The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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This is a draft. It is published so it can be read and corrected, not because it is finished.

Where Black Avon Park lived, and who its people were, 1940-1950

Almost nothing about Black Avon Park had survived in the record — no church, no business, no neighborhood, no names beyond a handful. The federal census schedules close a great deal of that gap. They were taken street by street, house by house, with a column for race, and Avon Park’s 1950 town districts have now been substantially read: two of them in full or nearly so, the rest sampled evenly across their runs.

The town was divided down the middle

Black Avon Park in 1950 lived in Commissioner’s District 2, east of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. Every Black household found in the schedules falls in enumeration districts 28-7 and 28-8, the two districts making up that half of the town.[census-1950-ed-28-8][census-1950-ed-28-7]

The other half — districts 28-1, 28-2, 28-3, 28-5 and 28-6, covering the town center, the professional streets round the Jacaranda Hotel and the grove suburbs west — showed no Black household on any page opened.[census-1950-district-1] That is a strong pattern rather than a proof: 28-1 was read complete and the other four sampled across their length, so an isolated household could still be sitting on an unread page.

The streets, and the blocks

In district 28-8 the enumerator recorded street names, and Black households appear on South Verona Avenue, First Street, Second Street, Fairfield Avenue, Castle Avenue, Carolina Avenue and Woodrow Avenue.[census-1950-ed-28-8]

In district 28-7 the enumerator never used the street column at all, walking the district block by block from a named corner instead. So that half of the neighborhood can be placed only by block — Black households fill Blocks 7, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 13, the last of which the enumerator himself labeled “west of railroad.”[census-1950-ed-28-7] Between them those blocks hold a Black population comparable in size to district 28-8’s.

Two streets carry a Black block and a white block under the same name: Fairfield Avenue, and Verona Avenue, whose southern stretch is Black and whose northern is white.[census-1950-ed-28-8][census-1950-ed-28-7] Avon Park was not sorted into two districts so much as sorted block by block, and sometimes house by house.

The color line, at two front doors

Two crossings are fixed exactly.

District 28-8, sheet 6. Household 71, a white family surnamed Freeman, on South Highland Avenue. Household 72, immediately following: Glover D. Coward, 41, born in North Carolina, taxi cab driver, and his wife Queen Ester Coward, 27, a beautician — both “Neg.” The street column changes from “South Highland” to “Carolina” inside household 72’s own entry, and Carolina Avenue runs Black for its whole length.[census-1950-ed-28-8]

District 28-7, sheet 6. Household 53, Joe E. William, white, recorded as “Hoe trees” at a “Nursery.” Household 54, immediately following: J. B. Cummings, 35, born in Georgia, “Neg,” recorded as “Laborer” at a “Nursery.”[census-1950-ed-28-7]

The second is the more telling of the two. The line falls between two households on the same block whose men worked for the same kind of employer at the same kind of work. Segregation at Avon Park was not about distance and not about occupation. It ran through a single nursery’s workforce as readily as down a street.

The school, staffed and named

The richest single yield is the staff of the Black school. Each is recorded at the “City School” or “Public School” as a government employee, and none of these names had been recorded before:

Name Age Born Recorded as
Howard L. Warner 33 Georgia Elementary Principal
Dorothy W. Warner 29 Georgia Elementary Teacher
Alberta Jones 56 North Carolina Elementary Teacher
Julia Williams 46 Oklahoma Elementary School Teacher
Freddie Gibson 25 — Elementary School Teacher
Eva Butler 24 Florida Elementary School Teacher
Blond E. Austin 22 Florida Third Grade Teacher
Mary E. Jones 49 South Carolina Pastry Cook
William Smith — — Cook
Que Jones 55 Alabama Janitor
Henry Austin 56 Florida School Bus Driver

Howard L. Warner is the first identified name for anyone holding Hopewell School’s principalship between James Ellerbe in 1941 and Earnest E. Sims at the closing in 1968.[census-1950-ed-28-8] He and his wife lodged in a Black-run rooming house kept by John Williams. The identification is strong but unproven: the schedule names no school, and it rests on his occupation, his race, and his place in the same cluster of Black city school employees.

The bus driver deserves his own line. Henry Austin was driving a school bus for the city schools in 1950 — which makes it the more pointed that when Hopewell closed in 1968 and its children were sent across town, the county provided no bus and a parent drove them in his truck.

Ministers, and five Black-owned businesses

Three Black clergymen are named — Rev. Harry Johnson, 57, born in Georgia; Rev. George W. Cameron, 69, born in Florida, working seventy-seven hours a week for his church; and Rev. Philip L. Johnson, 75, born in South Carolina, a missionary — with a church pianist, Samuel Hobbs, 27.[census-1950-ed-28-8] Cross-referencing the 1930 census, the 1938 WPA church survey, and the 1976 centennial history ([black-ministers-of-avon-park-1920-1950](black-ministers-of-avon-park-1920-1950.md)) identifies Rev. Harry Johnson as the founder and pastor of Emanuel Tabernacle (later the Apostolic Church of Jesus) on Carolina Street from 1927 through 1950 (where Joe Hobbs served as church clerk in 1938), while establishing that New Mount Olive A.M.E. Church (founded 1919/1920 under Rev. A. M. Wadell)[newssun-mtolive-105] was pastored in 1930 by Rev. H. McNeal Harris and St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church (founded 1916 under Rev. G. W. Epps) was pastored from 1930 by Rev. T. L. Jenkins.[census-1930-avon-park]

No Black-owned business at Avon Park had previously been identified; the census names five:

  • George Lewis, “owner,” barber shop, 1940.[census-1940-ed-28-3a]
  • Hattie Sims, 36, born Georgia, “owner,” grocery store, married to Thomas E. Sims, 41, a crate-factory hand — household 79 of enumeration district 28-7, sheet 9.[census-1950-ed-28-7]
  • Susie Bell Huggins, 41, born Georgia, divorced, “owner,” beer and honey store.[census-1950-ed-28-7]
  • Winnie Gray, 33, born South Carolina, “owner,” beer hall, married to Roosevelt Gray, a fruit picker.[census-1950-ed-28-7]
  • Daniel Gibbs, manager of a retail grocery on Castle Street (household 160 of enumeration district 28-8, sheet 15).[census-1950-ed-28-8]
  • Alex Austin, 53, born Florida, manager of his own sandwich shop (class O) next door on Castle Street (household 161 of enumeration district 28-8, sheet 15), where his daughter Mattie L. Walker, 34, worked as a waitress and his wife Bertha Austin, 48 (who had kept a Black-owned grocery store in the 1930 census), kept house alongside their unmarried great-niece, Hopewell third-grade teacher Blond E. Austin, 22.[census-1930-avon-park][census-1950-ed-28-8]

All five are food, drink or personal-service trades serving the Black neighborhood itself — the shape a Black business district took in a segregated town, where the white trade was closed to it. Queen Ester Coward’s beauty shop and the Boones’ hot dog stand on Fairfield Avenue belong to the same pattern, continuing a neighborhood commercial district that in 1930 already included grocery merchants James Jones and Bertha Austin, dance-hall manager John Shine, dance-hall pianist Bensey Robertson, pool-room managers Tommy Privett and Will Stringer, and home barber Rosa H. Lyons ([black-businesses-and-trades-in-avon-park-1920-1930](black-businesses-and-trades-in-avon-park-1920-1930.md)).[census-1930-avon-park][census-1950-ed-28-8]

What each half of the town did for a living

The occupational divide tracks the residential one exactly.

Commissioner’s District 2, in order of frequency: picking and loading fruit at citrus packing houses; crate-mill and saw-mill labor; domestic work as maids in private homes and hotels; laundry and dry-cleaning; food and drink service.[census-1950-ed-28-8][census-1950-ed-28-7] That is the documentary counterpart to what Hopewell’s pupils remembered of themselves, that they were “mostly the children of migrant fruit pickers.” The census names the parents.

Commissioner’s District 1: lawyers, doctors, a newspaper editor, the city police chief, bookkeepers, telephone and telegraph operators, dry-goods and grocery owners, insurance and law-office staff, an automobile dealer, citrus company managers and inspectors.[census-1950-district-1] Both halves of the town lived off the same crop. They did not do the same jobs in it.

The 1940 record shows the same division with more mill in it — laborers at the crate mill and the saw mill, fruit pickers, a canning-plant machine operator, maids in private homes.[census-1940-ed-28-3a]

At the King’s Jacaranda Hotel, enumerated as a district of its own, a staff and lodger roster of about thirty was almost entirely white; its two Black employees were Eugene W. Walker, 51, bell boy, and Thomas M. N. Lyons, 38, chef, both working seventy hours a week and both lodging on the premises.[census-1950-ed-28-4]

Birthplaces across the Black neighborhood are overwhelmingly Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida. One man stands apart: Bill Porter, 50, a farm hand born in Jamaica.[census-1950-ed-28-8]

The Sims family, found — and not found

Thomas Sims, 74, born in Alabama, and his wife Maggie R. Sims, 63, born in Georgia, lived at 216 Castle Street in 1950.[census-1950-ed-28-8] Those birth years, about 1876 and about 1887, match the parents recorded for Ernest Eldridge Sims, Hopewell School’s long-serving principal. Twenty years earlier, in the April 1930 census of Enumeration District 28-3 (Sheet 4B, leaf 0053, Dwelling 89, Family 92, at 57 East First Street), crate-mill laborer Thomas Simms and his wife Maggie Simms were enumerated together with six children: Thomas E., Rosa L., Delbert M., Earnest E. (then fifteen), Elihu, and Barney.[census-1930-avon-park] That 1930 household establishes that Thomas E. Sims in District 28-7 (Sheet 9, Household 79, age 41, crate-factory hand), whose wife Hattie Sims kept a neighborhood grocery store in 1950, was the older brother of Principal Ernest E. Sims and the eldest son of Thomas and Maggie R. Sims.[census-1930-avon-park][census-1950-ed-28-7][census-1950-ed-28-8]

Ernest E. Sims himself is not in the town’s schedules. Both Black districts were read — 28-8 complete, 28-7 all but two pages — and neither he nor his wife Arletha appears. He was thirty-six in 1950 and recently married. Nor were Ernestine Johnson or Clara Boone, the two Hopewell teachers honored in 2026, who would each have been about eighteen or nineteen; a search for “Tolliver,” Clara Boone’s maiden name, returns nothing anywhere in Highlands County. James Ellerbe returns zero matches in the whole county index — nine years after the Atlanta Daily World named him principal here, he had gone.[census-1950-search]

This is now a considered negative rather than a sampling gap. Any of the three may have been living in the rural districts outside the town, which have not been looked at, or simply elsewhere on 1 April 1950.

Black Avon Park is plainly present in the 1940 schedule’s district 28-3A, but that enumerator, Maude D. Tomlinson, left the street column blank on every sheet, for white and Black households alike, so whether Black Avon Park stood on the same ground in 1940 as in 1950 cannot be determined.[census-1940-ed-28-3a] Who lived on the Avon Park Air Force Base itself in 1950 likewise goes unrecorded, since the two districts named for the base cover only the civilian farmland around its perimeter.[census-1950-district-1][census-1950-search]

References

The same ground twenty years earlier

The 1930 manuscript schedules, browsed page by page, put Black Avon Park on nearly these same streets. Verona, Carolina, Fairfield and Castle all appear, and the line between white and Black households falls on Verona Avenue in 1930 as it does in 1950.[census-1930-avon-park] See Black Avon Park in 1920 and 1930.

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. United States Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration districts 28-1, 28-2 and 28-3 (Avon Park), NARA microfilm T626 roll 318 (1930) · official
  2. Highlands Sun / Highlands News-Sun, New Mt. Olive AME Church celebrates 105th anniversary (2024)
  3. United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration district 28-8, Avon Park city (1950)
  4. United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration district 28-7, Avon Park city (1950)
  5. United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration districts 28-1, 28-2, 28-3, 28-5 and 28-6, Avon Park city, Commissioner's District 1 (1950)
  6. National Archives and Records Administration, 1950 Census name and keyword search, National Archives and Records Administration (2026)
  7. United States Bureau of the Census, 1940 Census population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration district 28-3A, Avon Park city (1940)
  8. United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration district 28-4, King's Jacaranda Hotel (1950)

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