The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Pre-1912 Bulk Freight Routes and Railhead Isolation on the Lake Wales Ridge

Between the founding of Avon Park in 1886 and the completion of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad’s Haines City branch in 1912, settlements on the northern Lake Wales Ridge operated in severe transportation isolation.[maxwell-1976][crosby-1888]

Surviving commercial ledgers, period business directories, town histories, and transportation surveys demonstrate that all documented bulk freight, citrus fruit, printing supplies, telephone hardware, and merchandise moved westward across the sandy flatwoods to railheads in the Peace River valley—specifically Fort Meade, Bowling Green, and Wauchula.[maxwell-1976][gaz-1895] Despite the operation of a major steamboat landing at Fort Basinger roughly thirty miles to the southeast on the Kissimmee River, no documentary or oral historical evidence links Avon Park growers or merchants to the Kissimmee River water route.[vanlandingham-basinger-ch2][levey-2021-basinger]

Geographic Barriers and the Eastward Waterway Disconnect

From the early 1880s until 1915, Fort Basinger served as the primary commercial port and ferry crossing on the lower Kissimmee River, dispatching agricultural produce and livestock hides north to the railhead at the town of Kissimmee aboard sternwheel steamboats.[vanlandingham-basinger-ch2][levey-2021-basinger]

However, natural geography prevented Avon Park shippers from utilizing this river corridor:

  1. Wetlands and Stream Crossings: The country between the Lake Wales Ridge at Avon Park and the west bank of the Kissimmee River is cut by Arbuckle Creek, the marshy margins of Lake Istokpoga, and low prairie that floods in the wet season. Interior overland travel in the period before the railroads ran on sandy, unimproved wagon trails that were frequently inundated during the summer rains, and no graded road or bridged crossing east of Avon Park is recorded.[byrne-basinger-2016][vanlandingham-basinger-ch2]
  2. Transit Time and Transshipment Inefficiencies: The serpentine Kissimmee River route from Fort Basinger to Kissimmee covered between 162 and 175 river miles, requiring five full days for a round-trip voyage, followed by transshipment onto the South Florida Railroad at Kissimmee.[vanlandingham-basinger-ch2] In contrast, a wagon team traveling westward could reach the railhead at Fort Meade within one and a half days, placing cargo directly onto trunk-line rail cars connecting to Jacksonville and northern markets.[maxwell-1976][crosby-1888]

The Westward Wagon Haul to Peace River Railheads

From the arrival of the first homesteaders in 1886, Avon Park’s sole link to the national transportation network ran westward to the Florida Southern Railway (later part of the Plant System, then the Atlantic Coast Line):[crosby-1888]

  • Passenger and Settler Ingress: In 1888, town founder Oliver M. Crosby directed all inbound prospective settlers and investors to take the Florida Southern train to Fort Meade, eighteen to twenty miles to the northwest.[crosby-1888] The Florida Development Company maintained wooden signboards at every trail fork across the pine flatwoods to guide horse-drawn livery teams to Avon Park, and crossed Peace Creek over a long wooden wagon bridge near Fort Meade.[crosby-1888]
  • Citrus Hauling: The first commercial citrus crops harvested around Avon Park were hauled across the flatwoods by wagon to the depot at Fort Meade.[maxwell-1976] Due to deep sand ruts, wagons were limited to forty wooden boxes of fruit per load, with round trips taking three days.[maxwell-1976] Pioneer Fred Smith served as one of the primary commercial wagon masters, hauling boxed fruit out and returning with wholesale groceries and hardware for local stores.[maxwell-1976]
  • Heavy Industrial and Publishing Materials: When Crosby published the town’s promotional journals and newspapers, carload lots of white printing paper were shipped by rail from New York mills to Fort Meade, then transferred to covered wagons for the twenty-mile haul to Avon Park.[maxwell-1976] Similarly, the Highlands Crate Mill commissary dispatched weekly wagons to Fort Meade for provisions, while John C. Burleigh’s sawmill machinery and his 1894 Shay locomotive were delivered via the railroad at Bowling Green and hauled overland on temporary wooden rails.[maxwell-1976]
  • Scheduled Drayage and Utility Transport: In 1895, the commercial firm of Nevans & King operated a regular express and dray wagon service connecting Avon Park directly with Fort Meade.[gaz-1895] When the Ed Scott Telephone Company installed the town’s permanent telephone system, line supplies and equipment were hauled by mule and wagon twenty miles from the railroad at Wauchula.[maxwell-1976]
  • Automobile Transit Proposals of 1906: When the Avon Park Horticultural Society sought to break its railhead isolation in May 1906, civic leaders evaluated proposals to operate steam-powered motor freight vehicles across the twenty-mile wagon road to Wauchula, confirming that the town’s entire commercial focus remained fixed on Peace River railheads.[dsc-1906-05-18]

Open-Range Cattle and the Absence of an Eastward Record

Cattle were worked across the whole interior on open range, unfenced and unpenned, and the herds were gathered rather than driven on fixed routes. When Oliver Crosby rode through the country west of the future townsite in the mid-1880s, he found it “devoted to cattle ranges,” with cowboys’ huts at wide intervals and roundups worked with dogs.[maxwell-1976] The Bass and Boney families, at opposite ends of DeSoto County, kept their cow hands in the woods for several weeks at a time on the annual roundup for branding, and each family’s crew stopped at the other’s ranch to be fed on the ride home.[maxwell-1976] The trail names the cow hands used — Mizelle Prairie, Redbug Ridge, Boar Hammock, Buzzards Roost, Echo Springs, Corkscrew Hammock — belong to that country west and north of Avon Park.[maxwell-1976] Cattle ran loose in Avon Park itself until the town council passed an ordinance in the early 1920s forbidding animals to run at large within the town limits.[maxwell-1976]

Evidence: single-source. No record has been found of Avon Park–area cattle being driven east to the Kissimmee River crossing at Fort Basinger, and none of the accounts of the Basinger ferry names an Avon Park drover.[vanlandingham-basinger-ch2][levey-2021-basinger] That is an absence in the record rather than a documented prohibition: the Basinger ferry did serve open-range drives moving between the Peace River valley and the eastern prairies, so the possibility of occasional eastward movement cannot be closed off.[vanlandingham-basinger-ch2]

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. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (references/the-first-hundred-years-of-avon-park_leoma-bradshaw-maxwell_1976.md) (1976) · book
  2. O. M. Crosby, Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (1888) · book
  3. Belden Publishing Company, Florida Railroad Gazetteer and State Business Directory, 1895, s.v. Avon Park (1895) · book
  4. O. R. Thacher (department editor), The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 18 May 1906, page 8: Department of The South Florida Sun, Horticultural Meeting (1906) · newspaper
  5. Kyle S. VanLandingham, Basinger 1860–1917 (Chapter Two, History of Okeechobee County) (1978) · book
  6. Jason Byrne, Is It Fort Basinger, Bassenger, or Bassinger? (2016) · secondary
  7. Elaine Levey, Highlands News-Sun, Fort Basinger Was Hub of Early Commerce (2021) · newspaper

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