Abbie R. Dodge
Jacksonville hotel proprietor and investor whose 1897 sheriff's sale purchase of the 20,000-acre Florida Development Company holdings secured the Avon Park townsite and protected settler land contracts following the Great Freeze.
The Archive
People
The biographical and institutional registry: Avon Park founders, citrus growers, business leaders, historic hotels, African American community leaders, schools, and civic organizations.
Arthur Winthrop Sargent (1853–1937)
Pioneer educator, editor of The Avon Park Idea, builder of Sargent's Hall, and long-serving Justice of the Peace for DeSoto County District 14 from 1903 through 1916.
Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, Haines City Branch
The branch line that ended Avon Park's isolation, surveyed south from Haines City in 1906, built through the town during 1912, and eventually pushed on to Immokalee and Everglades City.
Avon Park Air Force Range
The bombing and gunnery range opened east of Avon Park in March 1942 on 107,059 acres, expanded to some 352 square miles, still active, and holding within it the archaeology of everything that came before it.
Avon Park Bandstand
Built in 1897 on the banks of Lake Verona, relocated twice, and now situated in the Mile Long Mall, the two-story octagonal bandstand is the oldest surviving civic and recreational pavilion structure of Avon Park's pioneer era.
Avon Park Citrus Growers Association
Cooperative citrus marketing and packing association founded at Avon Park in October 1909 as a local branch of the Florida Citrus Exchange, constructing a major packing house on the Atlantic Coast Line railroad in 1912 and operating until 1955.
Avon Park City Hall
The Neoclassical city hall at 110 East Main Street, voted in the boom of 1926, begun in 1928 with a cornerstone laid by the Masonic lodge, built by the C. W. Pabor Construction Company for about $28,600 with art stone where terra cotta had been specified, and completed in March 1929, the month the bodies of the mayor and the tax assessor lay in state in it before it had opened.
Avon Park Correctional Institution
The state prison at the gate of the bombing range, ten miles east of Avon Park, which began in April 1957 in the wartime barracks of a federal emergency detention camp that closed in 1953, on land subleased from the Federal Bureau of Prisons; its first superintendent was L. L. Wainwright.
Avon Park Executive Airport
Municipal general aviation airport situated two miles west of downtown Avon Park along State Road 64 (FAA LID: AVO), originally developed in the late 1930s, operated as the primary flight training base for the Lodwick Aviation Military Academy during World War II, and deeded to the city under the Surplus Property Act in 1947.
Avon Park Historical Society and the Depot Museum
The municipal historical society and museum of Avon Park, organized on October 9, 1945 as the Old Settlers Association of Avon Park, reorganized in 1975–1978 as the Historical Society of Avon Park, deeded the 1926 Seaboard Air Line depot in 1979, and incorporated with the State of Florida on June 25, 1981.
Avon Park Sash and Door Company
The architectural woodworking and millwork plant established during the 1920s boom to produce windows, doors, and building components for the town's masonry and frame construction surge.
Avon Park Transportation Company
Company formed in January 1895 to build a wooden-railed common-carrier railroad forty miles north from Avon Park to Haines City, with John C. Burleigh as superintendent; the line was never completed.
Beatrice Brown-Peterson
Civic leader, founder of the Avon Park Martin Luther King Jr. Walk, thirty-year school paraprofessional, and wife of Cueller Peterson Jr., honored in the Depot Museum's permanent African American history exhibit.
Belle Glade Culture
The archaeological culture of the Lake Okeechobee basin and Kissimmee River valley, roughly 1000 BC to AD 1700, whose territory includes Highlands County and the Lake Wales Ridge.
Bougainvillea Cemetery
Avon Park's town cemetery on Highway 27, the ten acres Oliver Crosby laid out and gave the town when the first maps were drawn, where a three-month-old child was buried in 1888, a cemetery association was driving a well by 1906, and Crosby himself was buried in 1932 under a monument the town set in 1976.
Brian McRae
Ten-season Major League Baseball center fielder, 1985 first-round draft pick, and son of Hal McRae; together they formed the second father-manager and son-player tandem in major league history.
Bryant G. Granger
DeSoto County Clerk of the Circuit Court who recorded the original 1889 Avon Park town plat.
Byrum W. Shockley (1895–1964)
Avon Park citrus and rose grower, 1920 federal census enumerator for Election Precinct 14 (ED 23), and co-founder and first historian of the Old Settlers Association of Avon Park.
C. C. Chollar
Inaugural Cashier of the Bank of Avon Park (1894), Secretary/Treasurer of the Avon Park Transportation Company (1895), and subsequent Cashier of the First National Bank of Arcadia under Ziba King.
C. E. Lanier
Named in the act that incorporated Avon Park in 1913 as its first tax collector, cashier of its First National Bank by 1918, on the county's Highway Beautification Board in 1927, and Highlands County's member of the Florida House of Representatives in 1941 and 1945.
Camp Wingmann, Avon Park
The Episcopal Diocese of South Florida's summer camp, which came to Avon Park in 1932, spent four summers at the Lake Byrd Lodge, and in 1939 built a permanent camp on Trout Lake on land given by the senior warden of the Church of the Redeemer.
Charles H. Smith
Secretary of the Jacksonville Board of Trade, secretary of the Tropical Land Company, author of Jacksonville and Florida Facts, and the incorporator who drew up the charter and by-laws of the Florida Development Company in November 1891.
Charles H. Walker
Avon Park citrus grower, president of the Florida Citrus Exchange, receiver for the Anderson citrus corporations, and chairman of the Ridge Area Hospital Association whose fund drive created Walker Memorial Hospital.
Charles R. Head
Avon Park businessman, civic promoter, personal friend of St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon, leader in the construction of Cardinal Field (1927), and namesake of Charles R. Head Field.
Charles S. Donaldson
Naturalist, citrus grower, Mayor of Avon Park (1929–1931), botanical founder and supervisor of the Mile Long Mall, Highlands Hammock conservation pioneer, and namesake of Donaldson Park on Lake Verona.
Chipco
Muscogee-speaking Seminole chief, born in Alabama about 1800, who evaded deportation through both later Seminole Wars and led a band in the Peace River and Kissimmee country until his death in 1881.
Church of Christ (Avon Park)
A white congregation in Avon Park established in 1917.
Clara Tolliver Boone
An esteemed Avon Park educator who began teaching at Hopewell School in 1956 and later at Avon Park Middle School, honored for her lifetime dedication to the community.
Clark D. Knapp
Pioneer attorney and notary, president of the Avon Park Transportation Company (1895) and of the Florida Development Company (1896), and the first mayor of Avon Park, elected when the town incorporated in January 1897.
Cora Gray Wray
Pioneer Avon Park settler (arrived 1903), charter signer, treasurer, and historian of the Old Settlers Association of Avon Park (1945–1971), and collector of the foundational pioneer manuscripts, family albums, and artifacts of the Avon Park Historical Society.
DeForest Canfield
Pioneer Avon Park lumber dealer, grove developer, and the inaugural Tax Collector of Highlands County (1921–1929), for whom Canfield Street was named.
Dorr D. Kinney
Pioneer Avon Park merchant, notary public, and postmaster (1891–1896) who acquired the Tobe Hendry store and operated the post office on East Main Street before selling to Benjamin F. West.
Dr. Howard Earle Skipper
Avon Park native, biochemist, and oncologist who formulated the foundational cell-kill kinetics and combination chemotherapy models that enabled curable regimens for leukemia and other cancers.
Dr. Mary E. Coffin
Homeopathic physician, Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College faculty member, Wilkinsburg civic leader, and co-founder of Dr. Mary's Health Villa on Lake Isis in Avon Park.
E. O. Douglas High School
Highlands County's sole public secondary school for African American students under de jure segregation (1927–1970), attended by secondary students from Avon Park including major league player and manager Hal McRae.
Edgar A. DeLaney, Sr.
Mayor of Avon Park for twenty-eight years and twice president of its council, credited with bringing Walker Memorial Hospital, South Florida Junior College and the federal housing projects to the town; the mayor who in April 1955 received the Black churches' petition and appointed the town's first Black policeman; South Delaney Avenue and Delaney Heights carry his name.
Edgar A. Pabor
Journalist, notary public, and horticultural manager who served as co-editor of the Pabor Lake Pineapple (1892–1897) and partner in W. E. Pabor & Sons grove-care enterprises.
Edward W. Gough
Avon Park machine-shop owner, elected to the city council in 1949 on the Black vote and president of the council in 1951 when it voted to throw that vote out; the lead appellant in Gough v. State ex rel. Sauls.
Ellis R. West
Inaugural Town Clerk and Tax Assessor of the Town of Avon Park (1913), partner in B. F. West & Son general store, early private banker, and long-serving precinct election official.
Episcopal Church of the Redeemer
The historic Carpenter Gothic Episcopal church at 20 East Pleasant Street in Avon Park, built in 1894 by pioneer settlers including William and Mary King and Clark D. Knapp under the Missionary Jurisdiction of Southern Florida.
Ernest E. Sims
Pioneer educator and long-serving principal of Hopewell School; appointed assistant principal of Avon Park Middle School upon desegregation, serving a record 35 years in local schools until retiring in 1971.
Erving Leander Richardson
Dartmouth College alumnus (Class of 1873) from Columbia and Liberty Hill, Connecticut, who served as principal of the Avon Park public school from 1897, early mayor in 1897–1898, president of the Avon Park Horticultural Society, and leader in the Union Congregational Church until his death at Avon Park on 25 July 1911.
Flint Lumber Company
Philadelphia-capitalized lumber and logging corporation organized in November 1918 by George Flint and L. F. DeBordenave, operating a steam sawmill, 16-mile logging railway, and 71,000 acres of ridge timber in Avon Park.
Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center, Avon Park
The state's first residential treatment center for alcoholism, built on land Avon Park gave the state, two miles south of the town between two lakes; it received its first patients in December 1956, was dedicated on 6 February 1957, held sixty-four beds by 1962, and its land later became the college campus.
Florida Development Company
Oliver M. Crosby's company, the vehicle behind the founding of Avon Park, the recorded purchaser of the Shay locomotive brought overland in 1894, and lost by Crosby to debt after the freezes of the mid-1890s.
Fort Arbuckle
An 1850 U.S. Army frontier post (Florida Master Site File 8PO999) on the northeast shore of Lake Arbuckle in southern Polk County, inside the Avon Park Air Force Range, from which sixty Seminole people were deported in February 1850.
Fort Basinger
A Second Seminole War post established on the west bank of the Kissimmee River in 1837 by Colonel Zachary Taylor, located in eastern Highlands County along modern U.S. 98.
Fort Kissimmee
The only Seminole Wars fort confirmed inside modern Highlands County (Florida Master Site File 8HG15), established January 1850 on the Kissimmee River about twenty miles east of Avon Park, whose later pioneer settlement (8HG20) was displaced by military acquisition in 1942.
Fountain Funeral Home
Independent Avon Park funeral home established in 1973 by James Earl Fountain, operating since 1975 at 507 US Highway 27 North.
Frank E. Sperring
A Sharon Valley, Connecticut man who wintered at Avon Park in 1888–89 and went out selling Florida land that spring, two and a half years before he was named one of the four incorporators of the Florida Development Company.
Fred L. C. Conner
Avon Park's first Black police officer, appointed in April 1955 after the town's Black churches, organized as the Progressive Civic Club under Queen Coward, petitioned the city council; he walked a beat without a car, served more than seventeen years, and was partnered from about 1957 by Robert Britt, later the town's first Black councilman and mayor.
Fred Montsdeoca
Lorida cattleman and Florida Agricultural Extension agent for Glades and Okeechobee counties from 1930 to 1971, who served as federal cattle foreman for the Seminole cattle program at the Brighton Reservation.
George Edmiston
Pioneer settler, Civil War veteran, and horticulturalist of Avon Park, known for his Niagara grape vineyard exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and experimental subtropical plant cultivation.
George W. Bacon
American-born London map publisher (G. W. Bacon & Co., Ltd.) whose 1889 visit to Avon Park led him to propose capitalizing the colony into a $150,000 stock company and attempting to raise $75,000 in London, directly prompting the formation of the Florida Development Company.
Gregor's Bakery and the invention of Brown 'n Serve rolls
A bakery on South Forest Avenue where a volunteer fireman answering a fire call in 1949 accidentally invented par-baked rolls, sold the process to General Mills for $40,000, and patented the foundational par-baking process.
H. G. Burnet
Pioneer nurseryman, horticulturist, and superintendent of Tropical Nurseries in Avon Park, who was the first land applicant in Pabor Lake Colony and championed subtropical crop diversification.
Hal McRae
The Avon Park native who spent nineteen seasons in the major leagues, made the designated hitter a real offensive position, and later managed two clubs.
Harvey and Clarke
Prominent West Palm Beach architectural firm formed in 1921 by Henry Stephen Harvey and Louis Phillips Clarke, designers of the 1925 Mediterranean Revival Seaboard Air Line Railway station in Avon Park.
Head Field and the St. Louis Cardinals at Avon Park
The ballpark built in 1927 to bring the world champion Cardinals to Avon Park for spring training, where Babe Ruth hit a home run into a street that took his name, and which the team left after three seasons.
Herbert Seaverns
First elected Mayor of the Town of Avon Park (1913–1915), merchant of building supplies and agricultural materials, builder, and pioneer grove developer.
Highlands Coca-Cola Bottling Company
The commercial soft drink bottling plant established in Avon Park during the 1920s boom, operating near Lake Tulane and the railroad tracks under J. S. Francis until 1969.
Highlands County, Florida
Created out of DeSoto County by Chapter 8513 of 1921, with Sebring as its temporary and then permanent county seat, and Avon Park - the larger town - as the loser of the county-seat election of 1922.
Highlands Hammock
A 1,600-acre old-growth subtropical hammock west of Sebring, preserved from logging in 1930 through the philanthropy of Margaret Shippen Roebling, opened in 1931, developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and established as one of Florida's first four state parks in 1935.
Highlands Lakes Hotel and Casino
The three-story resort hotel of the boom on the east side of Lake Lillian, with a lighted pavilion floating in the lake and a casino built over the water, closed by the crash of 1929, lent to a health-resort promoter in 1936, used as the Lodwick flying school's barracks in the war, and converted in 1946-48 into the Walker Memorial Hospital.
Hopewell School, Avon Park
Built in 1926 on what is now Ernest E. Sims Street, the first public school for Black children in Avon Park; it closed under desegregation in 1968 and the original building does not survive.
Hotel Jacaranda
The three-story hotel at 7-23 East Main Street, begun in late 1923 and finished for the 1926 season, financed from Chicago and Pittsburgh, ruined by the bust, and still open a century later.
Hotel Verona
Avon Park's first hotel, constructed 1887–1889 on Lake Verona for Oliver M. Crosby to lodge prospective land buyers; served as the town's social and cultural center for forty years until destroyed by fire on 2 February 1927.
Isaac C. M. Ellenberger (1863–1934)
Pennsylvania educator, author, and Avon Park High School principal (1919–1924) who led the school to Southern Association accreditation and was appointed inaugural Highlands County School Superintendent in 1921 before declining the post due to state dual-officeholding laws.
J. A. Caldwell
Industrial crate manufacturer and banker who served as general manager of the Mutual Crate Company and Avon Manufacturing Company mills in Avon Park from 1922 until his death in 1931.
J. M. Lee
Avon Park resident who represented Highlands County in the Florida House of Representatives for three terms (1927–1931) and subsequently served fourteen years as Florida State Comptroller from 1933 until his death in 1946.
John C. Burleigh
Connecticut-born sawmill manager, merchant, and construction superintendent at Avon Park who in December 1894 moved a twelve-ton Shay locomotive twenty-three miles overland on relaid wooden rails and operated businesses across Avon Park and Midland.
John Sears Francis
Proprietor of the Highlands Coca-Cola Bottling Company in Avon Park and senior warden of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, who alongside his wife donated the Trout Lake acreage that became Camp Wingmann in 1939.
John T. Hendricks
Pioneer Avon Park abstractor, notary public, model pineapple grower on Pleasant Street, and 1897 town councilman (1851–1917); husband of Florence Adell Woodruff, plaintiff in the 1915 DeSoto County chancery suit quieting title in Blocks 7 and 35, and paternal grandfather of 1st Lt. Laird Woodruff Hendricks Jr., namesake of Hendricks Field.
Judge Don Register
Circuit judge of the Tenth Judicial Circuit — Polk, Hardee and Highlands counties — from about 1945 until his retirement in November 1958, a Winter Haven trial lawyer before that; the judge who in October 1951 ordered the Avon Park city council to restore the votes of the town's Black precinct.
Keith E. Collyer
The Avon Park lawyer who went to court in 1951 for the mayor and councilmen elected by the town's Black precinct, won a writ of mandamus against the city council, had four councilmen cited for contempt, and swore the winners in himself.
Lake Bonnet
Natural solution lake north of Avon Park (historically spelled Bonnett Lake), site of the 1940 Highlands County Prison Camp, the historic Pinecrest Golf Club on Little Lake Bonnet, and 20th-century residential communities.
Lake Byrd Lodge
Three-story rustic log lodge on Lake Byrd designed by William Heim in 1920 for the Pittsburgh-Florida company, leased for Camp Wingmann (1933–1936) and Lodwick aviation cadets (1941–1945), and operated as the UCC Lake Byrd Conference Center from 1948 to 2002.
Lake Lotela
An 802-acre natural freshwater lake southeast of Avon Park, known for the historic Pinecrest Lakes Club on its eastern shore and boom-time paper subdivisions along its northern banks.
Lake Tulane
A deep, round solution lake at Avon Park whose sediments hold a continuous sixty-thousand-year record of Florida's climate, correlated in detail with ice-rafting events in the North Atlantic.
Lake Verona
A 41-acre deep karst solution sinkhole lake in downtown Avon Park whose basal sediment cores date to greater than 33,000 years Before Present.
Lake Wales Ridge
The ancient sand ridge running through Polk and Highlands counties on which Avon Park sits, formed as Pleistocene dune islands and the reason the area was habitable for thousands of years.
Lakeside Historical Cemetery
The Black community's burial ground at 1581 Cummings Avenue, Avon Park, also called Lincoln Garden Cemetery, legally bounded as a 6.59-acre tract under Deed Book 79, Page 558, holding marked graves from 1928 to the present and restored by a nonprofit board with city, state and Duke Energy funding.
Lakeview Memorial Gardens
The privately owned perpetual-care park cemetery at 854 Memorial Drive, Avon Park, established on twenty-five acres reaching toward Lake Denton by developer Robert E. Sherwood, which made its inaugural burial on 2 April 1969 for Vietnam War combat correspondent SSG Charles Wayne Jenkins.
Leigh Chapter No. 85, Order of the Eastern Star
Masonic-affiliated fraternal chapter established in Avon Park by January 1915, meeting in the Masonic hall and named in recognition of the Leigh family.
Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell
Avon Park historian, longtime secretary of the Old Settlers Association (elected 1958), Chairman of the 1975–1976 Bicentennial Committee of the Historical Society, custodian of Cora Gray Wray's pioneer archives, and author of The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976).
Lodwick Aviation Military Academy, Avon Park
The civilian-run Army primary flying school that operated at the Avon Park Municipal Airport from October 1941 to November 1944, quartering its cadets in the town's converted resort hotels and graduating 3,413 pilots.
Louie R. Marlin
An early Avon Park resident reported to have arrived with the W. P. Kennedy Construction Company in 1917.
Mary Emma (Miller) Crosby
The founder's wife (1853–1938), who drove the first spike of Avon Park's wooden railroad in January 1895 and, after her husband lost the town, remained for nearly two years straightening out land titles for pioneer buyers.
Mattie W. Tompkins
Avon Park's woman lawyer — admitted to the Florida Bar in 1925, an associate of the Pardees' firm for decades, and a member of the city council from 1939 to 1947, when the city bought its airport land and set up its first telephone system; she practiced for sixty-one years.
Mile Long Mall
The landscaped central greenspace of Avon Park's Main Street, laid out in phases between 1920 and 1927 on a street Crosby had platted as a narrow one-lane road, and planted to a 1923 design by the landscape architect W. A. Cook.
Nalaka turpentine camp
A Consolidated Naval Stores turpentine camp on Kissimmee Island, inside what is now the Avon Park Air Force Range, worked from about 1919 to about 1928 by a population of over two hundred, 187 of them Black, with its own still, cooperage, commissary and school — the largest turpentine operation yet documented in Avon Park's country, and one whose ground is now an archaeological site.
Nalaka Turpentine Distillery
Nalaka was a significant turpentine distillery and company town operating from 1918 to 1930 within the area that is now the Avon Park Air Force Range, employing a predominantly African American workforce.
Nathaniel S. C. Perkins
Avon Park notary, land agent, and civic promoter who served as Vice President of the Avon Park Town Company (1893) and Vice President and Treasurer of the Florida Development Company (1894), and who raised the subscription funds for the town's second school building.
O. R. Thacher
Viticulturalist, attorney-in-fact, and editor of The South Florida Sun who documented Avon Park community life from the 1890s until his death in 1912.
Oliver Marvin Crosby
Founder of Avon Park (1852-1932), a Danbury, Connecticut orchardist and promoter who bought a township from Hamilton Disston, lost everything in the freezes of the 1890s, remarried in Florida in 1925, and was buried in the cemetery he laid out.
Oscar Wolfe
Avon Park civic activist and petitioner who led the landmark 1932–1933 recall movement against the Avon Park City Council and was later a candidate in the 1951 municipal council election.
Pabor Lake Colony
W. E. Pabor's colony four miles north of Avon Park, founded 18 July 1892, with its own post office and newspaper, and the first station on the Avon Park wooden tramway; it did not survive.
Paul L. Rumpsa
Avon Park road construction contractor, independent citrus grower, boutique packer, and author of Citrus Par Excellence (1930), who pioneered direct-to-consumer express gift-fruit shipping and co-founded Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church.
Peter Augustus Ruhl
Florida printer, editor, and publisher known throughout the state press as 'Pete' or 'Pa' Ruhl, who founded The Avon Park Press in November 1915 before taking editorial charge of The Sebring White Way in April 1916.
Philip J. Leigh
Atlantic City equestrian director and prominent early winter resident of Avon Park, whose estate and family visits produced the earliest surviving photographic documentation of the town's railway depot and citrus infrastructure.
Pinecrest Hotel and Country Club
The Mediterranean Revival clubhouse and hotel William Heim built on Lake Lotela in 1926 for a golf course laid out by Donald Ross, operated as an exclusive winter resort, and demolished in 2007 following catastrophic 2004 hurricane damage.
Pittsburgh-Florida Fruit Growers Association
4,000-acre commercial citrus corporation organized in 1915 by the Anderson brothers (A. V., C. P., and C. Parke Anderson), builder of Lake Byrd Lodge (1920) and Lake Byrd Packing Company, and pioneer of the commercial canning of Florida orange juice.
Queen Ester Coward
Beauty-shop keeper on Fairfield Avenue in 1950 and, in 1955, the leader of the Progressive Civic Club through which Avon Park's Black churches petitioned the city council for a police liaison and got the town's first Black officer appointed.
Robert B. Archibald
Jacksonville attorney, Fourth Judicial Circuit Judge (1873–1881), Union Civil War veteran, and an incorporator of the Florida Development Company in November 1891.
Robert King Jr.
Hotelier, Army captain, and longtime Avon Park Realtor who co-managed the Hotel Jacaranda (1946–1954) and Pinecrest Hotel (1946–1947), connecting Avon Park tourism with Highlands, North Carolina.
Royal Page Davidson
Military educator, automotive innovator, Superintendent of Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, developer of the Pinecrest Golf Club on Lake Lotela (1925–1926), and donor of the 1922 Armistice Day Flagpole on the Mile Long Mall.
S. Colquitt Pardee, father and son
Two Avon Park lawyers of the same name — Stephen Colquitt Pardee Sr. (1886–1951), city attorney for seventeen years, president of the Glenada Hills Land Company, and organizer of Walker Memorial Hospital; and Stephen Colquitt Pardee Jr. (1912–1987), city attorney in the 1940s and counsel in the 1951 municipal election case.
Seaboard Air Line Railway station, Avon Park
The 1925 Spanish Eclectic passenger and freight station on Museum Avenue, built for the Seaboard's new Coleman-to-West Palm Beach line and now the Avon Park Depot Museum.
South Florida Junior College
Founded in 1965 under Florida's community college master plan and opened on Avon Park's Main Street in 1966; now South Florida State College, serving Highlands, Hardee, and DeSoto counties.
Southside Park Company
Avon Park residential holding and development corporation founded by Charles G. Metcalfe Sr., tied to the Southside Park subdivision and the Hopewell School parcel.
St. Mary Primitive Baptist Church
An African-American church in Avon Park established in 1929.
Stephenson-Nelson Funeral Home
Established in Avon Park in 1929 by J. M. Stephenson and J. Ross Blythe, operating from the historic William R. Reck house and since 1955 in a dedicated facility at 111 East Circle Street.
The "Crosby" — Burleigh's Shay Locomotive
The twelve-ton Lima Shay geared locomotive, Lima shop number 469, that John C. Burleigh brought overland to Avon Park in December 1894 and ran on the town's wooden railway.
The Avon Park Black Tigers
An all-Black town team that played in central Florida's segregated semi-professional baseball leagues.
The Avon Park Depot & Baseball Museum
Location, hours, admission, and exhibit highlights for the Avon Park Depot & Baseball Museum.
The Avon Park Fire Department
From a hand-drawn chemical cart kept under the Main Street bandstand in 1920 to a career department with its own station on South Delaney Avenue, by way of the first motor truck of 1923, the first siren of 1924 and the fire station of 1928 that is now the police station.
The Avon Park Police Department
Avon Park's municipal law enforcement agency from the first town marshal of 1913 through the 1928 station, the civil rights appointments of 1955, and its replacement by the Highlands County Sheriff's Office in 2021.
The Avon Park Public Library
The public library at 100 North Museum Avenue overlooking Lake Verona, founded through the civic initiatives of the Woman's Club and Mrs. William M. Reck, championed into its permanent municipal building by Winifred Reck Todd, and operating as a branch of the Heartland Library Cooperative.
The Avon Park telephone exchange
The municipal and regional telecommunications exchange of Avon Park, originating from an 1891 pioneer telephone company, regulated under Railroad Commission Order 654, employing approximately one hundred operators as a regional toll switching center for eight towns across four counties, and retiring the last manual cord switchboard in Florida in 1985.
The Avon Park Woman's Club
Pioneer civic and cultural organization founded in 1913 by Mrs. William M. Reck and local community leaders, responsible for founding the public library, town beautification, and hosting the 1933 Florida Federation of Women's Clubs state convention.
The Brickell Building
The two-story polychrome brick block at 2-12 East Main Street, financed by E. M. Brickell of Pittsburgh and designed by William J. Heim, dated 1919 by the county and the town history and 1921 by the National Register, whose upstairs auditorium was the town's council chamber, lodge hall and dance floor, the first classroom of the junior college in 1965, and, after the city bought it in 2021, the subject of a dispute over its sale.
The Bunbury House on Lake Pythias
An English couple's country house of 1889 on sixty acres at Lake Pythias, built to J. H. Nettleton's design for the Bunburys, empty for nine years after Lady Bunbury went home, and from 1908 the home of the Shockley family, whose son Byrum became the town's first historian.
The Cow Creek Seminoles and Brighton
The Creek-speaking Seminole community that regrouped in the Kissimmee and Fisheating Creek country after the wars, was forced out by drainage and agriculture, and is ancestral to today's Brighton Reservation just south of Highlands County.
The Mayaca and the Jororo
The interior peoples of central Florida whose territory reached the upper Kissimmee watershed at contact, the four Franciscan missions among them in the 1690s, the 1696 revolt, and their destruction before the Seminole arrived.
The roads to Avon Park
From company signboards in the flatwoods in 1888 to a sixty-foot county road in 1915, a state highway worth beautifying in 1927, and two state road designations in 1939 - the making of the route that is now U.S. 27.
The Skipper Family of Avon Park
Pioneer South Florida family whose members served as early postmasters, municipal aldermen, citrus operators, and founders of Skipper Brothers Bankers and the First National Bank of Avon Park.
The South Florida Sun
A newspaper published at Avon Park from about 1900 to 1912, edited by viticulturalist and land agent O. R. Thacher, which survives chiefly as a weekly department printed inside The De Soto County News in 1905 and 1906.
Union Congregational Church
Avon Park's first organized church congregation, founded in 1892 by town developer Oliver M. Crosby on Lake Verona, known for the 1895 pastor tobacco effigy protest and hosting the historic 1953 integrated Southeastern Regional Meeting of Congregational Christian Churches.
W. A. Cook
Florida landscape architect and horticulturist of Oneco, Florida, author of "The Home and the Grounds" (1920), and designer of the 1923 Mile Long Mall landscape plan in Avon Park.
Wiley Sauls, Jr.
Elected mayor of Avon Park in 1949 at twenty-one on the votes of the town's Black precinct, re-elected in 1951, unseated by his council, and restored by the courts; married Kathryn Ann Gaddis in Ohio in June 1952, resigned, and became president of Union Quarries Inc.
William and Mary King
The English couple Crosby credited as Avon Park's first real settlers - William A. King of Birmingham, later county commissioner and mayor, killed at the Main Street crossing in 1929, and Mary Ann King of Warwickshire, who is said to have suggested the town's name.
William E. Pabor
Colony founder, poet and horticultural editor who built towns in Colorado before founding Pabor Lake north of Avon Park in 1892, and who died at Denver on 29 August 1911 and was buried at Fruita, the Colorado town he had named.
William F. Ward
Citrus nurseryman, horticulturist, founder of the 500-acre Ward's Nursery (1917), developer of the "Avon" avocado variety (1923), and pioneer of commercial Persian lime cultivation on the Lake Wales Ridge.
William H. Yates
Manager of the Mutual Crate Company and Avon Manufacturing Company mills in Avon Park, and successor to J. A. Caldwell in 1931.
William J. Heim
The Pittsburgh architect brought to Avon Park in 1920 by a citrus association, who stayed thirty years and designed the Jacaranda, the Pinecrest, the City Hall, the Park Theater, the town's packing houses and, with his son, most of the county's schools.
William Krause (1840–1915)
German-born Avon Park settler, deputy sheriff, stove-wood and ice-plant entrepreneur, and early source for the town's school history.
William L. Smith
Avon Park master builder and general contractor who erected the town's first brick building (the 1912 First National Bank block at 1–9 West Main Street), the First Methodist Church (1919–1921), the Coen and Whidden buildings, and prominent regional masonry structures across central and southwest Florida.
William Reck
Illinois migrant, civic leader, and real estate developer who moved to Avon Park circa 1913, actively promoted the construction of the Mile Long Mall, and lobbied the Florida Legislature for the creation of Highlands County in 1921.
Willie James McRae
The Avon Park citrus laborer and yard worker who played for and managed the semi-pro Avon Park Black Tigers and was the father of major league standout Hal McRae.
Winter Guest Club
The club the winter residents of Avon Park organized in 1937, for which the city provided a clubhouse in Donaldson Park and shuffleboard courts first built by the WPA in the winter of 1938-39, and which had about eight hundred members by 1976.