The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The Avon Park Fire Department

Avon Park’s fire department counts its age from 1923, the year the town bought its first motor fire truck, and celebrated its centennial at the firehouse on South Delaney Avenue on 8 December 2023.[sebring-centennial-2023] The story before that date is one of a wooden town with a hand cart, and the story after it is mostly the town’s own record, so much of what follows rests on the Historical Society’s 1976 history and the council minutes it excerpts.

A hand cart under the bandstand, 1920

The Sanborn Map Company’s surveyors, who drew the town for fire-insurance underwriters in November 1920, recorded what Avon Park had to fight a fire with: “Volunteer. No organization. One Deluge 2-35 gal. tank cart with 200’ r hose. Alarm, whistle. No fire limits enforced.” The water mains, two and three inches across and fed from a 50,000-gallon tank a hundred feet up, gave “domestic service only” from the Florida Ice and Power Company, and “no fire service.” The cart itself is drawn on the Main Street sheet, “under band stand,” in the block between Forest and Lake avenues. Out at the crate mills south of town the picture was the same: the Mutual Crate Company’s mill had a night watchman on hourly rounds but “no fire hose,” and its water supply, with a ten-thousand-gallon tank, was still “to be built.”[sanborn-1920]

The 1976 history remembers the first fire house as “a small wooden building near where the Jacaranda Hotel now stands,” replaced in the early 1920s by a new fire house at the end of South Butler Avenue, beside which the council had a jail built in 1923.[maxwell-1976]

Truck, siren and station, 1923 to 1928

The council minutes give the department’s first decade in a handful of lines. On 6 August 1923 the council bought a fire truck for $12,400. On 2 June 1924 it bought the town’s first fire siren, for $480.50. On 10 February 1926 R. A. Stamey was appointed to arrange a room for the fire engine. On 7 January 1928 W. H. McCarthy was elected fire chief; on 21 March 1928 the council moved to erect a city hall, fire department and jail; and on 5 December 1928 the fire station was completed.[maxwell-1976] The National Register nomination for the historic district records the same building, begun in 1928 as the city fire station and later the police station.[nrhp-90000486]

The Avon Park Fire Department’s first fire truck

The first fire truck, bought in 1923 for $12,400. Seated is W. H. McCarthy, fire chief, and to his right Demos Mandis. The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), page 201. Avon Park Historical Society.[maxwell-1976]

The volunteers of 1927 were the men of American Legion Post No. 69, whose group photograph the history prints as the fire company of that year.[maxwell-1976] They had their hardest night that February, when the Avon Park Hotel on Lake Verona caught fire in its boiler room at half past two in the morning and was “enveloped” by the time “fire-fighters arrived from Sebring, Frostproof and Wauchula to aid the local department.”[keowee-1927-02-09] The city charter passed by the Legislature that June made the Chief of the Fire Department one of the officers chosen by the council rather than by the voters.[lof-1927-12514]

The first fire station, built in 1928

The first fire station, built in 1928 and later occupied by the police department. The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), page 201. Avon Park Historical Society.[maxwell-1976]

The volunteer firemen of 1927

The volunteer firemen of 1927, American Legion Post No. 69. The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), page 202. Avon Park Historical Society.[maxwell-1976]

The siren years

McCarthy held the two posts of fire and police chief together by 1938.[maxwell-1976] The siren he had been given in 1924 still governed the volunteers’ lives a quarter of a century later: it was the siren, sounding for a fire on the west side of town in 1949, that pulled the baker Joe Gregor out of his shop with a batch of rolls half-baked, and gave the world Brown ’n Serve rolls (see Gregor’s Bakery). In 1953 the Legislature gave the firemen civil-service protection. Chapter 28886, filed on 11 May 1953, made every regularly employed member of the fire department, the chief included, a civil-service employee to be hired, promoted and dismissed “on merit and fitness only,” determined by competitive examination, and created a five-member Civil Service Board to run the system: three citizens “of different vocations” appointed by the council, one fireman elected by the department, and one councilman. It repealed Section 18 of the 1927 charter to make room for itself.[lof-1953-28886]

The Florida State Firemen’s Association comes to town

In the 1970s Avon Park’s fire chief was Mack Flowers, and Flowers was also president of the Florida State Firemen’s Association, which “established headquarters here in 1970 and erected a beautiful brick building on Hwy 27 South of Avon Park,” with plans, the history says, for a state firemen’s museum.[maxwell-1976] The association’s own account gives the building’s dedication as April 1973, “debt free.”[fsfa-about] The museum was never built. The association, now the Florida State Firefighters Association, sold the building at 2450 U.S. 27 South in September 2022 to a member couple, and kept the use of it for training classes.[newssun-fsfa-2022]

The station on South Delaney Avenue

The department’s present firehouse stands at 98 South Delaney Avenue on Lots 13–16 of the Wilson Subdivision, housing a brush truck, an engine, a ladder truck and a rescue boat for the town’s lakes.[sebring-centennial-2023][hcpa-parcel-28332229000000130a]

The station’s construction chronology spans the late 1970s. The City of Avon Park initiated the capital project in 1976 as part of its Bicentennial civic program, cited in later municipal accounts as the project’s beginning.[sebring-centennial-2023][newssun-fire-remodel-2025] Structural construction of the 10,998-square-foot main station and its reinforced concrete aprons and driveways was completed in 1978, the official Actual Year Built recorded on the Highlands County Property Appraiser’s tax roll and in the firehouse’s own historical display.[hcpa-parcel-28332229000000130a][newssun-fire-tour-2024] The department formally dedicated and occupied the station in 1979, the year captioned in Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell’s contemporary photograph as the “New Fire Station Built in 1979” as her history went to press following Mayor E. A. Delaney Sr.’s death in November 1979.[maxwell-1976] With the relocation complete, the 1928 station on East Main Street was transferred to the police department.[maxwell-1976]

The new fire station

The new fire station on South Delaney Avenue. The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), page 204. Avon Park Historical Society.[maxwell-1976]

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. Highlands County Property Appraiser, Highlands County Property Appraiser Parcel Record: A-22-33-28-290-0000-0130 (98 S Delaney Ave) (2026)
  2. Sanborn Map Company, via the Library of Congress, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Avon Park, DeSoto County, Florida, November 1920 (4 sheets) (1920) · archival
  3. 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
  4. Associated Press, in the Keowee Courier, Fire Demolishes Hotel at Avon Park, Fla., Keowee Courier (Pickens Court House, S.C.), 9 February 1927, page 7 (1927) · newspaper
  5. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12514 (No. 709), Laws of Florida 1927, Special Acts: An Act to Abolish the Present Municipal Government and Municipality of the City of Avon Park (1927) · official
  6. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Avon Park Historic District (1990) · official
  7. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 28886 (House Bill No. 510), Laws of Florida 1953, Special Acts: An Act Relating to Civil Service for Firemen in the City of Avon Park, Florida (1953) · official
  8. Florida State Firefighters Association, About Us, Florida State Firefighters Association (2024) · secondary
  9. Highlands News-Sun, September 2022, Florida Firemen's Association building changes hands (2022) · newspaper
  10. sebring.com, 2023, Avon Park Fire Department Centennial Celebration (2023) · secondary
  11. Highlands News-Sun, October 2024, Homeschooled children tour Avon Park Fire Department (2024) · newspaper
  12. Highlands News-Sun, March 2025, Avon Park remodels, reinforces fire station (2025) · newspaper

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