Lake Forest was a plat name, not the town’s former name
Local accounts say Avon Park was first called Lake Forest and later renamed. That is a misunderstanding of a document, and the founder’s own pamphlet corrects it.
Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (1888) pairs the two names in its own title and uses them for different things. Lake Forest is a named plat — a subdivision — sitting in Section 22 of Township 33 South, Range 28 East, “about the center” of a township called Avon Park.[crosby-1888-pamphlet] The pamphlet speaks of “parties now interested in building Lake Forest” who began the settlement eighteen months earlier. A plat inside a township, not a town renamed.
This resolves two puzzles at once.
No post office named Lake Forest ever existed in this part of Florida, which had looked like evidence against the name entirely.[forte-postal] Of course it did not: plats do not get post offices, townships and towns do.
And no federal land patent covers Section 22 of Township 33 South, Range 28 East — the section containing the town core.[blm-glo] That is the Lake Forest section. Crosby got his land from Hamilton Disston, whose enormous 1881 purchase from the state moved millions of acres out of state hands without any federal patent ever being issued to a settler. The title trail runs through Disston and the Internal Improvement Fund, not the General Land Office.
How to state it. Avon Park was the township name from the start. Lake Forest was the plat Crosby laid out at its center and advertised under both names together. Neither replaced the other.
What is still open. Whether the plat was ever recorded under the name Lake Forest, and where. The National Register nomination gives an 1892 platting date without a book and page; a companion research pass found reference to two 1887 plat filings. Neither has been checked against the county record, because both county clerks’ systems were unreachable.
References
- crosby-1888-pamphlet — O. M. Crosby. Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park. 1888. crosby-1888-common-sense-about-florida.md
- forte-postal — Jim Forte Postal History. Post Offices by county, Florida. 31 August 2026. https://www.postalhistory.com/postoffices.asp
- blm-glo — Bureau of Land Management. General Land Office Records, Townships 33S and 34S, Range 28E, Tallahassee Meridian. 31 August 2026. https://glorecords.blm.gov/s/
Related
- Reference: Crosby’s Common Sense About Florida, 1888
- Finding: the Avon Park townsite passed through no federal land patent
- Report: the naming of Avon Park and the question of the English settlers
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
- O. M. Crosby, Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (1888)
- Jim Forte Postal History, Post Offices by county, Florida (2026)
- Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records, Townships 33S and 34S, Range 28E, Tallahassee Meridian (2026)
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