No public-domain photographs of Avon Park’s cemeteries are available in the major digital archives
Avon Park buries its dead in three primary locations: Bougainvillea Cemetery, Lakeside Historical Cemetery (formerly Lincoln Garden Cemetery), and Lakeview Memorial Gardens. Despite their historical significance—particularly Bougainvillea, established by town founder Oliver Marvin Crosby in 1888, and Lakeside, the town’s historic Black burying ground—no public-domain photographs of these sites are currently accessible through the major digital archival repositories.
An exhaustive search conducted across the State Archives of Florida (Florida Memory), the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Geologic Map Database, and the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) returned zero digital accessions matching photographs of any Avon Park cemetery.
The only known published image of an Avon Park cemetery marker currently held in the project bundle is the 1976 plate of Oliver Crosby’s monument in Bougainvillea Cemetery, sourced from Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell’s The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida.
For Lakeside Historical Cemetery, which is currently undergoing a multi-year restoration effort led by the Lakeside Historical Cemetery Of Avon Park Inc. and supported by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and the Duke Energy Foundation, visual documentation of the site “before and after its restoration” is critical.[topics-queue-522] Since no archival photographs of Lakeside Cemetery exist in state or federal databases, capturing these images requires direct, in-person photography with the permission of the cemetery’s governing board.
Related
- Report: The cemeteries of Avon Park
- Entity: Bougainvillea Cemetery
- Entity: Lakeside Historical Cemetery
- Entity: Lakeview Memorial Gardens
Where this comes from
- Evidence
- corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.
- Review
- unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
- Rights
- society
Sources
- Avon Park Historical Society, Museum Research Topics Queue, Line 522 (topics-queue.md) (2026) · secondary
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