The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The Bunbury House on Lake Pythias

Summary

Among the English families who settled around Avon Park in Crosby’s decade was one the town has always called Lord and Lady Bunbury, who in 1889 built a sixty-acre country place on Lake Pythias to the design of J. H. Nettleton, the architect of the Verona Hotel.[maxwell-1976] Lady Bunbury went home to England for good after nine years, the house stood empty for nine more, and in 1908 it was bought by the Reverend James B. Shockley of Kentucky, whose family kept it and whose son Byrum became the first careful student of the town’s early history.[maxwell-1976] The house was still standing, and still full of the Bunburys’ things, when a Federal Writers’ Project writer described it in 1937.[darsey-1937] A George H. Bunbury is listed among the town’s English settlers, and a G. Bunbury of Avon Park was advertising in the state’s farm paper in 1895 for beggarweed seed and a pair of Belgian hares; the couple held no title, and neither has been identified from any record outside Avon Park.[maxwell-1976][fa-1895-bunbury]

The house

According to the town history, the Bunburys had visited the Laidleys at Fort Meade, the center of the English colony in that part of Florida, before choosing their sixty acres on Lake Pythias. A Laidley family was indeed at Fort Meade in those years: the Bartow Advance Courier of 2 May 1888 lists “J. W. Laidley and family, Fort Meade” among the arrivals at a Bartow hotel.[bartow-1888-laidley] Nettleton drew the plans, but Mr. Bunbury said he had designed the house himself, “a combination of an English farm house and hunting lodge, with southern colonial and some ‘cracker’ influence in the style.” It had no fireplace and no well; rain water was collected in a large wooden cistern. The Bunburys kept horses, “two fine blooded horses” with six dogs and four children in the photographic plates they left behind, and laid out a race track whose low ribbon-wire fences stayed on the property for many years. Lady Bunbury’s diary, which the Shockleys found in the house, told of her love of horses, of bringing ice from Fort Meade for special occasions, and of the English friends she kept up with: the Fort Meade colony, the Floods at Frostproof, the Stevensons on Lake Isis, the Hauptmans and the J. H. Smiths on Lake Viola, and the Kings at Avon Park.[maxwell-1976]

Lady Bunbury writing in her diary, circa 1898

Lady Bunbury writing in her diary, circa 1898. The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), page 77. Avon Park Historical Society.[maxwell-1976]

In the nine years they lived in America, the book says, Lady Bunbury went back to England for the birth of each of her four children, and at last stayed there, leaving much of her personal property in the house; her husband came back three times before he sold the place to the Shockleys, and “always pined to spend his last days in Avon Park.”[maxwell-1976]

The house in 1937

Barbara Berry Darsey, compiling the Avon Park Guide for the Federal Writers’ Project, described the house nearly fifty years after it was built and while the Shockleys were living in it. She writes that “Lord Bunbury, one of the earliest settlers, came from England with his horses and his dogs” and built “a spacious home of the typical English type of that day (according to his notes and diary),” standing “upon the shores of Lake Pythias” and “now known as the Shockley Estate.” Early photographs of the place, she says, “show extensive kennels and barns also of sturdy construction which have long since disappeared,” while the house itself remained “almost without change”: an extremely wide hall running the whole depth of the building, tall rooms on either side of it, and a verandah carried right around the outside with broad steps on all four sides. The rooms were “panelled in a clear beautiful wainscoating, said by some to be of German walnut, which was brought by Lord Bunbury when he came from England,” and the same wood ran up the staircase and its railing to the half story above.[darsey-1937]

Two things the Bunburys had brought from England were still in the house in 1937. In the section of her book on the fine arts, dated 19 May 1937, Darsey records “an interesting group of water colors by Lady Bunbury,” whom she calls “an English pioneer artist,” and beside them “a fine old piano brought from England in pioneer days by the Bunburys” — a small upright in a carved and hand-polished case whose “ivory keys are now yellowed with age” but which “still possesses a rich mellow tone.”[darsey-1937] By then Byrum Shockley was running a commercial rose garden at the house, “once the hunting lodge home of Lord and Lady Bunbury, pioneers from England,” supplying cut flowers to local markets and budded rose bushes to buyers out of state.[darsey-1937]

Darsey places the house “some three or more miles southeast of the present city,” a direction that does not agree with the position of Lake Pythias among the solution lakes north of the town.[darsey-1937]

The Bunburys in the record

“Lord and Lady Bunbury” was a courtesy the town paid them and not a title either of them held. The only hereditary honor attached to the name is a baronetcy created in 1681 for a Cheshire family, whose holder is styled Sir and not Lord, and which passed in 1895, on the death of the ninth baronet, to a family seated at Barton Hall in Suffolk.[cokayne-baronetage-4] Maxwell’s own list of the English settlers of the first years, beside E. H. Thompson, Dr. Chase and Fred S. Pryor, names him plainly as “George H. Bunbury.”[maxwell-1976] That a Bunbury was farming at Avon Park in the 1890s is confirmed by The Florida Agriculturist, in whose cheap column, from 1 May to 12 June 1895, “G. Bunbury, Avon Park, Fla.” advertised: “Wanted, five or six pounds cleaned Beggar Weed seed. Also pair fancy rabbits or Belgian hares.”[fa-1895-bunbury] Beggarweed was the cover crop of the ridge groves and the hares a fancier’s stock; the advertisement is that of a man improving an English country place, not a commercial grower.[fa-1895-bunbury]

The Shockleys

The Reverend James B. Shockley and his wife Sarah Woodyard Shockley, both formerly instructors at the Asbury Methodist College at Wilmore, Kentucky, came to Frostproof in 1907 with their sons Byrum and Francis, bought the Bunbury place and moved to Avon Park in 1908, where Mr. Shockley taught school in 1908–09.[maxwell-1976] Byrum W. Shockley (1895–1964), who served as federal census enumerator for Avon Park’s precinct in January and February 1920 (recording his widowed mother Sarah W. Shockley, age 57, himself at age 24, and his 14-year-old brother Francis W. Shockley on the Lake Pythias fruit farm on Sheet 10A), became an authority on citrus varieties and culture, “noted for his scholarly research into the early history of Avon Park,” and one of the five charter founders and first historian of the Old Settlers Association; his brother Francis W. Shockley (1905–1954), who served as City Clerk of Avon Park in the 1930s, married Lucille Able, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. A. B. Able, and their son is Dr. James B. Shockley.[maxwell-1976][fg-byrum-shockley][fg-francis-shockley] Both brothers are buried in Bougainvillea Cemetery.[fg-byrum-shockley][fg-francis-shockley]

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. Barbara Berry Darsey, Avon Park Guide, typescript for the Federal Writers' Project, pages 22, 138, 142 and 150 (references/avon-park-guide-federal-writers-project-1937.md) (1938) · archival
  2. Bartow Advance Courier, Bartow, Fla., Bartow Advance Courier, 2 May 1888, hotel arrivals: 'J. W. Laidley and family, Fort Meade' (1888) · newspaper
  3. George Edward Cokayne, Complete Baronetage, volume IV: creations 1665–1707, pages 117–119, 'Bunbury: cr. 29 June 1681' (1904) · book
  4. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida, pages 50 and 77–79: Burnbury House and Shockley Family (references/the-first-hundred-years-of-avon-park_leoma-bradshaw-maxwell_1976.md) (1976) · book
  5. The Florida Agriculturist, DeLand, Fla., The Florida Agriculturist, 1 May 1895, page 9, Cheap Column: want advertisement of G. Bunbury, Avon Park (repeated 8, 15, 22 and 29 May and 5 and 12 June 1895) (1895) · newspaper
  6. Find a Grave, Byrum Shockley (1895–1964), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park, Find a Grave memorial 35079025 (2026) · secondary
  7. Find a Grave, Francis W. Shockley (1905–1954), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park, Find a Grave memorial 35079111 (2026) · secondary

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