The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Avon Park never had a fiber industry

Summary

One sentence printed in Avon Park’s own newspaper in 1894 has been taken in this archive as a sign that the town was trying to make a business of sisal. It was not. The sentence is a second-hand trade note about Florida in general, hedged twice by the man who set it; the crop it describes could not be grown within ninety miles of Avon Park; and no record of a fiber grower, a fiber mill or a fiber crop at Avon Park has ever been found, in any source, at any date.

What the paper actually printed

The Avon Park Idea survives only in the papers that quoted it. The Savannah Morning News of 5 September 1894 carried this in its Florida column:

Avon Park Idea: The fiber growth in Florida from sisal and bayonet leaves is proving, it is claimed, a great success, it being identical with that produced in the Bahamas, which is superior to that of the Yucatan product. The Bahama product, it is claimed, is a transplant from the Florida Keys, is strong and of good color. The shipments of sisal from Yucatan in January were very small, only about 50 per cent. of the usual amount. An evolution in the business is recorded in the fact that sisal twine is sold at lower prices than jute, and is displacing the latter.[savannah-1894-09-05]

Read it for what it says. It is about “the fiber growth in Florida,” not at Avon Park. It says “it is claimed” twice. It reports Yucatan shipping figures and the Bahama trade — matters no editor in a pine-woods village of a few hundred people had any way of knowing at first hand. It is a squib lifted from the agricultural or trade press, of the kind every country weekly filled its columns with, and it makes no claim about Avon Park at all.

Sisal could not grow there

The United States Department of Agriculture had a special agent in charge of fiber investigations, Charles Richards Dodge, who surveyed the Florida coast from Jupiter to Charlotte Harbor in the spring of 1891 and published what he found. His report draws the commercial limit as a line running “from latitude 28° 30’ commencing on the Atlantic coast, in a southwesterly direction across the State of Florida, to the Gulf coast in latitude 27° 15’.” Even inside it, he wrote, a cold winter blackened the newest leaves and destroyed their value; only “fully matured leaves will stand one or two degrees of frost without injury.” His conclusion on the older dream of growing the plant further north was flat: “the frost line sharply marks the limit of cultivation.”[dodge-1891]

Forty years later the Department’s senior fiber botanist put the botany at its plainest: “Sisal plants require a tropical climate… There are no commercial sisal plantations outside the Tropics.”[dewey-1931]

Avon Park stands inland on the Lake Wales Ridge, well north of that line and colder in winter than the coast at the same latitude. Four months after the Idea’s note the freezes of December 1894 and February 1895 destroyed the town’s citrus and its first economy. Sisal would not have survived a single one of them.

What a “bayonet leaf” was

“Bayonet leaf” meant a yucca, and the term was loose even among the men who used it professionally. Dodge’s companion report on leaf fibers lists the yuccas of the United States and notes that “among the many common names may be mentioned Adam’s needle, Spanish bayonet, Aloe-leaved Adam’s needle, bear-grass, dwarf palmetto.”[dodge-1893] In his own fieldwork in south Florida he uses “Spanish bayonet” consistently for a plant distinct from the sisals — “upon all these keys sisal is growing to a great extent in patches, but more or less interspersed with false sisal, Spanish bayonet, and bamboo” — and the species he found answering to it was Yucca aloifolia.[dodge-1893] That is the best identification available, and it is not a certain one.

Evidence: single-source for the identification itself, which rests on Dodge’s usage alone.

Yucca fiber never paid, and Dodge is the reason we know. He put about forty pounds of Yucca aloifolia leaves from Sands Key through the Department’s cleaning machine and got about one pound of dry fiber, twelve to fifteen inches long. His verdict: “This would not pay commercially, as the yield is low for an inferior fiber. Pineapple fiber with the same yield would be three or four times as valuable, while the leaves could be gathered for one-fourth the cost.”[dodge-1893] Cordage machinery of the day could not work a fiber shorter than about two and a half feet, and no yucca came near it.[dodge-1893]

A promotional pamphlet of 1895 on The Fibre Bearing Plants of Florida — issued to sell land along a railroad, and printed at the same Savannah press that set the Morning News — names the five plants then being pressed on Florida growers: sisal, sansevieria, wild pineapple, cultivated pineapple, and ramie. No yucca is among them, and neither is anything called a bayonet.[parsons-1895]

The plant is still there

Spanish bayonet does grow at Avon Park, whatever its fiber was worth. A herbarium specimen of Yucca aloifolia collected in May 1964 comes from Highlands County, “US 27 between FL 731 and FL 70,” in sand scrub, a few miles from the town.[plant-atlas]

Its relative Yucca filamentosa, Adam’s needle or bear-grass, is the better-documented plant of the ridge scrub around Avon Park: collected in Highlands Hammock State Park, in scrub south-east of Sebring, and — earliest of all — “near Lake Annie,” at what is now the Archbold Biological Station, by the botanist John Kunkel Small on 13 May 1926.[plant-atlas] Both are far hardier than sisal, and both were standing in the scrub long before anyone printed a word about fiber in Avon Park.

Nothing was ever grown or milled

The search for a fiber industry at Avon Park has been run through every record that would have caught one, and all of them are empty.

Oliver Crosby, who founded the town and wrote two books about what would grow and pay in Florida, never mentions sisal, hemp, ramie, or any fiber plant as a crop in either of them.[crosby-1888]

The business directories list Avon Park’s firms by name and trade in 1895, 1907, 1911 and 1918 — thirty-four entries in the fullest pre-freeze snapshot, thirty-five in 1918. Not one is a fiber mill, a twine or cordage works, a decorticating plant or a fiber grower. The same directories do list fiber manufacturers elsewhere in Florida in those years, so the trade was one they recorded.[gaz-directories]

The state’s own county crop returns itemize what DeSoto County grew in 1921-22 and what Highlands County grew in 1923-24, down to teosinte, chufas, tanyah and arrowroot. No fiber crop of any kind appears in either.[fl-agriculture]

The Federal Writers’ Project’s survey of the town’s industries, written in 1937 and running to citrus, pineapples, turpentine, timber, cattle and every other line of business its author could find, records no fiber industry past or present.[darsey-1937]

The one thing that might have come to something was pineapple. Avon Park had eighty-six pineapple growers in the township in 1895, and pineapple leaf is a genuine fiber that Dodge himself rated three or four times more valuable than yucca.[dodge-1893] Nobody there is known to have tried it.

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. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News, Savannah, Georgia, 5 September 1894, page 6, Florida column, quoting the Avon Park Idea on fibre (1894) · newspaper
  2. Charles Richards Dodge, Special Agent in Charge of Fiber Investigations, A Report on Sisal Hemp Culture in the United States, United States Department of Agriculture, Fiber Investigations Report No. 3 (1891) · official
  3. Charles Richards Dodge, Special Agent in Charge of Fiber Investigations, A Report on the Leaf Fibers of the United States, United States Department of Agriculture, Fiber Investigations Report No. 5 (1893) · official
  4. Lyster H. Dewey, Sisal and Henequen, Plants Yielding Fiber for Binder Twine, United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry, Circular No. 186 (1931) · official
  5. Charles W. Parsons, The Fibre Bearing Plants of Florida, published and issued by the Plant System, printed at The Morning News Print, Savannah (1895) · book
  6. Institute for Systematic Botany, University of South Florida, Atlas of Florida Plants, herbarium specimen records for Yucca aloifolia and Yucca filamentosa in Highlands County (2026) · secondary
  7. Oliver Marvin Crosby, Common Sense about Florida, and Florida Facts both Bright and Blue (1887), searched for every fibre crop (references/common-sense-about-florida_o-m-crosby_1888.md) (1888) · book
  8. R. L. Polk & Co. and others, Florida state gazetteers and business directories, the Avon Park entries for 1895, 1907, 1911 and 1918 (references/florida-business-directories.md) (1918) · book
  9. Barbara Berry Darsey, Avon Park Guide, typescript for the Federal Writers' Project, Economic Development and Industry chapter (references/avon-park-guide-federal-writers-project-1937.md) (1938) · archival
  10. Florida Department of Agriculture, Biennial Report of the Department of Agriculture of the State of Florida, 1921-1922 and 1923-1924: the DeSoto and Highlands county crop returns (1924) · official

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