, including the Jacaranda.” The city floated a $30,000 bond issue despite its boom-time debts, and the C. W. Pabor Construction Company built it for $28,600. Terra cotta was specified for the exterior and cheaper art stone substituted. Completed late 1928; the city took occupancy in March 1929.[nrhp-90000486]

The Park Theater, 36 East Main Street, 1935 — Heim’s, and the only Art Deco building in Avon Park. Its completion “marks the end of historical development within the district.” It is now Hope Tabernacle.[nrhp-90000486]

The Seaboard Air Line station, Museum Avenue, 1925 — Spanish Eclectic, hollow tile and rough stucco, on its original site a hundred yards north of the Mall. The Atlantic Coast Line station was razed in the early 1980s.[nrhp-90000486]

What the nomination says about the town’s history

Much of Section 8 is standard context, but several passages carry facts found nowhere else.

Citrus. The Avon Park Citrus Growers Association merged with the Florida Citrus Exchange and built a large packing house north of Main Street. In 1915 C. Parke Anderson and his brother organized the Pittsburgh-Florida Citrus Growers Association and the Lake Byrd Packing Company; by 1922 they had 4,000 acres in citrus and had built the Pittsburgh-Florida Packing House, and later an orange and grapefruit juice canning plant at Avon Park. W. F. Ward moved to the town in 1917 and built up a citrus nursery “that eventually covered some 500 acres.”[nrhp-90000486]

That settles a standing question: the Pittsburgh-Florida concern’s name was the Citrus Growers Association, and it was the Andersons’ — and W. F. Ward is the Ward of the Ward Nurseries the 1939 WPA guide describes.

Promoters and subdivisions. William Reck, who moved his family from Illinois to Avon Park about 1913, “promoted the creation of the Mall, and later lobbied for the formation of a new county.” Subdivisions of the period included King and Langston’s, filed 1912, and Van Luven’s, filed 1915.[nrhp-90000486]

The boom, in numbers. Forty-one subdivisions were established between September 1921 and February 1926, twenty-one of them in 1925. Lakeside Heights was subdivided and re-platted inside a year. One lot at the west end of the business section sold for $75,000; the buyer defaulted, and in the Depression the same lot sold for $400. Between 1920 and 1926, in one twelve-block area, about forty structures went up — “a large high school complex, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, the Avon Park Sash and Door Company building, and approximately twenty-five residences.”[nrhp-90000486]

The banks. The First National Bank failed in the bust and “left vacant the building it had occupied since 1916.” “Three years later, in February 1929, the Avon Park State Bank closed, nine months before the October crash.”[nrhp-90000486] That names the second bank this project had been looking for.

Public spending after the bust. In December 1927 the city spent $45,000 on land for a park on Lake Verona; in 1928 the city fire station, later the police station, was begun, and work started on the City Hall.[nrhp-90000486]

Recovery. In 1939 the Chamber of Commerce was revived and launched a tourist campaign called “Avon Park with the Mile Long Mall.” The Air Force base and bombing range ten miles east were developed from late 1940 to April 1942.[nrhp-90000486]

Where it is wrong, or contradicts itself

The nomination has no footnotes, and it should not be quoted without these caveats.

  1. The 1930 population is wrong. It gives 3,528; the census gives 3,355. Its 1940 figure, 3,125, is correct.[census-1930-t16][census-1940-t30]
  2. It contradicts itself on 1900. Section 8 first says the population “dropped from a pre-freeze level of nearly 500 to 128 by the turn of the century,” then says that “between 1900 and 1910 … the population of Avon Park increased from 225 to only 285.”[nrhp-90000486]
  3. It contradicts itself on the City Hall. Section 7 says it “was completed in 1927”; Section 8 says the bond was floated in 1928, the building completed late 1928 and occupied in March 1929, and the inventory dates it 1928.[nrhp-90000486]
  4. The Henry Plant passage is an anachronism. It says that “in early 1895, Henry Plant had been approached about an extension of his Atlantic Coast Line Railway to Avon Park, but had rejected the proposal.” Plant’s system was the Plant System; it did not become part of the Atlantic Coast Line until 1902, three years after Plant’s death. Whatever the underlying source says, the railway is named wrongly here.[nrhp-90000486]
  5. It says nothing whatever about Black Avon Park.
  6. The bandstand’s 1897 date is given without a source, as is the 1892 platting of Main Street.
  7. It misidentifies the buyer of the Hotel Jacaranda. Section 8 (pages 9–10) states that the hotel “was recently purchased by Highlands County and is now used as a part of the Community College system as a hotel and restaurant training center.”[nrhp-90000486] Highlands County never purchased or owned the building; the buyer was the South Florida Community College Foundation, Inc. (a Florida non-profit corporation organized in June 1984), which began operating the hotel in 1988 and closed fee-simple title from Preston B. Weeks by warranty deed on 29 June 1990 (OR Book 1114, Pages 1378–1379) for $600,000.[hcor-1114-1378][hcpao-jacaranda]

The twenty-two photographs

The photographs filed with the nomination are online as a forty-four page PDF and can be downloaded directly.[nrhp-90000486-photos] They are black-and-white prints made in 1989 or 1990, each captioned in the photographer’s hand “n/22 — Avon Park Historic District, Avon Park, Highlands Co., FL.”

What the first twelve show:

No. Subject
1 The Mall looking along Main Street from an upper story, palms and traffic
2 The Mall from the opposite direction, with “Hardware” signs on the north side
3 A greenspace with the flagpole base and a monument, looking down Main Street
4 A stone-walled planting bed in a greenspace
5 The Davidson Flagpole, flag flying, with the bandstand roof beyond
6 The Main Street Bandstand, close up, in its greenspace
7 The First National Bank building, 1-9 West Main Street, on its corner
8 A greenspace beside the railroad with a word planted out in shrubs
9 A two-story masonry vernacular block, dentil string course, on a corner
10 A two-part commercial building, then a coin laundry
11 The Avon Park Book Exchange, the district’s one frame commercial building
12 The Brickell Building, 2-12 East Main Street

The photographs are not reproduced here. The nomination was prepared by employees of the Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation, not of the federal government, and NPGallery carries no rights statement marking them public domain, so their copyright status is unresolved. If the National Park Service or the Florida Division of Historical Resources clears them, twenty-two dated views of Main Street become available for exhibition.

The nomination was itself prepared from the Historic Properties Survey, Avon Park, Florida (Historic Property Associates, St. Augustine, 1989), held by the Bureau of Historic Preservation in Tallahassee.

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. United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Avon Park Historic District, reference 90000486, prepared February 1990 by Stephen A. Olausen and Barbara E. Mattick, Bureau of Historic Preservation, Tallahassee (1990)
  2. Bureau of Historic Preservation, Tallahassee, for the National Park Service, Photographs filed with the National Register nomination for the Avon Park Historic District, 22 views, 1989-90 (1990)
  3. United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume II, Part 2, Florida, Table 30 (1943)
  4. United States Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1, Florida, Table 16 (1932)
  5. Highlands County Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller, Warranty Deed from Preston B. Weeks to South Florida Community College Foundation, Inc., 29 June 1990, Highlands County Official Records Book 1114, Pages 1378–1379 (Instrument #0711070) (1990) · official
  6. Highlands County Property Appraiser, Highlands County Property Appraiser Parcel Record A-22-33-28-010-0480-0100 (19 E. Main Street, Avon Park, FL 33825, Jacaranda Hotel) (2026) · official

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