The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Lord and Lady Bunbury: a courtesy, not a title

Summary

Avon Park has always called the English couple who built the country house on Lake Pythias in 1889 Lord and Lady Bunbury. They cannot have been. The one hereditary honor attached to the name is a baronetcy, and a baronet is styled Sir, never Lord; the baronetcy itself belonged, throughout the years the couple were in Florida, to a family seated in Suffolk. Whoever the couple at Lake Pythias were, “Lord” was a courtesy their neighbors paid them and not a rank he held. Their real names have still not been established.

What the town has called them

The name comes down through the family that bought the house. Barbara Berry Darsey, compiling the Avon Park Guide for the Federal Writers’ Project in 1937, writes of “Lord Bunbury, one of the earliest settlers,” who “came from England with his horses and his dogs,” and of the rose garden that Byrum Shockley then kept at “his home on Lake Pythias, once the hunting lodge home of Lord and Lady Bunbury, pioneers from England.”[darsey-1937] Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell repeats it in 1976 — “Lord and Lady Bunbury of England had visited the Laidleys at Fort Meade before selecting the 60 acre site on Lake Pythias where they built the home” — and, in her list of the town’s English settlers a few pages earlier, gives the same family’s name plainly as “George H. Bunbury.”[maxwell-1976]

There is no Lord Bunbury

Cokayne’s Complete Baronetage, the standard register of the order, carries the family under “BUNBURY: cr. 29 June 1681,” created for Thomas Bunbury of Bunbury and Stanney in Cheshire, sheriff of that county in 1673–74, and traced from him through ten holders.[cokayne-baronetage-4] A baronetcy is not a peerage, and it does not make a man a lord. The holder is addressed as Sir; the style “Lady” belongs to his wife, and the Standing Council of the Baronetage states the rule plainly: “the wife of a baronet or a knight has the style of ‘Lady’ before her surname.”[baronetage-styles] “Lady Bunbury” is therefore a style that has really existed. “Lord Bunbury” is not.

Nor was the baronetcy itself anywhere near Florida in the relevant years. Cokayne records that the ninth baronet, Sir Edward Herbert Bunbury, member of parliament for Bury St Edmunds from 1847 to 1852, died unmarried at Brighton on 5 March 1895, and that his nephew Sir Henry Charles John Bunbury succeeded him that day; the family seats were Barton Hall, near Bury St Edmunds, and Mildenhall Manor House, both in Suffolk.[cokayne-baronetage-4] Neither man, and no wife of either, is placed at Avon Park by any source.

The candidate who has been tested

Evidence: single-source.

One particular man has been proposed as the settler: George Edward Bunbury, born 17 October 1856, a son of Colonel Henry William St Pierre Bunbury and Cecilia Caroline Napier.[thepeerage-7998] Cokayne names the same colonel and the same wife as the parents of the tenth baronet, his eldest son, so this George Edward was that baronet’s younger brother and never a baronet himself.[cokayne-baronetage-4] He does not fit. The peerage compilations, drawing on Burke’s, record that he married Beatrice Dora Cottle, daughter of Thomas J. Cottle of Woodstock, Ontario, on 30 October 1884; that they had one recorded child, a daughter, Noreen Winifred Cecilia Napier Bunbury; that he held a lieutenant’s commission in the Norfolk Regiment; and that he died in 1943.[thepeerage-7998] His wife would not have been Lady Bunbury either. Nothing connects him to Florida, and one daughter is not the four children Avon Park remembers.

What the American record says

A Bunbury really was farming at Avon Park. In seven consecutive issues of The Florida Agriculturist between 1 May and 12 June 1895, “G. Bunbury, Avon Park, Fla.” advertised in the cheap column: “Wanted, five or six pounds cleaned Beggar Weed seed. Also pair fancy rabbits or Belgian hares.”[fa-1895-bunbury] Those seven advertisements are the only trace of the family in any Florida newspaper yet digitized. A search of the whole Chronicling America corpus for the word “Bunbury” in Florida papers returns fifteen pages, seven of them these advertisements.[chronam-bunbury-florida] No Florida newspaper of the period calls anyone Lord or Lady Bunbury.

Nor were the Bunburys still in the town at the end of the decade. A transcription of the 1900 federal census for Avon Park’s precinct, enumerated on 25 June 1900, records no Bunbury household at all, though it does record William King, merchant, born in England in July 1853, and his wife Mary A. King, born in England in April 1860.[usgenweb-1900-avon-park] That is consistent with the story the town tells, in which the wife went home to England for good after about nine years and her husband came back only as a visitor.[maxwell-1976]

Every surviving record of the man himself, on both sides of the Atlantic, gives an initial and not a name: “G. Bunbury” in the newspaper, “Lord Bunbury” in the typescript. Only Maxwell, writing ninety years after the fact, supplies “George H.”[fa-1895-bunbury][darsey-1937][maxwell-1976]

The missing English records

The true identity of the couple might be established from English records matching the family profile (a George Bunbury with a wife who returned to England to bear four children between 1889 and 1898), but the necessary primary sources — the FreeBMD index of English birth registrations from 1889 to 1900, the 1891, 1901, and 1911 England censuses, and the UK outbound passenger lists (BT27) for 1885 to 1900 — remain locked behind login requirements and anti-scraping systems. Until those records can be consulted by a researcher with a signed-in session, the identity of the Avon Park Bunburys remains unresolved.

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. George Edward Cokayne, Complete Baronetage, volume IV: creations 1665–1707, pages 117–119, 'Bunbury: cr. 29 June 1681' (1904) · book
  2. The Standing Council of the Baronetage, Addressing a Baronet (2026) · official
  3. Darryl Lundy, thepeerage.com, Person Page 7998: George Edward Bunbury, citing Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage (107th edition, 2003), volume 1, page 583 (2006) · secondary
  4. Barbara Berry Darsey, Avon Park Guide, typescript for the Federal Writers' Project, pages 22, 138, 142, 146 and 150 (references/avon-park-guide-federal-writers-project-1937.md) (1938) · archival
  5. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida, page 50: the English settlers, and pages 78–79: Burnbury House and Shockley Family (references/the-first-hundred-years-of-avon-park_leoma-bradshaw-maxwell_1976.md) (1976) · book
  6. The Florida Agriculturist, DeLand, Fla., The Florida Agriculturist, 1 May 1895, page 9, Cheap Column: want advertisement of G. Bunbury, Avon Park (repeated 8, 15, 22 and 29 May and 5 and 12 June 1895) (1895) · newspaper
  7. Library of Congress, Chronicling America, search for 'Bunbury' in Florida newspapers: fifteen pages in the digitised corpus (2026) · official
  8. USGenWeb Archives, 1900 United States federal census, Avon Park, Precinct 14, DeSoto County, Florida, enumerated 25 June 1900 by Henry C. Evarts; transcription by Janine Rickner and Phyllis Borden for the USGenWeb Archives (2025) · secondary

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