The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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African American secondary schooling, labor migration, and demographic shifts (1930–1940)

During the decade of the Great Depression, Avon Park and Highlands County experienced severe structural contractions across segregated education, extractive industries, and population stability. Between 1930 and 1940, Highlands County lost over a quarter of its African American population, while Avon Park lost a fifth of its Black residents.[census-1930-t16][census-1940-t30] These shifts were driven by institutional limits on secondary schooling, the exhaustion of pine timber stands, and the economic dispersal of transient wage laborers.

Secondary School Provision and Regional Commutes

Under Florida’s segregated school system, Highlands County provided no secondary high school within Avon Park for African American children. The three-room frame Hopewell School, constructed in 1926 on Winthrop Street, was designed and operated strictly as an elementary facility (grades 1 through 8).

To obtain high school coursework, older Black pupils in Avon Park relied on a centralized county facility located ten miles south in Sebring:

  • The Slater Fund County Training School: In the 1931–1932 school year, the John F. Slater Fund disbursed $325 toward teacher salaries for a single county training school designated administratively as “Highlands — Sebring-Avon Park.”[dpi-1930-1932] In subsequent years, this consolidated institution operated as the Sebring Negro School and was later formally developed as E. O. Douglas High School, serving as Highlands County’s sole public secondary school for Black students until desegregation in the late 1960s.[dpi-1934-1936]
  • Daily Commutes and Boarding Alternatives: Black students in Avon Park seeking a high school diploma commuted daily to Sebring by county-operated segregated buses or private carpools. Families possessing financial means occasionally sent children to residential academies outside the county, such as the high school department of Florida A&M College in Tallahassee, Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, or Fessenden Academy in Marion County.
  • Cumulative Educational Impact: Because secondary access required long daily travel, economic self-reliance, and tuition for boarding schools, high school completion remained rare. By the 1950 census, only twenty-five nonwhite adults in the entire county held four years of high school education out of 1,815 adults aged twenty-five and over (1.4 percent), with a median educational attainment of 5.2 school years.[census-1950-t44]

The 1930–1940 Great Depression Out-Migration

Between the 1930 and 1940 censuses, Highlands County’s total population remained virtually flat (rising from 9,192 to 9,246, an increase of 54 persons), but this stability concealed a major racial divergence: the white population grew by 791, while the Black population fell from 2,677 to 1,944 — a net loss of 733 Black residents (27.4 percent).[census-1940-t30]

In Avon Park, where more than a third of the county’s Black residents lived, the Black community declined from 928 in 1930 to 743 in 1940 (a 19.9 percent loss), accounting for 185 of the town’s total net population loss of 230 persons.[census-1930-t16][census-1940-t30]

This outflow resulted from the collapse of extractive wage industries that had expanded during the 1915–1926 boom:

  • Labor Recruitment in the 1910s and 1920s: During World War I and the 1920s land boom, commercial operators actively recruited Black laborers from Alabama and Georgia to work in turpentine woods, still operations, and sawmills. Pioneer residents such as Douglas Reed (born 1889, who arrived in 1917 from Alabama to work for Charlie Clements), Diamond Collins, and L. J. Jenkins formed part of this industrial labor influx.[maxwell-1976] By 1930, this created a sharp gender imbalance in Highlands County: 1,055 Black men aged 21 and over against 660 Black women (a male surplus of 395).
  • Industrial Shutdowns in the 1930s: As virgin longleaf pine timber stands were cut over and the Hagan Naval Stores Company, Flint Lumber Company sawmills, and municipal construction projects closed or curtailed operations during the Great Depression, transient single male workers migrated out of the county to seek agricultural, phosphate, and industrial employment in Tampa, Lakeland, Jacksonville, and northern cities.
  • Normalization of the Sex Ratio: By 1940, the adult gender surplus had disappeared entirely: the census recorded 584 Black men and 563 Black women aged 21 and over, reflecting the departure of 471 adult men of working age and the stabilization of a settled family resident community.

The Age-15 Adolescent Male Cliff in the 1940 Census

Table 30a of the 1940 census records a pronounced demographic cliff among young Black males in Avon Park:[census-1940-t30]

Age Cohort Black Males Black Females
Under 5 years 37 40
5 to 9 years 39 37
10 to 14 years 41 41
15 to 19 years 22 42
20 to 24 years 18 34
25 to 29 years 38 36

While female cohort numbers remained consistent across adolescence (41 girls aged 10–14, 42 aged 15–19, and 34 aged 20–24), the male cohort dropped by nearly half at age fifteen (from 41 down to 22) and reached a low of 18 at ages 20–24.

Three structural factors produced this adolescent departure:

  1. Terminal Elementary Schooling at Hopewell: Because Hopewell School terminated at the eighth grade (around age fourteen), formal schooling ended for the majority of local adolescent boys. Without a local high school to maintain daily enrollment, teenage boys entered the full-time wage labor market immediately.
  2. Agricultural Labor Circuit Recruitment: At age fifteen, adolescent males were recruited into mobile citrus harvesting crews, muck truck-farming labor forces (such as the Everglades and Belle Glade winter vegetable harvests), and fruit-packing operations across central and south Florida.
  3. Out-Migration for Industrial and Transportation Employment: Adolescent males moved to larger urban centers offering non-agricultural employment, including Tampa docks and factories, Polk County phosphate mining works, and Atlantic Coast Line railroad maintenance crews, while adolescent females more frequently remained in Avon Park residing in family households and working in local domestic, laundry, and commercial service positions.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.
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unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
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Sources

  1. United States Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1, Florida, Table 16: Composition of the Population, for Incorporated Places of 2,500 to 10,000, page 422 (1932)
  2. United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 2, Florida, Tables 22, 30 and 30a, pages 53, 120 and 123 (1943)
  3. United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1950, Volume II, Part 10, Florida, Table 44: Characteristics of the Nonwhite Population, for Counties, page 10-107 (1952)
  4. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1930-1932: Table XV, Disbursed from Slater Fund (1932)
  5. Florida Superintendent of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1934-1936: the Slater Fund, and the Negro high-school directories (1936)
  6. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (Held at the Avon Park Historical Society Depot Museum, Avon Park, Florida) (1976) · book

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