The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The record of Black Avon Park is almost entirely missing from accessible sources

Qualified, 2 September 2026. Two finds have narrowed this gap since it was written. The federal census of 1950 counted Black Avon Park by name, street by street, and has been read; and the Works Progress Administration’s Historical Records Survey wrote a card for each of nine Black congregations in the town in September 1938, giving their streets, buildings, ministers and record books, and naming dozens of Black townspeople — see Report: The Black churches of Avon Park in 1938. What remains genuinely missing is the pictures. An exhaustive search of Florida Memory, the Library of Congress including the Farm Security Administration file, the National Archives, NPGallery, the Florida A&M Black Archives and the Internet Archive found no photograph of any Black church, of Hopewell School, or of any Black resident of Avon Park. The absence is now documented rather than assumed.

This bundle has recovered, from free online archives, the name of the man who founded Avon Park, the book he wrote, the chapter number of the town’s charter, the mileage of its railway station from Haines City, and the names of five aldermen who took office in 1913. A research pass of comparable effort on the town’s Black history produced:

  • one school, Hopewell, built in 1926;[newssun-hopewell]
  • the names of two teachers;
  • the fact that the town was segregated by law, housing included, with the white population in Precinct 1 and the Black quarters in the southern part of town voting in Precinct 2;
  • and one event, the cancellation of the Black precinct’s ballots by the city council in 1951, which itself rests on a single uncited blog post.[byrne-1951-votes]

Since this was first written, a single newspaper article on the town’s old churches has more than doubled what is known. It adds:

  • New Mount Olive A.M.E. Church, 818 South Delaney Avenue, organized in 1919/1920 (though once erroneously dated to 1900) — an organized Black congregation older than Hopewell School, and the earliest institution of Black Avon Park yet identified. It is still there.
  • St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, 251 East Green Street, from 1916, under Rev. G. W. Epps.
  • A school at Hagan’s Turpentine Still, and the fact that when it closed, “classes for Black children were held at St. Mark for several months.”[newssun-churches]

That last sentence names a turpentine camp nobody in this project had heard of, establishes that it had a school, and shows the Black church taking over the schooling when the camp school closed. Both churches stand in the southern part of town, which matches the recorded color line.

The lesson is about method, not about the past. Everything above came from one local newspaper article illustrated with the Historical Society’s own photographs. It was not in any archive, any census volume, any statute or any map. What is missing from Black Avon Park’s record is missing from the searchable record; a great deal of it is still in the town, in churches that have been meeting continuously since 1916 and 1919/1920.

A second addition, and the first hard number. The Atlanta Daily World of 25 September 1949 carried an Associated Negro Press dispatch from Avon Park reporting that 317 Black voters were registered in the town and 297 of them voted in that September’s municipal election, 255 for the winning mayoral candidate — a turnout the Junior Chamber of Commerce’s own registration drive had produced.[adw-1949-09-25] That is the earliest independently sourced count of any kind for Black Avon Park this project holds, and it also confirms, from outside the town, the segregated two-precinct arrangement and the fact that the Black precinct decided the election two years before the council tried to cancel it.

Even so, the rest of the list still stands. No business. No neighborhood name. No census figure. No named Black resident before 1916. The cemetery is the one item since found: the Lakeside Historical Cemetery on Cummings Avenue, also called Lincoln Garden, whose oldest marked graves date from 1928.[fg-lakeside]

Update, September 2026: one route did open

Most of this document still stands, but its central claim needs qualifying. The federal census population schedules for 1940 and 1950 were opened for the first time in September 2026, and they turned out to hold a great deal of what this document says could not be found.

From the schedules alone, this project now has: the streets and blocks Black Avon Park lived on; the color line fixed at two named household boundaries; a school principal, five teachers, two cooks, a janitor and a school bus driver, all named; three ministers; five Black-owned businesses; and a roster of the county prison camp in which seventeen of twenty-one prisoners were Black.[census-1950-schedules] See Finding: where Black Avon Park lived, and who its people were, 1940-1950 and Finding: the Highlands County Prison Camp in 1940.

The lesson is worth stating precisely, because it sharpens rather than cancels the argument below. The federal government counted these people carefully, by name, street by street, and its record survives and is free to read. What failed was everything local: the town’s own historical literature, its newspapers, its maps, its institutional memory. The gap this document describes is a gap in what Avon Park recorded and kept about itself, not a gap in the evidence that exists.

That also means the remedy is partly mechanical. Where a federal record exists — the census, the state education reports, the county property and deed records, federal court files — Black Avon Park can be recovered by anyone willing to read page images. The steps listed under “What would change it” below remain right, and the Society remains the best source; but they are no longer the only routes.

This is a fact about the record, not about the past

Roughly a third of Avon Park’s population today is Black. The people were there; the documents that would name them were either never made, not kept, or not digitized. Three specific mechanisms are visible in this project’s own work:

  1. The town’s own historical literature omits it. The National Register nomination for the Avon Park Historic District is a detailed, well-sourced forty-page history of the town from 1886 to 1935. It describes the citrus industry, the railways, the land boom, the hotels and the architecture. Black Avon Park does not appear in it.[nrhp-90000486]
  2. The digitized newspapers stop before it. The De Soto County News is digitized for 1905-06 and 1915-16 only, and no Avon Park or Highlands County paper is digitized at all before the 1980s. The period in which Hopewell School was built, used, and closed has no searchable local press.
  3. The maps that would show it are not online. Sanborn fire insurance maps of the 1920s and 1930s routinely mark segregated dwellings and neighborhood boundaries. Avon Park’s 1926 and 1939 Sanborn editions exist at the Library of Congress and are confirmed not digitized; only the November 1920 edition can be read online.

What would change it

In rough order of value per unit of effort:

  1. Ask the Society. In February the Avon Park Depot Museum opened a permanent exhibit on the town’s Black history, featuring eight people. Whoever assembled it knows more than any accessible online source, and the Society is the body this research serves.
  2. The Precinct 2 records. Registration rolls, poll books and returns for 1949 and 1951 would name hundreds of Black residents. Segregated voting was an instrument of exclusion; it also produced a separately-filed list of Black voters, which is now a genealogical resource.
  3. The 1926 and 1939 Sanborn sheets, on microfilm or ordered from the Library of Congress.
  4. Highlands County school board minutes for the founding of Hopewell in 1926, and the Fisk University Rosenwald Fund card file, since 1926 falls inside the Rosenwald building program and Florida had about 126 Rosenwald schools.
  5. Oral histories, urgently. One of the Hopewell teachers named in the press was ninety-four.

Why this document exists

So that the gap is recorded as a gap. An exhibit or a publication that draws only on what is easy to find will reproduce the silence, and will do so while appearing well-sourced. Anyone using this bundle should know that its coverage of the town is not evenly distributed, and why.

A silence with a date on it

The clearest measure of the gap is a book that had every reason to close it and did not. Barbara Berry Darsey’s Avon Park Guide, written for the Federal Writers’ Project in 1936–38 and running to 220 pages, has a section on education that takes the town’s schools from a one-room log cabin of 1888 to the accredited high school of 1923. It does not mention a school for Black children anywhere, and neither does any other page of the volume.[darsey-1937]

It is not that the writer was unaware there were Black people in Avon Park. The same volume counts the town’s taxpayers as “some seven hundred white tax payers, fifty colored,” records “eleven white Churches and eight Negro Churches within the limits of Avon Park,” and sets out at length when Black labor was first allowed into the town and the curfew ordinance that followed. Eight congregations and fifty taxpayers, and not one school.[darsey-1937]

References

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. Barbara Berry Darsey, Avon Park Guide, typescript for the Federal Writers' Project, read in full: the town's schools, its churches and its taxpayers (references/avon-park-guide-federal-writers-project-1937.md) (1938) · archival
  2. Highlands News-Sun, Hopewell Elementary School educators encouraged Black students to excel (2026)
  3. Associated Negro Press, in the Atlanta Daily World, Negroes Swing Mayor's Election In Avon Park, Atlanta Daily World, 25 September 1949, page 3 (1949)
  4. Jason Byrne, Florida History Blog, Avon Park City Council Throws Out All Black Votes in 1951 Election (2026)
  5. Robert Miller, Highlands News-Sun, 29 January 2023, 100-year-old churches in Avon Park (2023)
  6. United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Avon Park Historic District (1990)
  7. United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, Avon Park enumeration districts (1950)
  8. Find a Grave contributors, Lakeside Historical Cemetery, also known as Lincoln Garden Cemetery, Avon Park, Find a Grave cemetery 2331202 (2026) · secondary

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