The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Florida Development Company

Oliver M. Crosby’s company, and the corporate engine behind the founding of Avon Park.

What it was

Oliver Marvin Crosby’s land company, and the corporate form of the whole Avon Park enterprise.
Incorporated November 1891, by articles filed with the Florida Secretary of State
Capital stock $250,000 (an initial November 1891 newspaper notice misprinted it as “$3,50,000”, but state filings and later company reports confirm $250,000)
Offices London, New York, Jacksonville, and Avon Park
Incorporators O. M. Crosby, Frank E. Sperring, Charles H. Smith, Robert B. Archibald
Ended Sheriff’s sale of its real estate, January 1897; personal property auctioned February 1897

The 2 Nov 1891 Savannah Morning News notice of incorporation for the Florida Development Company containing the misprinted $3,50,000 capital stock figure. The 2 Nov 1891 Savannah Morning News notice of incorporation for the Florida Development Company containing the misprinted $3,50,000 capital stock figure. Credit: Library of Congress / Georgia Historic Newspapers.[fdc-newspapers]

Source: contemporary newspaper reporting.[fdc-newspapers] The Pabor Lake Pineapple names Crosby as “Hon. O. M. Crosby, president of the Florida Development company” at the tramway celebration of September 1895,[pineapple] and the National Register nomination records that he lost the company through debt after the freezes.[nrhp-avon-park-district]

Crosby’s own explanation of the English money, given in 1923, was that a London publisher whom he brought over to see the town promised $75,000, and that bank failures in London spoiled it.[findagrave-crosby] That publisher was George Washington Bacon of G. W. Bacon & Co., who visited in 1889, persuaded Crosby to capitalize the enterprise into a stock corporation to pay off the $17,000 Hotel Verona debt, and urged him to buy a steam sawmill on credit in Jacksonville.[maxwell-1976] Crosby sailed to London in May 1891 to aid Bacon in marketing shares, but British financial tightening following the 1890 Barings Crisis prevented the capital from arriving. Upon returning in October 1891, Crosby instructed Charles H. Smith, secretary of the Jacksonville Board of Trade, to draft the company’s charter and by-laws.[maxwell-1976] The four incorporators represented each key operational base: Crosby at Avon Park, Frank E. Sperring at the New York promotional office (99 Franklin Street), and Smith alongside former Fourth Judicial Circuit Judge Robert B. Archibald at Jacksonville.

A directory entry in the November–December 1892 issue of the Pineapple styles Crosby “Manager, Florida Improvement Co., Avon Park, Florida,” while every other surviving source — including the same issue’s own Bureau of Information on page 5 — uses “Florida Development Company.”[pineapple] The variant is a single-occurrence editorial slip, not a separate entity.

Rise and collapse

  • November 1891 — incorporated.[fdc-newspapers]
  • October 1894 — at the annual stockholders’ meeting held at Avon Park, the company reports capital unimpaired at $250,000, $93,704.43 due the company for land sold, land sales up 300 per cent over the prior year, a three-story business block built, and a bank established, declares a ten per cent dividend, and elects O. M. Crosby president, N. S. C. Perkins vice president and treasurer, R. D. Hall secretary, and O. R. Thacher (printed “O. B. Thatcher”) superintendent.[fdc-newspapers][savannah-1894-10-16]
  • December 1894 and February 1895 — the freezes.
  • October 1895 — Abbie R. Dodge sues the company for $8,000 in Duval County.[fdc-newspapers]
  • April–July 1896 — still advertising for homeseekers in northern newspapers such as The New Dominion of Morgantown, West Virginia (“Fla. Development Co., Avon Park, Fla.”), and donating ten acres in May 1896 to Henry H. Todd for a proposed canning factory at Avon Park.[fdc-newspapers][new-dominion-1896-04-25]
  • January 1897 — the company’s real estate is sold at a sheriff’s sale at Arcadia to satisfy Dodge’s claim, which had been reduced to a judgment of $10,000. Judge Barron Phillips confirms the sale at Tampa on 9 January and denies the stockholders’ petition for a receiver.[fdc-newspapers]
  • February 1897 — the remaining property is auctioned at Avon Park: “furniture, fixtures, presses, mills, nursery stock, books and accounts,” in the Pineapple’s own guarded report.[pineapple][fdc-newspapers]

Abbie R. Dodge, of the Jacksonville hotel partnership Dodge & Cullens, thereby became the owner of 20,000 acres of DeSoto County land, including the town of Avon Park itself, “a large nursery of fruit trees, a saw mill and six cottages.” Her judgment was for $10,000. She announced she would honor the company’s existing installment land-sale contracts rather than void them, which probably saved a good many settlers their lots.[fdc-newspapers]

She held on for years. A tax-deed notice in the De Soto County News of February 1906 shows town lots still carried on the tax rolls in the name of “Abbie R. Dodge and Wm. Boyd” against certificates of 1898 and 1900.[fdc-newspapers] Who William Boyd was, and what happened to the town’s ownership between 1900 and the appearance of the Scenic Highlands Development Company by 1918, is untraced.

The connection to the locomotive

The Lima construction roster records that Shay shop number 469 — the twelve-ton geared locomotive that J. C. Burleigh brought twenty-three miles overland to Avon Park in December 1894 — was built for “The Florida Development Co.” and carried on its books as number 5.[shay-roster-469] That buyer is Crosby’s company.

It also makes sense of the locomotive’s name. Harper’s Weekly, reporting in June 1895, calls the engine the Crosby.[harpers-1895-novelty] A company named its locomotive after its president.

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. W. E. Pabor and E. A. Pabor, Pabor Lake Pineapple, October 1892 to September 1897 (1897)
  2. Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation / National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Avon Park Historic District (ref. 90000486) (1990)
  3. shaylocomotives.com, Lima Shay Shop Number 469 factsheet (2020)
  4. contemporary Florida and Georgia newspapers, via digitised collections, Savannah Morning News and Weekly Floridian reports on the Florida Development Company, 1891-1897 (1897)
  5. Find a Grave, Oliver Marvin Crosby memorial, with transcribed Tampa Tribune interview, 1923 (2026)
  6. Harper's Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 2008, A Novelty Among Railroads (1895)
  7. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (references/the-first-hundred-years-of-avon-park_leoma-bradshaw-maxwell_1976.md) (1976) · book
  8. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), 16 October 1894, page 6: Annual meeting of the stockholders of the Florida Development Company at Avon Park (1894) · newspaper
  9. Florida Development Company, in The New Dominion, The New Dominion (Morgantown, W.Va.), 25 April 1896, page 1: Fla. Development Co., Avon Park, Fla. advertisement (1896) · newspaper

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