The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Section 22 left federal ownership as swamp land in 1879

An earlier finding in this project established that no federal land patent covers the section containing Avon Park’s core, and inferred that title must have come by another route. The route is now documented.

The General Land Office tract book for Township 33 South, Range 28 East records Section 22 as “Selected as Swamp Act of Sept. 28, 1850. Approved Nov. 8, 1879.”[glo-tract-book]

What that means. Under the Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act of 1850, the federal government granted states the wet lands within their borders so they could be drained and sold. Florida’s share went into the Internal Improvement Fund, created in 1855 to hold the state’s land grants as collateral for railroad bonds.[davis-disston] Section 22 was selected under that act and approved to the state in November 1879. It was state land, not federal, from that date — seven years before Crosby began his town.

Why it matters for research. Anyone tracing the townsite’s ownership will find nothing in federal land records, because there is nothing to find. The trail runs through the State Archives of Florida’s Internal Improvement Fund records, then to Hamilton Disston, who bought four million acres of exactly this kind of land from the Fund in 1881, and then to Crosby. It ends in the DeSoto County deed books at Arcadia, where every conveyance before 1921 was recorded.

A caution. That Section 22 was swamp-act land approved in 1879 is documented. That it was among Disston’s selections is not. Disston’s 1881 contract let him choose from about twelve and a half million acres statewide, and no township-level list of what he actually took has been found. An extensive search of the historiography on the Disston Land Purchase—including T. Frederick Davis’s 1939 study and Pat Dodson’s 1971 work—failed to locate a Disston-side deed, map, or State Archives Internal Improvement Fund trustee-minutes record explicitly naming Township 33 South, Range 28 East.[davis-disston][dodson-1971] Further, AI-generated search snippets claiming the Florida Land and Improvement Co. explicitly transferred this specific township were rejected upon audit as factually unsupportable. The Disston-to-Crosby link thus rests solely on Crosby’s own statements.

Independent corroboration of the location. A tax-deed notice in the De Soto County News of February 1906 places platted lots of “the town of Avon Park” in “sec 22 tp 33 r 28e,” confirming the townsite’s legal description from a county record entirely outside the federal land system.[desoto-news-1906]

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office tract book for Township 33 South, Range 28 East, Tallahassee Meridian (2026)
  2. T. Frederick Davis, The Disston Land Purchase, Florida Historical Quarterly (1939) (1939)
  3. Pat Dodson, Hamilton Disston's St. Cloud Sugar Plantation, 1887-1901, Florida Historical Quarterly (1971) (1971)
  4. De Soto County News (Arcadia, Florida), Tax-deed legal notice naming lots in the town of Avon Park, De Soto County News, February 1906 (1906)

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