The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center, Avon Park

Florida’s first state institution for the treatment of alcoholism, and Avon Park’s reward for eight years of giving the state land. It stood two miles south of the town, off the Sebring highway, on the Section 34 land first offered for a venereal hospital in 1943. This document is about the institution as it actually operated; the statutes that created it are in Report: The state hospital at Avon Park, 1943-1955.

Opening

The Legislature of 1953 made the Avon Park center the hub of a statewide Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Program, a “specialized agency created by the 1953 State Legislative session to work for the control and prevention of alcoholism in Florida,” and by April 1955 the program had its state offices open at Avon Park while the residential center itself was still only “planned.”[gct-1955-04-21][lof-1953-28134] Out-patient clinics came first: Jacksonville and Pensacola, then Tallahassee on 25 April 1955, of seven intended.[gct-1955-04-21]

The center received its first patients in December 1956 and was formally dedicated on 6 February 1957.[kwc-1957-06-05] That is six years after the act that created it and fourteen after the city first gave the land.

The place

A visitor in 1959 described “quite a layout of modern Florida-type buildings” covering “about a square block of lawn area between two sparkling lakes two miles south of Avon Park and east off the highway,” with a sign visible to traffic on the Sebring road.[gct-1959-03-19] The two lakes are Lake Lelia and Lake Glenada, excluded by name from the city’s gift of 1943.

The people who ran it

The first program administrator was Ernest A. Shepherd, “a former Methodist minister … a former chief in the Division of Alcoholism of the New Hampshire Health Dept., and … a lecturer at the Yale School of Alcohol Studies.” The senior physician was Dr. James A. Mosco, a neuropsychiatrist who had been a flight surgeon in Europe in the Second World War, then chief neuropsychiatrist at the Veterans Administration in St. Louis, then at the Miami VA.[kwc-1957-06-05] By 1963 a research project on the vocational rehabilitation of patients was running under James H. Williams, Ph.D.[gct-1963-07-11]

How it worked

Admission was voluntary, by the 1953 act.[lof-1953-28134] A patient arriving at Avon Park went first into “a receiving hospital pending preliminary evaluation of his physical, psychological, and social condition,” and “generally, within three days to a week” moved to a residential unit for “a 30-day treatment period”; on leaving he was referred to one of the outpatient clinics, to Alcoholics Anonymous, or to his own doctor or minister.[kwc-1957-06-04] Staff told visitors that forty to fifty-five per cent of patients showed “definite improvement.”[gct-1959-03-19]

A Key West Citizen reporter caught the social texture of it on a Sunday visitors’ day in 1957: a patio of patients, three of them Key Westers, and a lady visitor whose suspicion “changed to bewilderment” before she said, “Why! They look just like human beings!”[kwc-1957-06-04]

Scale

The state’s appropriations act of 1959 carries a line for the Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Program.[lof-1959-500] By 1962 the program “operates outpatient clinics in Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville and Pensacola, and tentatively plans to establish a clinic in Orlando,” and “also operates the 64-bed Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center in Avon Park”; Governor Farris Bryant proclaimed an Alcoholism Information Week around it that November.[gct-1962-11-22] A 1963 study of its patients found three-quarters aged between thirty-five and fifty-five and more than forty per cent divorced or separated.[gct-1963-07-11]

What became of the land

In the early 1960s the program’s advisory board offered twenty-four acres of its property as the site of the new junior college, on condition that adjacent land was acquired from the city to the south and from the Sachsenmaier family to the north on U.S. 27; the college moved onto that permanent site, a mile and a half south of Avon Park, in 1969.[newssun-sfsc-60] So South Florida State College’s Avon Park campus stands on the ground the city gave the state for a hospital in 1943.

The center’s own successor is still there. The Florida Center for Addictions and Dual Disorders, a fifty-five-bed residential facility serving all sixty-seven Florida counties, stands at 100 West College Drive, “at the rear of South Florida State College.”[tchs-fcadd]

Not the prison

The alcoholism center did not become the Avon Park Correctional Institution. The two were separate state institutions on separate sites — the center two miles south of town on the Sebring highway, the prison ten miles east on Highway 64 at the gate of the bombing range — and they happened to open within two months of each other in the winter and spring of 1957. See Entity: Avon Park Correctional Institution.

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. The Key West Citizen (Key West, Fla.), Psychiatrists Aid Alcoholics, Study Causes, by Bill Gibb — The Key West Citizen, 5 June 1957, page 6 (1957)
  2. The Key West Citizen (Key West, Fla.), Rehabilitation Center Is Real Help To Alcoholics, by Bill Gibb — The Key West Citizen, 4 June 1957, page 12 (1957)
  3. Gadsden County Times (Quincy, Fla.), Alcoholic Clinic Opens April 25 — Gadsden County Times, 21 April 1955, page 16 (1955)
  4. Gadsden County Times (Quincy, Fla.), Alcolines, by Charley Stookey — Gadsden County Times, 19 March 1959, page 3 (1959)
  5. Gadsden County Times (Quincy, Fla.), Farris Bryant Spotlights Cost Of Alcoholism — Gadsden County Times, 22 November 1962, page 12 (1962)
  6. Gadsden County Times (Quincy, Fla.), State news briefs — Gadsden County Times, 11 July 1963, page 8 (1963)
  7. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 28134, Laws of Florida 1953 (Senate Bill No. 783): the Florida Rehabilitation Center for Alcoholism (1953)
  8. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 59-500, Laws of Florida 1959: the general appropriations act, Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Program and Avon Park Prison items (1959)
  9. Highlands News-Sun, 60 years later: From downtown Avon Park to four campuses (2025)
  10. Tri-County Human Services, Inc., The Florida Center for Addictions and Dual Disorders (2026)

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