The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The Punta Rassa Cattle Trade and the Absence of an Avon Park Connection

Popular accounts of central Florida’s frontier era frequently link interior open-range cattle herding to the historic shipping wharf at Punta Rassa and the Cuban cattle trade, in which drovers exchanged herds for Spanish gold doubloons.[shofner-1978][fm-punta-rassa]

Archival customs records, regional economic histories, and local settlement records demonstrate that this commercial connection does not apply to Avon Park.[shofner-1978][maxwell-1976][crosby-1888] While open-range ranching flourished on the prairies and flatwoods surrounding Avon Park, the town was established nearly two decades after the height of the Punta Rassa trade, and local cattle moved to domestic markets and regional railheads rather than southwest Gulf export docks.[maxwell-1976][crosby-1888][brown-1991]

Chronological Separation and the Cuban Cattle Boom

The commercial boom in Florida cattle exports through Punta Rassa was concentrated in the decade following the American Civil War, driven by livestock shortages in Cuba during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878).[shofner-1978][fm-punta-rassa]

Punta Rassa, situated at the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River near modern Fort Myers, was developed in the late 1850s by cattleman Jacob Summerlin and later expanded by Captain Francis Asbury Hendry.[shofner-1978][fm-punta-rassa] The site featured an 800-foot wooden shipping wharf, holding pens, a cable station for the International Ocean Telegraph Company, and quarters for drovers waiting to load livestock onto schooners and steamers like the Governor Marvin and the Southern Star.[shofner-1978]

Federal customs reports illustrate the scale of this post-Civil War trade: between July 1871 and July 1872 alone, eighteen vessels made regular runs from Punta Rassa to Cuba, carrying 18,349 cattle valued at $301,846.[shofner-1978] Spanish gold coin served as the primary medium of exchange, giving rise to regional traditions of cowmen returning into the interior with saddlebags of doubloons.[fm-punta-rassa][brown-1991]

By contrast, the settlement of Avon Park did not begin until 1886, when Oliver Marvin Crosby arrived on the northern Lake Wales Ridge, and the municipality was not incorporated until 1897.[maxwell-1976][crosby-1888] The height of the Punta Rassa Cuban shipping boom predated the town’s founding by fifteen to twenty years.[shofner-1978][maxwell-1976]

Railhead Competition and the Reorientation of Interior Livestock

By the time Crosby laid out Avon Park in 1886, transportation across south-central Florida had been reordered by railway construction.[crosby-1888][brown-1991]

Between 1884 and 1886, the Florida Southern Railway and the Plant System extended rail lines southward down the Peace River valley through Bartow, Fort Meade, Bowling Green, and Arcadia, terminating at deep water at Punta Gorda on Charlotte Harbor in 1886.[crosby-1888][brown-1991] The completion of these rail lines eliminated the commercial necessity of driving cattle south overland through the Caloosahatchee flatwoods to Punta Rassa.[brown-1991] Interior herds could instead be penned at nearby Peace River rail depots or loaded onto cattle cars for domestic shipment northward.[maxwell-1976][brown-1991]

Simultaneously, the port of Punta Rassa began shifting away from cattle export toward commercial sport fishing.[fm-punta-rassa] Following the widely publicized 1885 capture of a tarpon on rod and reel by New York sportsman W. H. Wood, the Summerlin and Shultz facilities at Punta Rassa were adapted into tourist accommodations, and by the 1890s sport anglers had largely displaced cattle drovers at the port.[fm-punta-rassa]

Open-Range Cattle Herding at Avon Park

The absence of a Punta Rassa shipping connection does not reflect an absence of cattle in early Avon Park.[maxwell-1976][crosby-1888] When Crosby scouted the area in the mid-1880s, the flatwoods and prairies west and north of the lake country were entirely devoted to open-range cattle grazing, worked by stockmen using cowpens, hunting dogs, and cow whips.[maxwell-1976][crosby-1888]

Pioneer families, notably the Bass and Boney families operating in DeSoto County, maintained extensive herds that roamed across the pinelands without fencing.[maxwell-1976] Annual roundups for branding and sorting lasted several weeks, following trails and cow camps bearing local vernacular names: Mizelle Prairie, Redbug Ridge, Boar Hammock, Buzzards Roost, Echo Springs, and Corkscrew Hammock.[maxwell-1976]

These herds supplied meat for local homesteaders, sawmills, and regional butcheries, and stock was moved westward across the sandy flatwoods to Peace River trading centers rather than south to the Gulf coast.[maxwell-1976][crosby-1888] Open-range grazing remained common in the immediate vicinity until the early 1920s, when the Avon Park Town Council enacted an ordinance prohibiting cattle from roaming at large within town limits.[maxwell-1976]

No surviving shipping manifest, diary, county record, or pioneer memoir links an Avon Park rancher or drover to cattle drives to Punta Rassa or payments in Spanish gold.[maxwell-1976][crosby-1888][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. Dr. Jerrell H. Shofner, Sunland Tribune, Smuggling Along the Gulf Coast of Florida During Reconstruction (1978) · secondary
  2. 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
  3. O. M. Crosby, Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (1888) · book
  4. State Library and Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, Old Punta Rassa (2020) · archival
  5. Kyle S. VanLandingham, Basinger 1860–1917 (Chapter Two, History of Okeechobee County) (1978) · book
  6. Canter Brown Jr., Florida's Peace River Frontier (1991) · book

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