The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Avon Park incorporated in January 1897 and elected Clark D. Knapp its first mayor

Summary

Avon Park had a mayor, a council, a clerk and a marshal from the first week of January 1897. The whole slate was printed in a Savannah daily a few days later. That is sixteen years before Chapter 6662 of the Laws of Florida made the Town of Avon Park by special act, and it means the 1913 charter was not the town’s beginning as a municipality but its second one.

The notice

The Morning News of Savannah carried a Florida column of short items from around the state. On Friday 15 January 1897, between the failure of a bank at Orange City and a printers’ dispute at Tampa, it printed this:

Avon Park was incorporated last week and Clark D. Knapp elected mayor; B. F. West, L. W. Mix, H. B. Todd, J. T. Hendricks and William King councilmen; R. D. Hall, clerk and treasurer; J. J. Dobbins, marshal.[savannah-1897-01-15]

“Last week” places the election in the first days of January 1897. A history of Arcadia and DeSoto County, listing the incorporation dates of the county’s towns, gives Avon Park’s as 5 January 1897.[arcadia-desoto-history] The town history of 1976 says the same thing more loosely — that the town incorporated in 1897 — and separately records Knapp being called mayor in the Avon Park Idea of 1898.[maxwell-1976]

The first town government

Office Name
Mayor Clark D. Knapp
Councilman B. F. West
Councilman L. W. Mix
Councilman H. B. Todd
Councilman J. T. Hendricks
Councilman William King
Clerk and treasurer R. D. Hall
Marshal J. J. Dobbins

[savannah-1897-01-15]

All eight officers can be placed in the town’s pre-freeze and post-freeze records:

  • Clark D. Knapp (mayor) was the town’s attorney and notary, president of the Avon Park Transportation Company from January 1895 and of the Florida Development Company from January 1896, and was advertised as "Clark D. Knapp, attorney at law, Avon Park, Fla." in the May 1897 Pabor Lake Pineapple.[maxwell-1976][plp-1897]
  • B. F. West (councilman) kept the East Main Street general store, served as postmaster from September 1896, and ran a private banking business.
  • H. B. Todd (councilman) was the town’s tinsmith and built the pineapple and fruit canning factory in 1896.[gaz-1895]
  • William King (councilman) was the town’s first settler (1885) and pioneer merchant.
  • J. T. Hendricks (councilman) was John T. Hendricks (1851–1917), the town’s abstractor of titles and notary public ("Hendricks J T, notary, abstracts" in the 1895 state business directory), who cultivated a celebrated one-acre pineapple and subtropical fruit garden on Pleasant Street, married Florence Adell Woodruff (daughter of Bougainvillea Cemetery pioneer James W. Woodruff), and in 1915 brought a DeSoto County chancery suit to quiet title to lots in Blocks 7 and 35 of the Town of Avon Park.[gaz-1895]
  • L. W. Mix (councilman) is enumerated in the 25 June 1900 federal census of Avon Park (Precinct 14, Household 381/382) as Lawrence W. Mix, born March 1843 in New York of New York-born parents, farming at Avon Park with his sixteen-year-old Michigan-born son Clarence H. Mix (born May 1884).[census-1900-desoto-ap]
  • R. D. Hall (clerk and treasurer) had served as corporate secretary of the Florida Development Company, elected at the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting in Avon Park in October 1894 alongside President O. M. Crosby, Vice President and Treasurer N. S. C. Perkins, and Superintendent O. R. Thacher.[savannah-1894-10-16]
  • J. J. Dobbins (marshal) belonged to the Kansas-born Dobbins family into which sawmill manager and wooden-railroad superintendent John C. Burleigh married in November 1897; Burleigh’s wife Mary C. (Dobbins) Burleigh (born February 1872 in Kansas) and her sister Hazeline Dobbins (born October 1879 in Kansas) were enumerated together in Household 391/392 of the 1900 Avon Park census.[census-1900-desoto-ap]

The slate is a fair picture of who remained in Avon Park at the start of 1897: the men who still had a store, an office, or a grove in the place.

Under the general law

Florida did not require an act of the legislature to make a town. Under the general municipal incorporation law of 4 February 1869, not fewer than twenty-five male inhabitants of any hamlet, village or town could establish a municipal government for themselves: they published or posted a notice for thirty days naming the proposed corporate limits, met, fixed those limits, chose a name and elected officers, and filed a transcript of the proceedings with the clerk of the circuit court. No act of the legislature and no filing with the Secretary of State came into it, so a town incorporated this way left no trace whatever in the session laws.[uf-local-government-powers] Two other DeSoto County towns show the same two-step pattern: Wauchula incorporated in 1888 and was validated by the state in 1903, and Arcadia incorporated in 1886 and re-incorporated as a city in 1901.[arcadia-desoto-history]

How long it lasted

Two years and two months. On Wednesday 1 March 1899 the town voted on whether to keep its municipal government, and of forty-seven votes polled only twelve were for keeping it.[savannah-1899-03-09] By November 1905, when District 14 Justice of the Peace A. Winthrop Sargent posted a law-enforcement warning outside the Avon Park post office, he cited Florida Revised Statutes Section 2683 governing the discharge of firearms "in any unincorporated village."[dsc-1905-11-17] See Avon Park voted its own town government out of existence in 1899.

Why the town chartered again in 1913

The 1913 act, by contrast, is a special charter. Its first section says that a municipality “is hereby established, organized and constituted,” and it names nine officers to serve until that year’s regular election; it recites no earlier charter and repeals nothing.[lof-1913-6662] That silence is what has kept 1913 standing as the town’s founding date; the Florida League of Cities still gives it as the year Avon Park was incorporated.[flc-incorporation-years] It is not evidence that nothing came before: a general-law municipality that had lapsed in the empty years after the freeze would leave nothing for the legislature to repeal.

No Florida newspaper reports it. The Pabor Lake Pineapple, published a few miles away and read in full for all nine of its 1897 issues, never mentions the incorporation, the election, or any of the eight officers — although its February number discusses the fall of the Florida Development Company at length, and although by May it was describing a crop grown “within the corporate limits of the town” of Avon Park as an unremarkable fact.[plp-1897] The silence is worth stating because the paper is the only surviving Florida source close enough to have carried the news.

The record that would settle the 1897 proceedings exactly is the county clerk’s — the incorporation papers filed at Arcadia, and the transcript books the Highlands County clerk made of DeSoto County’s records in 1921.

References

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

  1. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News, Savannah, Georgia, 9 March 1899, page 6: the election at Avon Park on whether the municipal government should continue (1899) · newspaper
  2. W. E. Pabor, editor and publisher, The Pabor Lake Pineapple, January to September 1897, read in full: the fall of the Florida Development Company, and the town's corporate limits (references/pabor-lake-pineapple.md) (1897) · newspaper
  3. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News, Savannah, Georgia, 15 January 1897, page 6, Florida column: the incorporation of Avon Park and the election of its officers (1897) · newspaper
  4. Manatee County Public Library digital collection, A History of Arcadia and DeSoto County, page 11: the incorporation dates of the county's towns (2026) · secondary
  5. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida: the town's incorporation in 1897, and Clark D. Knapp as mayor in the Avon Park Idea of 1898 (references/the-first-hundred-years-of-avon-park_leoma-bradshaw-maxwell_1976.md) (1976) · book
  6. University of Florida Law Review, The History and Status of Local Government Powers in Florida, University of Florida Law Review (2026) · secondary
  7. Florida League of Cities, Florida Cities by Incorporation Year, with Incorporation and Dissolution Information, 2020 (2020) · secondary
  8. Florida State Legislature, Chapter 6662 (No. 242), Laws of Florida 1913: An Act to Establish and Constitute a Municipality in DeSoto County, Florida, To Be Known and Designated as the Town of Avon Park (references/laws-of-florida-chapter-6662-1913.md) (1913) · official
  9. United States Census Bureau / USGenWeb Archives transcription, 1900 United States Federal Census, Precinct 14 (Avon Park), DeSoto County, Florida, enumerated 25 June 1900, Households 381/382 (Lawrence W. Mix) and 391/392 (John C. Burleigh and Hazeline Dobbins) (1900) · official
  10. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), 16 October 1894, p. 6: Annual meeting of the Florida Development Company at Avon Park, electing R. D. Hall secretary (1894) · newspaper
  11. Belden Publishing Company, Florida Railroad Gazetteer and State Business Directory, 1895, p. 97: 'Hendricks J T, notary, abstracts' (1895) · book
  12. O. R. Thacher, The De Soto County News, The De Soto County News (Arcadia, Fla.), 17 November 1905, p. 8: 'Department of The South Florida Sun, Avon Park Locals' (notice by A. Winthrop Sargent, J.P., citing Florida Statutes Section 2683 on discharging firearms in an unincorporated village) (1905) · newspaper

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