Avon Park in 1888, by the numbers, from the founder’s own pamphlet
Crosby’s Common Sense About Florida is a sales document and reads like one, but it is full of specific figures a promoter had no reason to invent, and it is the only description of the settlement in its first two years written by someone who was there. Set out plainly, this is what it says the place was.
The town on the ground
| Houses standing | ten — “Ten houses already dot the landscape” |
| Sawmill | on the ground, described as “the first need of a settler” |
| Lumber cut and waiting | 100,000 feet, plus “a quantity of shingles” |
| Under construction | a combined store and hotel, taking most of that lumber, which “may be finished ere these words are read” |
| Letters received | thirty to fifty a day |
| Settlers expected that year | 100 families |
The store and hotel is on Lot 20, Block D of the first platted forty acres. The Historical Society dates the Hotel Verona’s construction to 1887-89 and says it was built from the pines standing where it sat; a sawmill with a hundred thousand feet of cut lumber, a mile away, is how that happened.[crosby-1888]
The land, and how it was sold
- The township — Township 33, Range 28 — is “six miles square, or thirty-six square miles, containing over 23,000 acres.”
- Section 16 is School Lands, “not for sale or controlled by us,” the sixteenth section of every township being reserved to support the public schools.
- “A few hundred acres in the township in question were entered by private parties previous to our purchase. All the rest is owned or controlled by ourselves, which, deducting the clear-water lakes, leaves about 20,000 acres.”
- Tracts were surveyed in forty-acre blocks, starting near the center of Section 22, each with a park 140 by 720 feet at its center.
- Streets were 60 and 80 feet wide.
- Every lot was 50 by 100 feet and every lot cost $50, deliberately flat-priced: “rather than grade prices — high about the center, and lower as lots run back — we give our early customers the advantage of the rise of value that follows rapid sales.” He expected the first buyers’ lots to reach $100 to $200. “We do not reserve alternate lots for our profit.”[crosby-1888]
The 20,000-acre figure is worth noting: the Historical Society’s account says Crosby and an unnamed partner bought 20,000 acres for $50,000 from Hamilton Disston. Crosby’s own arithmetic in 1888 — a 23,000-acre township, less private entries and less the lakes, leaving about 20,000 — arrives at the same number from the other direction.
Getting there
There was no railway. “At present a drive of eighteen to twenty miles is necessary from Fort Meade, for most of the way over a hard (not sandy) flat woods road.” Prospective settlers were told to buy a settler’s ticket to Fort Meade at “about one-half the regular rates,” and then either meet Crosby’s superintendent on stated days or hire a livery team: “You can drive alone, as sign-boards mark the way to Avon Park at every diverging road or path.”[crosby-1888]
Signposts in the flatwoods, put up by a land company, are the whole transport system of Avon Park in 1888.
On the railway he was hopeful and vague: the line was “completed from Tavares to Kissimmee, and is projected south, through Avon Park, directly to the Gulf,” though “it is yet too early to say just which section of Avon Park it will penetrate.” It never came that way. The rails arrived twenty-four years later, from Haines City.
Who he wanted
The pamphlet advertises for trades, which is a fair index of what the settlement lacked:
“men who can work about a saw-mill, a good storekeeper or merchant, boarding-house proprietor, surveyors, carpenters, masons, and laborers in groves”
and a nurseryman “stocked with every variety of fruit, tree, or flower that will grow in Florida.”[crosby-1888]
He also sorts his buyers into five classes, of which the fifth is the one that actually built Florida: “Those wishing to escape the Northern winters.”
Why this is worth having
Almost every other account of early Avon Park is a recollection written decades later. This is contemporary, specific, and internally consistent, and it can be used as a control on the rest. Ten houses in 1888; 64 people in the 1890 census; 225 in 1900. The town Crosby was selling and the town that existed were not the same size, and the pamphlet lets you measure the gap.
References
- crosby-1888 — O. M. Crosby. Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park. 1888. crosby-1888-common-sense-about-florida.md
Related
- Reference: Crosby’s Common Sense About Florida, 1888
- Entity: Hotel Verona
- Entity: Oliver Marvin Crosby
- Report: the founding of Avon Park
- Finding: Lake Forest was a plat name, not the town’s former name
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
- O. M. Crosby, Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (1888)
Something here wrong, or incomplete? The Society would rather know. Tell a volunteer.
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