The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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No Highlands County rancher is recorded supplying the Brighton cattle program, 1935-1940

The Brighton Reservation lies just over the Highlands County line in Glades County, and the cattle program that restarted Seminole ranching there in the second half of the 1930s was the nearest large livestock enterprise to Avon Park’s own ranching country. No record found names an Avon Park or Highlands County rancher, stockman, landowner or business selling cattle, hiring out labor, leasing pasture, or supplying fencing or feed to that program between 1935 and 1940. Every account of where the herd, the fences, the wells and the work came from names the federal government, the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division, or the Seminole cattlemen themselves.

The stock came from the West

The foundation herd was a federal purchase shipped east by rail. A 1985 article in Rangelands records that “Seminole ranching enterprises began rebuilding in 1936 when the United States Government shipped 500 head of drought relief Hereford cattle from Arizona to the Seminole Indian Agency,” with further losses on the overland drive to Brighton.[sievers-1985-seminole-ranching] The Tribe’s own historic preservation office gives 547 head bought from ranches ruined by the Dust Bowl.[thpo-cowkeepers-legacy] The National Register nomination for the Red Barn at Brighton gives a third figure again, 700 head from the Apache Reservation in Oklahoma.[nrhp-red-barn] The accounts disagree over the number and the place of origin, which is treated separately in the starter herd finding; they agree that the cattle were bought by the federal government in the western states and moved to Florida. A second purchase in 1940 brought two-year-old heifers from the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona.[sievers-1985-seminole-ranching] A contemporary account in The Clewiston News in September 1937 says the same thing of the breeding stock then on the ground: “A large number of pure-bred Hereford beef cattle were put on the reservation by the government and lately sevral head of Black Angus have been added to cross with the Hereford strain.”[clewiston-1937-09-03]

The fences, wells and pasture were relief work

Range improvement at Brighton was done as federal relief work on reservation land rather than bought in. Projects carried out with the Seminoles by the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division on the Florida reservations between January 1934 and August 1939 included 46 miles of range fence, 21 wells, 15 miles of truck trails and 12 miles of road, and more than 1,200 acres of developed range.[nrhp-red-barn] The Tribe’s account describes the same program of windmills, sink wells, mineral boxes, fencing and improved grass, and a herd past a thousand head by 1939.[thpo-cowkeepers-legacy] The grazing land was the reservation’s own: The Clewiston News, announcing the October 1937 roundup, described the Glades County reservation tract as partly “used largely for wild pasture land for cattle owned by the Indians.”[clewiston-1937-10-08]

The trade ran outward, and to Glades County

What local commerce the roundups generated ran the other way, and the buyers named were not from Highlands County. At the October 1937 roundup, reported in The Clewiston News from the Moore Haven Democrat, “many head of young calves were sold by the Indians, several Herefords and Shorthorns being purchased by Moore Haven men,” with the county agent helping to sort the cattle for the show.[clewiston-1937-10-15] Moore Haven is the Glades County seat, some forty miles south of the Highlands County line.

The one documented Highlands County tie is a federal post

The connection between Highlands County and the Brighton program in these years runs through one man, and it is a government appointment rather than a business relationship. Fred Montsdeoca, whose family ranched at Lorida in eastern Highlands County, was the Florida Agricultural Extension agent for Glades and Okeechobee counties from 1930 to 1971 and worked with the Seminoles at Brighton to build a cattle operation around herd and pasture management.[fahof-montsdeoca] He took a separate federal assignment as cattle foreman, taught pasture rotation and maintenance, and drew young Seminole men into the work.[tribune-2018-montsdeoca] The account of his career names Glades County officials and the reservation’s teachers; it names no Highlands County supplier.

Two bodies of record that would carry such a transaction survive but are not searchable at a distance. The Seminole Agency’s own correspondence for these years is held at the National Archives in Atlanta and is not digitized, and no Avon Park or Sebring newspaper survives in digital form for 1935 to 1940, so the local reporting that would have carried such a sale has not been searched.

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. Sievers, Ed; Tepper, Craig; Tanner, George W., Seminole Indian Ranching in Florida (1985) · secondary
  2. Seminole Tribe of Florida, Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Cowkeeper's Legacy - A Seminole Story (2023) · official
  3. Purkerson, Carrie; Seminole Tribe of Florida Tribal Historic Preservation Office, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Red Barn (2008) · official
  4. The Clewiston News, The Clewiston News, 3 September 1937 (1937) · newspaper
  5. The Clewiston News, The Clewiston News, 8 October 1937 (1937) · newspaper
  6. The Clewiston News, The Clewiston News, 15 October 1937 (1937) · newspaper
  7. Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame, Fred Y. Montsdeoca, 2004 Inductee (2004) · official
  8. Millar, Siobhan, Fred Montsdeoca: So much more than an Agricultural Agent (2018) · newspaper

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