Pabor Lake Pineapple, 1892–1897

For the founding generation of Avon Park this is the best source that exists in digitized form. It was published four miles from the town, monthly, by a man who knew everyone in it, and it survives complete enough to be read straight through.

Pabor Lake Pineapple, Vol. 1 No. 1, October 1892. University of Florida Digital Collections, bib. no. AA00020306. Public domain.[pineapple]

The run

Place	Pabor Lake, DeSoto County, Florida (four miles north of Avon Park)
Editors and publishers	W. E. Pabor and E. A. Pabor
Digitized run	Vol. I, No. 1 (October 1892) to Vol. V, No. 9 (September 1897) — 53 issues
Frequency	Monthly, dated the 15th; briefly semi-monthly in 1896
Length	4 pages in 1892, peaking at 16 pages in 1894–95, back to 8 by 1897
Second-class mail entry	Pabor Lake post office, 25 July 1893
Held at	University of Florida Digital Collections, bib. no. AA00020306

William E. Pabor was a colonization promoter with a career behind him — one of the early secretaries of the Union Colony at Greeley, Colorado, and involved in organizing colonies at Fort Collins, Corona and Colorado Springs before he came to Florida. E. A. Pabor is his son Edgar, who signed elsewhere as assistant manager of the Pabor Lake Colony.[pineapple] The paper is therefore both a local newspaper and a promotional organ, and should be read as both.

The digitized run simply stops after September 1897, with no farewell notice.

How to use it

A real browser is required. The University of Florida’s collections run as a JavaScript application; a plain page fetch returns an empty shell.[ufdc-platform]

Do not trust the search box. Each issue carries two machine-generated text layers: a per-page one that is badly garbled, and a whole-issue one that is much cleaner and correctly ordered by column. The site’s own search indexes the garbled layer. A phrase plainly legible on the page can return nothing, or return corrupted nonsense. Pull the whole-issue text files directly, then verify anything load-bearing against the page image.

Issue identifiers are not issue numbers. Each issue has a five-digit volume id from 00001 to 00053 that reflects the order of digitization, not publication. Volume id 00053 is the issue of 15 January 1895 and belongs chronologically between 00023 and 00024.

Read the page images; the machine text cannot be searched. The images are the only reliable way into this paper. Each page is at https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/AA/00/02/03/06/<vol id>/AA00020306_<vol id>_<page>.jpg, with the page as five digits — 00001 for the first page. They are 1000 by 1440 pixels, which is too small to read whole but perfectly legible when a column or half-page is cropped out and enlarged three times. The 1895 and 1897 runs were read this way, page by page: a hundred and thirty-six pages for 1895 alone.

Suggested citation form:

Pabor Lake Pineapple (Pabor Lake, Avon Park, DeSoto County, Fla.), vol. 3, no. 10, September 1895, p. 145. University of Florida Digital Collections, Florida Digital Newspaper Library, bib. no. AA00020306, vol. id 00029. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/aa00020306/00029

What has been found in it

• The tramway of the Avon Park Transportation Company reached Pabor Lake on Saturday 7 September 1895, reported on the front page of that month’s issue under the headline “IT HAS COME.”
• J. C. Burleigh appears from November 1892, first as an incorporator “of Midland” of a proposed railroad, and by mid-1895 as “one of the founders of Midland but now residing at Avon Park.”
• O. M. Crosby is named as founder of Avon Park and president of the Florida Development Company.
• William King is named as “the first settler of Avon Park” in August 1893.
• Pabor Lake itself was founded on 18 July 1892, celebrated annually afterwards as Founder’s Day.
• The paper never mentions Stratford-upon-Avon, an English colony, or the name “Lake Forest.”
• The whole surviving file has now been read from the page images, all fifty-three issues from October 1892 to September 1897. What follows is by year.
• The first number, of October 1892, and the combined November–December number set out what the two settlements were. The November–December issue carries the “no negro proviso” answer, the Frost-Proof Line railroad meeting at the Hotel Verona with its officers and its $50,000 of capital stock, a directory entry giving “O. M. Crosby, Manager Florida Improvement Co., Avon Park” — the company under a name it is given nowhere else, resolved as an editorial slip for the Florida Development Company — and the New York agency at 99 Franklin Street where callers were to “ask for F. E. Sperring, agent for Avon Park.”
• The January 1893 number prints William King’s own paper on pineapple culture, read before the Avon Park Township Association, in which he says “Five years ago last August I planted the first slips in Avon Park.” The same issue documents early weather station readings (average cloudless days) and notes that a Thanksgiving dinner was held in late 1892 at the Hotel Verona, “prepared under the deft [hands] of mine host McCreary, manager”. The February 1893 issue notes a visit by Dr. John W. Davies of Wales, confirming international visitors. The May 1893 number reports the Florida Home Seeker’s printing moving to Avon Park from Fort Meade.
• The 1894 run is the town at its height, and its December number reports that Crosby’s railroad committee of September 1892 had never filed articles of incorporation: “Absolutely nothing has been done.” The 1894 issues also reprint the lost Avon Park Idea at length and name its editor, A. L. Blue.
• The 1896 run never once names the Florida Development Company, but its November number states that the Pabor Lake lands “are in no way involved in the various judgments and suits now in the courts affecting title to lands in and about Avon Park” — the litigation, two months before the sheriff’s sale. The same page is the one place in the whole file where the paper turns on its neighbor, admitting that Avon Park had spread “mis-statements” about Pabor Lake “for years”.
• The 1895 and 1897 runs have been read from the page images. In 1895 the paper covered the freezes, the building and opening of the tramway, and the town’s affairs warmly: Avon Park and Pabor Lake are “sister towns” throughout, never rivals. In December 1895 its Question Box, answering settlers’ inquiries, stated that no land in Avon Park township was sold to Black people and no Black labor encouraged there.
• Its 1897 numbers describe the fall of the Florida Development Company in figurative terms without naming anyone — “the sheriff auctioned off, bit by bit, furniture, fixtures, presses, mills, nursery stock, books and accounts, etc., etc., of the Florida Development Co., and its ‘promoter’” — and reprint a bitter Times-Union piece on the “passing” of the company’s president. They do not report the town’s incorporation in January 1897 or the election of its first officers, though by May the paper treats the town’s corporate limits as an ordinary fact.
• It quotes or credits the lost Avon Park Idea at least eight times in 1895 alone, with dated issues and named headlines, and reports in March 1897 that the Idea was then “owned, edited and published by E. Gonzales,” having been established by “the Avon Park Town Co., to boom the town.”
• Two blocks of standing copy ran unrevised through the whole of 1895 — a colony advertisement promising a “Daimler motor railway from Avon Park to Haines City” before the end of 1894, and a Question Box answer still calling a rail connection a “prospect” three months after the tramway opened. Do not date anything from this paper’s advertising or its reference columns; date it from the news pages.

References

• pineapple — W. E. Pabor and E. A. Pabor, editors and publishers. Pabor Lake Pineapple (Pabor Lake, Avon Park, DeSoto County, Florida), October 1892 to September 1897. 15 September 1897. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00020306
• ufdc-platform — University of Florida. University of Florida Digital Collections / Florida Digital Newspaper Library. 31 August 2026. https://ufdc.ufl.edu

Related

• Pabor Lake colony
• Report: the naming of Avon Park and the question of the English settlers
• Report: Burleigh’s steam engine and the Avon Park wooden railroad
• Finding: pre-1930 Highlands County newspapers are largely undigitized

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. W. E. Pabor and E. A. Pabor, editors and publishers, Pabor Lake Pineapple (Pabor Lake, Avon Park, DeSoto County, Florida), October 1892 to September 1897 (1897)
2. University of Florida, University of Florida Digital Collections / Florida Digital Newspaper Library (2026)

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