The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
Menu
Admin Sign-In

The Avon Park telephone exchange

The telecommunications network serving Avon Park began during the pioneer settlement era and evolved into one of the town’s largest employers of women, serving as a critical regional switching hub across south-central Florida for nearly a century before the retirement of the state’s final manual cord switchboard in 1985.

Pioneer Origins and Regulatory Lineage (1891–1920)

Avon Park’s telecommunications lineage traces to March 1891, when local citrus growers and merchants organized the Ft. Meade, Midland and Avon Park Telephone Company, electing a board of directors to string overhead wire through the pine flatwoods connecting Avon Park to the railhead and telegraph lines at Fort Meade in Polk County.[newssun-telephony]

This pioneer line was succeeded by the Avon Park Telephone Company, which established the town’s first central magneto switchboard. In 1911, the Florida Legislature enacted Chapter 6186, Laws of Florida 1911, granting the Florida Railroad Commission full regulatory authority over telephone rates, physical connections, and exchange service standards throughout Florida.[laws-6186-1911]

In its twenty-third annual report for the year ending 28 February 1920, the Railroad Commission recorded formal administrative regulatory actions governing telephone exchanges across Florida, assigning Order No. 654 to the Avon Park exchange alongside regional exchanges at Arcadia, Wauchula, and Bowling Green.[frc-23] The regulatory order established formal exchange boundaries, commercial toll rate schedules, and service connections as the town entered the 1920s land boom.

Crosby’s line of 1892 and the exchange of 1914

Evidence: single-source.

The town history tells the same beginning from the town’s side, with a year’s difference. It says the first telephone line into Avon Park was built by Crosby in 1892 to Fort Meade, “a great step forward,” but that the cowboys used the glass insulators for target practice, falling limbs kept a man in constant repair work, the contractor left an unpaid bill of four hundred dollars, and at two dollars a call the line became too expensive to keep and was abandoned.[maxwell-1976] It was 1914, the book says, before the first telephone office was installed, in the two-story house of C. A. Clark on Lake Avenue, on the same property where the telephone building later stood, with Mrs. Clark as the only operator and twenty-two subscribers. The main office was the Ed Scott Telephone Company at Arcadia; J. R. Merritt superintended the installation of equipment that had to be hauled by mule and wagon from Wauchula, and the first pole was set that year in front of the First National Bank.[maxwell-1976] Merritt afterwards moved to Fort Pierce and became sheriff of St. Lucie County, and it was as Sheriff J. R. Merritt that he took charge of the posse that ended the Ashley gang of bank robbers on the Sebastian River bridge in November 1924.[maxwell-1976][flsheriffs-baker] After the Scott company came the Tri-County Telephone Company, with John L. Delegal as Avon Park manager, then the Inter-County Telephone Company under Robert M. Gay, and in 1967 the United Telephone Company, which by 1976 employed 240 people under Charles Bryan and was the county’s largest independent employer and taxpayer.[maxwell-1976]

The Regional Toll Switching Center

Following incorporation and expansion into the Inter-County Telephone and Telegraph network and subsequently the United Telephone Company of Florida, Avon Park was selected as the central toll switching center for south-central Florida.[aphs-phone]

Before the deployment of Direct Distance Dialing (DDD) across rural Florida, the Avon Park toll exchange handled all long-distance and inter-city toll traffic for eight communities across four counties:

  • Highlands County: Avon Park, Sebring, and Lake Placid
  • Hardee County: Wauchula, Bowling Green, and Zolfo Springs
  • DeSoto County: Arcadia
  • Okeechobee County: Okeechobee

The exchange operated twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. At its peak in the mid-twentieth century, the facility employed approximately one hundred switchboard operators and chief operators, making the telephone company one of the largest corporate employers of women in Avon Park’s history.[aphs-phone] Operators maintained manual plug-and-cord connections, route timing, emergency dispatch, and long-distance billing toll tickets across the multi-county network.

The 1985 Automation and Legacy

While metropolitan centers in Florida shifted to fully automated electronic switching systems during the 1960s and 1970s, United Telephone of Florida maintained manual toll assistance switchboards in Avon Park into the mid-1980s.

In 1985, United Telephone replaced its manual cord switchboards with electronic digital switching, closing the local toll office and consolidating all regional customer assistance and operator functions to a centralized facility in Altamonte Springs, Florida.[aphs-phone]

Avon Park was the final community in the State of Florida to operate a manual cord switchboard. Following the shutdown, the historic two-position wooden cord switchboard, along with operator headsets, patch plugs, and toll-board logs, was preserved and presented to the Avon Park Historical Society, where it remains on permanent public exhibition in the 1925 Seaboard Air Line depot museum.[aphs-phone]

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, pages 81–83: Clark Family and Telephones (references/the-first-hundred-years-of-avon-park_leoma-bradshaw-maxwell_1976.md) (1976) · book
  2. Florida Sheriffs Association, Sheriff Bob Baker and the Ashley Gang (2026) · secondary
  3. Avon Park Historical Society, Phone Switchboard Exhibit (2026)
  4. Railroad Commission of the State of Florida, Twenty-third Annual Report of the Railroad Commission of the State of Florida, for the year ending 28 February 1920 (1920)
  5. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 6186 (No. 67), Laws of Florida 1911: An Act Placing Telephone and Telegraph Companies Under the Jurisdiction of the Railroad Commissioners (1911)
  6. Highlands News-Sun, Telecommunications and Switchboard Operations in Highlands County (2020)

Something here wrong, or incomplete? The Society would rather know. Tell a volunteer.

Have a question about this record?

← Back to collection

Ask A.P.

Ask the archive

    Try asking:

    0 / 500

    A.P. answers only from the Society's own archive and cites what it used. Questions are not linked to you; search history is stored on your device only (how it works).Ask a volunteer for anything it cannot answer.