No surviving photograph of the Avon Park wooden railway is known
Despite extensive searches across the State Archives of Florida, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and regional digital collections, no photograph of the Avon Park Transportation Company’s wooden railway or its Shay locomotive, the Crosby, has been found.[harpers-1895-novelty][tillitson-m0165]
The only known visual documentation of the locomotive and the track remains the artist’s illustration by G. W. Breck, published in Harper’s Weekly in June 1895.[harpers-1895-novelty]
The George E. Tillitson Collection on Railroads at Stanford University lists the Avon Park Transportation Company among its holdings, offering a potential offline lead for un-digitized records, but no digital images are available online.[tillitson-m0165]
References
- harpers-1895-novelty — Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 2008. A Novelty Among Railroads. 15 June 1895. https://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-weekly_1895-06-15_39_2008
- tillitson-m0165 — Stanford University Libraries / Online Archive of California. Guide to the George E. Tillitson Collection on Railroads (M0165). 19 September 2026. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf1h4n982p/
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
- Harper's Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 2008, A Novelty Among Railroads (1895) · secondary
- Stanford University Libraries / Online Archive of California, Guide to the George E. Tillitson Collection on Railroads (M0165) (2026) · archival
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