The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Black Avon Park in 1920 and 1930, from the census manuscripts

Summary

Neither the 1920 nor the 1930 census of Avon Park has a name index, which is why neither had been read. Both have now been read page by page. In January 1920, six years after the town began admitting Black labor, its precinct held 413 Black and mulatto residents in about a hundred and fifty households. By 1930 the town itself held 928, better than a quarter of its people.[census-1920-ed23][census-1930-avon-park][census-1940-t30]

1920: turpentine

Avon Park’s precinct was enumeration district 23 of DeSoto County, taken between 6 January and 7 February 1920. The enumerator was Byrum Shockley, who grew up in the Bunbury house on Lake Pythias and became the first careful student of the town’s history.[census-1920-ed23]

Four hundred and thirteen Black and mulatto people appear in his sheets, in about a hundred and fifty households, spread through most of them rather than gathered in one place. The count is exact: the color column of all nineteen sheets has been read cell by cell. The great majority are marked “B”; “Mu” appears regularly from the ninth sheet onward. The largest single block is 88 people together, recorded almost entirely as “Laborer, Turpentine f’m” — the plainest link yet between the census and the naval stores business that the 1937 typescript says was one of the two kinds of work Black men had been allowed to do at Avon Park before 1914. Sawmill and crate-mill laborers, an ice-plant fireman, many washerwomen and one clergyman (David Pete on Sheet 8) are in the same sheets.[census-1920-ed23][darsey-1937]

These 413 were not all inside the town. Enumeration district 23 is the whole of election precinct 14, and the Census Bureau printed two figures for it: 1,698 people in the precinct, and 890 in the incorporated town. On the manuscript schedule itself, Shockley marked the exact boundary between the two: on Sheets 1A through 9B (images 0439–0456), he entered Avon Park Town as the incorporated place and stopped at Sheet 9B line 90 (890 people in all), writing across line 97 in his own hand, “Here ends the enumeration of Avon Park town.” On Sheets 10A through 18A (images 0457–0473), covering the remaining 808 people of Precinct 14 outside the corporate limits, he left the incorporated-place field blank.[census-1920-ed23][census-1920-fl]

That division separates the town’s Black population from that of the surrounding precinct: 83 Black and mulatto residents (9.3 percent of the town’s 890 inhabitants) lived inside the incorporated Town of Avon Park on Sheets 1 through 9, while 330 Black and mulatto residents (40.8 percent of the 808 rural precinct inhabitants, and four-fifths of all 413 Black residents in Precinct 14) lived outside the corporate boundary on Sheets 10 through 17 beside the mills, turpentine camps, and groves.[census-1920-ed23][census-1920-fl] Five years later the state of Florida counted only the town and found 229 Black residents in it.[census-1920-fl][florida-1925] The arithmetic is set out in Avon Park had 890 people in 1920, and 1,698 lived in its precinct.

Where these households stood is only partly recorded in the street-name margin. Shockley wrote a street or place name next to Black households five times across the district: Railroad Ave and Pomfret Ave inside the corporate limits on Sheet 6, and three unincorporated localities outside the town boundary—Pittsburg on Sheet 11B (the rural community north of Avon Park toward the Polk County line), Sebring on Sheet 13B in the turpentine woods, and Crate Mill Road on Sheet 14A at the mill complex south of town.[census-1920-ed23] For the remaining Black households in 1920, the street column is blank, and no camp or company name appears on the schedule.[census-1920-ed23]

1930: three districts

Ten years later the schedule names streets, and Avon Park was by then in Highlands County and split across three enumeration districts. All three were read.

28-2, the New Part of the city, holds one continuous run of about five hundred Black residents along A Avenue, B Avenue, Fairfield Avenue, Castle Street and Washington Street.[census-1930-avon-park]

28-3, the precinct outside the city limits, holds between four and five hundred more, on Fairfield Avenue, East First Street, and a long stretch of unplatted road with no street name at all. They are overwhelmingly crate-mill and saw-mill laborers.[census-1930-avon-park]

28-1, the Old Part of the city — the founding town — is white but for twenty-three people in six households: servants living behind white households on East Verona Circle and North Lake Avenue, and rented households on North Central and North Winthrop Avenues, working as domestic servants, chauffeurs, and railroad and grove laborers.[census-1930-avon-park]

The three together come to something between nine hundred and forty and nine hundred and fifty people, against the 928 the Census Bureau published for the town. Since 28-3 lay outside the city limits, its four-hundred-odd were probably never in that published figure at all, and the Black population of the town and its edges was larger than the printed number suggests.[census-1930-avon-park][census-1940-t30]

The streets inside the city are nearly the ones the 1950 census gives — Verona, Carolina, Fairfield, Castle — with the color line crossing on Verona Avenue in both years.

The 1930 sheets also name people the archive did not have: three ministers—Baptist preacher Robert M. Rixon on B Avenue, African Methodist Episcopal preacher H. McNeal Harris (serving New Mount Olive A.M.E. Church before his later leadership in the 1956 Tallahassee Bus Boycott), and Holiness preacher Elder Harry Johnson (founder of Emanuel Tabernacle on Carolina Street), alongside Saint John Baptist’s founding pastor Reuben Foreman working weekdays as a crate-mill sawyer in ED 28-3 ([black-ministers-of-avon-park-1920-1950](black-ministers-of-avon-park-1920-1950.md)); two Black shopkeepers, James Jones and Bertha Austin, each keeping a grocery; the manager of a dance hall, John Shine, with a pianist, Bensey Robertson, and a pool-room manager, Tommy Privett, living by, alongside a second pool-room manager, Will Stringer, on Castle Street; and a barber, Rosa H. Lyons, working from her father Sam Lyons’s house on Fairfield Avenue ([black-businesses-and-trades-in-avon-park-1920-1930](black-businesses-and-trades-in-avon-park-1920-1930.md)).[census-1930-avon-park]

The settlement “west of the city”

The 1937 typescript says the settlement that grew up after 1914 stood “some distance west of the city.”[darsey-1937] The 1950 work placed Black Avon Park east of the Atlantic Coast Line. Both are right, and they describe different places twenty years apart.

The Sanborn fire insurance map of 1920 shows, beyond the edge of the surveyed grid to the south-west of the town and west of the Atlantic Coast Line track, forty-four small dwellings and a two-story boarding house, lettered instead of numbered because the ground was never platted, and with no street name — standing among the Flint Lumber Company’s mill, the Mutual Crate Company and the Avon Manufacturing Company’s crate mill.[sanborn-1920] That is the blank street column of the 1920 census made visible, and Railroad Avenue, one of the three names the enumerator did write down, runs alongside the track on its west side through the same district.[sanborn-1920][census-1920-ed23]

By 1930 the people inside the city were on the New Part’s streets, east of the old railroad curve, and Verona and Fairfield — which in 1920 had run through the white lakefront neighborhood by Lake Verona — carried Black households at their southern ends.[census-1930-avon-park][sanborn-1920] The mill settlement did not vanish: district 28-3’s four hundred-odd crate-mill and saw-mill laborers, on an unplatted road outside the city, are its continuation.[census-1930-avon-park]

One thing the Sanborn sheets do not do is name it. All four were read, and not one carries a label reading “Negro” or “Colored” anywhere, though the surveyors named individual proprietors, marked boarding houses, and lettered every small dwelling on the sheet.[sanborn-1920]

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. United States Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Population, Florida, Number of Inhabitants: Table 2, Population of Counties by Minor Civil Divisions, page 7, and Table 3, Population of Incorporated Places, page 13 (1921) · official
  2. Florida Department of Agriculture, The Fifth Census of the State of Florida Taken in the Year 1925: Table 18, Population of Cities, Towns and Villages by Race, page 71 (1926) · official
  3. Sanborn Map Company, Sanborn fire insurance map of Avon Park, Florida, 1920, four sheets (references/sanborn-1920-avon-park.md) (1920) · archival
  4. United States Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, population schedules, Florida, DeSoto County, enumeration district 23 (Precinct 14, Avon Park), NARA microfilm T625 roll 217, enumerated 6–25 January 1920 (1920) · official
  5. United States Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration districts 28-1, 28-2 and 28-3 (Avon Park), NARA microfilm T626 roll 318 (1930) · official
  6. United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume II, Part 2, Florida, Tables 22 and 30 (1943) · official
  7. Barbara Berry Darsey, Avon Park Guide, typescript for the Federal Writers' Project, pages 37 and 119 (references/avon-park-guide-federal-writers-project-1937.md) (1938) · archival

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