The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Camp Wingmann, Avon Park

An Episcopal summer camp that has been at Avon Park, on and off, since 1932, and permanently on Trout Lake since 1939. It is the largest church institution the town has ever held, and it brought children from the whole of south Florida to Avon Park every summer for forty years.

The name

The first Camp Wingmann was a week’s retreat for high-school-age Episcopalians held in 1928 at Moccasin Island, a few miles west of Davie in the Everglades — “primitive, with little shade … a pool filled with black water and lots of mosquitoes.”[wingmann-history]

The name joins two bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of South Florida: Cameron Mann, bishop from 1914 to 1932, and John Wing, coadjutor from 1925 to 1932 and diocesan bishop from 1932 to 1950.[wingmann-history]

How it came to Avon Park

Years Where
1928 Moccasin Island, near Davie
c. 1929-1931 Crystal River, on the Gulf coast
1932 an Avon Park hotel (see below)
1933-1936 the Lake Byrd Lodge, on the outskirts of Avon Park
1937 Florida Military Institute, Haines City — the lodge was not available
1938 no camp: the Depression had stalled the building fund
1939 onwards its own camp on Trout Lake, Avon Park

[wingmann-history]

During the 1932 session (its fifth annual session, held June 14 to June 28), newspaper and periodical summaries record that Bishop John Durham Wing was in general charge of the camp, assisted by faculty members including the Rev. W. P. S. Lander (who served as director), Morton O. Nace (manager), the Rev. Henry I. Louttit, and Dean Johnson.[the-living-church-1932-04-02] Nace concurrently served as the executive secretary of the Young People’s Service League and director of Camp Perry, a diocesan boys’ camp that opened in Avon Park around the same time. The camp offered courses for the Young People’s Service League (Y.P.S.L.) on the Prayer Book and Church history. The capacity was noted as 95 campers, which matched the capacity of the lodge.[the-living-church-1932-04-02] Which specific Avon Park hotel held the 1932 session is not definitively established. While the Hotel Verona is sometimes named in local tradition, it burned down in 1927 and is eliminated. The Jacaranda Hotel and Pinecrest Hotel were both active in 1932 and are viable candidates, but no primary source has yet been found that explicitly connects either to the camp.

The Lake Byrd Lodge is described as “a rustic, three-story log structure reminiscent of the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park.”[wingmann-history] That description matches what the 1939 WPA guide meant when it put “LAKE BYRD LODGE (R), 42 m., a private clubhouse” two miles north of the town and said “is held the annual summer encampment of the Episcopal Diocese of South Florida.”[wpa-1939]

A caution about that guide entry. By the time the guide appeared in 1939 the camp had already left the lodge — 1936 was its last summer there, and the new camp on Trout Lake opened in 1939. The Federal Writers’ Project was describing an arrangement that had ended two or three years before it went to press. Guides go out of date in the writing.

During the Lake Byrd years the camp split into three: Camp Perry for young boys, Camp St. Mary for young girls, and Camp Wingmann proper for the high school age.[wingmann-history]

The permanent camp, 1939

Bishop Wing wanted a site of the diocese’s own. John Sears Francis, senior warden of the Church of the Redeemer in Avon Park, and his wife gave the diocese land outside the town on Trout Lake.[wingmann-history] That is a substantial act of local benefaction.

The building fund moved slowly — “Florida was still in the grips of the Depression and giving was slow,” and there was no camp at all in 1938. By the spring of 1939, $16,000 had been raised. Construction produced “rustic buildings with yellow pine framework and cypress board and batten exteriors”: a mess hall with kitchen, five cabins, a caretaker cottage and a pump house.[wingmann-history]

Afterwards

  • 1949. The Miami Times, the Black newspaper of Miami, reported that “the Clergy Conference of the Episcopal Church met in Avon Park, Fla., at Camp Wingmann on October 18-20.” Among those attending was Fr. Elisha S. Clark, in charge of St. Matthew’s Delray Beach, St. Philip’s Pompano and St. Mary’s Deerfield — Black missions of the diocese — who “reports that the conference was very inspiring.”[miami-times-1949-10-29] The camp was in year-round use for diocesan business as well as for children, and Black clergy of the diocese were meeting at Avon Park in 1949.
  • April to June 1955. The camp was desegregated. While diocesan clergy conferences were already integrated, the regular children’s summer camp sessions were restricted to white youth. The push for integrating the church camps was spearheaded in 1954 by the Rev. John Edwin Culmer, the first Black Archdeacon of the diocese.[archives-culmer] The diocesan convention at Fort Lauderdale voted almost unanimously to open Camp Wingmann to Black and white children together; two Tampa parishes protested and demanded the camp be re-segregated, arguing it was a “social and political issue.” Bishop Henry I. Louttit refused to call a special convention — “I can’t call a convention every time a minority wants one,” noting the diocese already had a long history of including Black members in its conventions and clergy groups. The first integrated session opened in June 1955, and Louttit had the clergy warn every parent beforehand.[mt-1955-06-25] Civil rights activist Samuel Augustus Jennings attended the following summer in 1956, noting he and a friend were the only two Black boys in the entire camp.[jennings-2020] See Finding: the Episcopal church camp at Avon Park was desegregated in June 1955.
  • 1950s. All Angels’ Chapel was built at the camp as a memorial to the service men and women from south Florida who died in the Second World War and in Korea, together with a house for the director.[wingmann-history]
  • 1960. Four buildings went up: a gymnasium called the Rec Hall, another cabin, a new director’s house — the old one having become “a small monastery for Franciscan Friars” — and a conference center with a chapel and rooms for sixty adults, named the Louttit Conference Center for Bishop Henry Louttit.[wingmann-history] The center was designed by Lakeland architect A. Wynn Howell, though local tradition often mistakenly claimed it was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. See Finding: A. Wynn Howell designed the 1960 Louttit Conference Center.
  • September 1960. Hurricane Donna passed directly over the camp. The old buildings came through; the new director’s house lost half its roof and the Rec Hall’s side walls and windows were blown out, though its steel frame and roof held.[wingmann-history]
  • The 1960s were the camp’s height: seven sessions each summer, each named for a saint, running eight or twelve days at $26 and $39.[wingmann-history]
  • 1979. After the old Diocese of South Florida split into three, the camp fell to the new Diocese of Central Florida, ran at a loss, and a diocesan convention voted to sell. The property went to the Missionary Alliance Church, then to David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge, then to Tri County Rehabilitation Services, who ran it as a drug rehabilitation center under the name Trout Lake Camp.[wingmann-history]
  • 1998. Three alumni of the 1960s bought it back and reopened it as an Episcopal youth camp. It is still running.[wingmann-history]

The account above comes from the camp’s own history page, which is detailed and internally consistent but carries no citations.

References

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. Camp Wingmann, Inc., Our History, Camp Wingmann, Avon Park, Florida (2026)
  2. The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.), Delray Beach News, by Frances Bain Adderley, The Miami Times, 29 October 1949, page 15 (1949)
  3. The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.), Bishop Stands Ground; Church Camp Will Stay Integrated, The Miami Times, 25 June 1955, page 1 (1955)
  4. Federal Writers' Project, Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, Federal Writers' Project, 1939, page 498 (1939)
  5. Samuel Augustus Jennings, FROM DA BACK OF DA BUS . WHERE THE ORANGE BLOSSOMS GROW, Reflections from Central Florida, Fall 2020 (2020)

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