The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The Thirteen Winter Casualties of 1889–1890 and the Unmarked Pioneer Graves of Bougainvillea Cemetery

During the fall and winter of 1889–1890, the fledgling settlement of Avon Park experienced a severe mortality crisis resulting in thirteen deaths.[maxwell-1976] Twelve of the deceased were pulmonary tuberculosis (“consumption”) patients who had journeyed south seeking health in the central Florida pine ridge, while the thirteenth was a young man who drowned in a sailing accident on Lake Verona.[maxwell-1976] In the absence of an undertaker or minister, town founder Oliver Marvin Crosby and pioneer carpenter-settlers constructed pine coffins, covered them in black cloth, and conducted committal services in the newly cleared town cemetery (now Bougainvillea Cemetery).[maxwell-1976] Today, no permanent carved headstones survive for any of these thirteen individuals, leaving their burial sites among the unmarked graves of the cemetery’s pioneer section.[maxwell-1976][fg-stenstrom][fg-anna-daugherty]

Therapeutic Promotion and the Consumptive Influx

In his promotional works published in New York—Florida Facts, Both Bright and Blue (1887) and Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (1888)—Oliver Marvin Crosby actively promoted the Lake Wales Ridge as a natural sanatorium for throat and pulmonary ailments.[crosby-1887-book][crosby-1888-pamphlet] Crosby contrasted Florida’s mild winter temperatures and balmy pine breezes with the harsh winters of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, publishing mortality tables from federal census returns showing heavy death rates from consumption in northern states.[crosby-1887-book] He urged sufferers: “To escape the Northern winter; To escape pneumonia, lung fever, or consumption… Buy a home at Lake Forest or Avon Park.”[crosby-1888-pamphlet] While Crosby included a formal caveat that “no climate will effect a cure where the patient is in the last stages of consumption,” northern advertising drew numerous terminally ill invalids seeking respite.[crosby-1887-book]

When the thirty-five-room Hotel Verona opened on Lake Verona in October 1889, Crosby filled the building to capacity for its inaugural winter season.[maxwell-1976] Winter guests and homesteaders arrived either by boarding at the hotel, lodging in private cottages, or residing in temporary platform tents.[maxwell-1976] However, many invalid arrivals were already in the advanced terminal stages of pulmonary consumption and succumbed during the fall and winter months.[maxwell-1976]

In a frontier settlement whose permanent population was enumerated at only sixty-four residents in the 1890 Federal Census, thirteen deaths in a single season represented a staggering loss, even though twelve of the casualties were transient health-seekers rather than resident homesteaders.[maxwell-1976][nrhp-avon-park-district]

The Lake Verona Sailing Accident

The sole non-consumptive casualty among the thirteen fatalities of 1889–1890 was a young man who drowned in a sailing accident on Lake Verona.[maxwell-1976]

Lake Verona, around which Crosby had platted the commercial center and constructed the Hotel Verona, is a deep solution sinkhole lake characteristic of the Lake Wales Ridge. The lake features steeply sloping underwater banks dropping rapidly to depths of eighty feet. Crosby heavily advertised boating and sailing on Lake Verona as primary recreational attractions for hotel patrons and prospective land buyers.[crosby-1888-pamphlet] During the winter season, a small sailboat capsized in the deep waters of the lake, drowning the young man before assistance could reach him (see The Lake Verona Sailing Casualty of 1889–1890 and the Archival Search for His Identity).[maxwell-1976]

Pioneer Mortuary Customs and Graveside Committals

Avon Park in 1889 had no undertaker, no licensed embalmer, and no commercial casket inventory (commercial caskets were first stocked years later in general mercantile stores by John C. Burleigh, Mr. Holt, and Captain Rae).[maxwell-1976]

As deaths occurred, pioneer carpenter-settlers—led by Connecticut builder J. H. Nettleton, who had erected the Hotel Verona—constructed wooden coffins from local heart-pine lumber as needed.[maxwell-1976] The women of the settlement lined the interiors and draped the outer pine boxes in black cloth.[maxwell-1976] Crosby recorded in his memoirs that the costs of the cloth and materials were generally borne at his own personal expense.[maxwell-1976]

Because Avon Park had no resident ordained minister in 1889—the Union Evangelical Church was not organized until 1892 and the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer was not built until 1894—Crosby himself officiated at each funeral, reading the Christian burial office at the graveside.[maxwell-1976]

Burial in Bougainvillea Cemetery and the Absence of Markers

All thirteen casualties were interred in the ten-acre community cemetery that Crosby had laid out and donated to the town on the east side of the settlement in 1888 (now Bougainvillea Cemetery).[maxwell-1976] The first interment in the cemetery had been three-month-old infant Hulda Stenstrom, buried near an east-side oak tree on 6 October 1888.[maxwell-1976][fg-stenstrom]

Comprehensive cemetery surveys confirm that not a single permanent stone marker exists in Bougainvillea Cemetery dated to 1889, 1890, or 1891.[fg-stenstrom][fg-anna-daugherty] The chronological timeline of surviving marked headstones jumps over four years from infant Hulda Stenstrom in October 1888 to Anna Daugherty on 3 December 1892.[fg-anna-daugherty]

Several structural factors explain why the thirteen casualties of 1889–1890 rest in unmarked graves:

  1. Transient Non-Resident Status: The consumptive invalids were seasonal health-seekers whose families remained in distant Northern states.
  2. Frontier Transportation Hurdles: No railroad reached Avon Park until the Atlantic Coast Line arrived in 1912. All heavy freight had to be hauled by mule or horse wagon across twenty miles of deep sand roads from the railhead at Fort Meade. Ordering, shipping, and wagon-freighting heavy Vermont marble or Georgia granite gravestones to an isolated interior frontier settlement was prohibitive for families of deceased visitors.
  3. Perishable Wooden Markers: Graves in pioneer Florida were typically marked with carpenter-made pine headboards or wooden crosses with painted or hand-carved inscriptions. In Florida’s subtropical climate, subjected to torrential summer thunderstorms, high humidity, wood-boring insects, and seasonal brushfires, untreated pine markers rotted and vanished within five to ten years.
  4. Lack of Early Cemetery Maintenance: Bougainvillea Cemetery had no formal sexton or caretaker organization until the voluntary Avon Park Cemetery Association began clearing brush and drove an irrigation well in March 1906.
  5. Potential Repatriation: Any families who later arranged to remove remains back to northern family burial grounds would have left no marker in Avon Park; those who remained were absorbed into the unmarked pioneer plots.

As local historian Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell observed in The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, these unmarked graves in Bougainvillea Cemetery remain “silent reminders that some who came never returned to their former homes.”[maxwell-1976]

Archival Anonymity of the Casualties

The individual names of the twelve consumptive invalids and the young sailing casualty are not preserved in surviving historical documentation.[maxwell-1976]

Crosby’s retrospective narrative, “Avon Park’s History: 1885–1896” (serialized in The Highlands County Pilot in 1919 and transcribed in Maxwell’s 1976 history), recorded the aggregate statistics and mortuary circumstances without compiling a nominal roster.[maxwell-1976] The loss of the 1890 Federal Population Census schedules in the 1921 Department of Commerce fire in Washington, D.C., combined with the lack of surviving 1890 federal mortality schedules for Florida, eliminated federal vital records for that year. Furthermore, early ecclesiastical registers do not exist: Union Congregational Church was incorporated two years later in 1892, and the early parish records and organ of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer were destroyed on 4 December 1895 when Avon Park’s pioneer schoolhouse burned to the ground.

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 (Held at the Avon Park Historical Society Depot Museum, Avon Park, Florida) (1976) · book
  2. Oliver Marvin Crosby, Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (references/common-sense-about-florida_o-m-crosby_1888.md) (1888) · book
  3. Oliver Marvin Crosby, Florida Facts, Both Bright and Blue: A Guide to Intending Settlers, Tourists, and Investors (references/florida-facts-both-bright-and-blue_oliver-marvin-crosby_1887.md) (1887) · book
  4. Find a Grave contributors, Hulda Stenstrom (13 Jul 1888 - 6 Oct 1888), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Find a Grave memorial 13490655 (2006) · secondary
  5. Find a Grave contributors, Anna Daugherty (1 Apr 1819 - 3 Dec 1892), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Find a Grave memorial 34560596 (2009) · secondary
  6. Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation / National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Avon Park Historic District (ref. 90000486) (1990) · official

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