The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Highlands Lakes Hotel and Casino

The Highlands Lakes Hotel was the resort the Florida boom built at Avon Park, and the one the bust closed. Everything known of its first decade comes from the town history of 1976, which is the only account of it; the health-resort episode of 1936 is corroborated by newspapers in two other states.

Highland Lakes Hotel on Lake Lillian

Highland Lakes Hotel (on Lake Lillian), Avon Park, Fla. The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), page 162. Avon Park Historical Society.[maxwell-1976]

The resort of the Twenties

Evidence: single-source.

The hotel was built in the early Twenties on the east side of Lake Lillian, which was also called Highlands Lake, by the Highlands Lakes Development Company, for which Cliff and Lewis Eisley were the salesmen with Bennett Associates. It was three stories high. The company built with it a floating pavilion in the middle of the lake, lighted at night, an eighteen-hole golf course on the west shore, and a casino with a fountain before it, built mostly out over the water, where a live orchestra played and hotel guests and people from the country round danced every night. Among the guests who signed its register in the Twenties, the book records, was the novelist Sinclair Lewis.[maxwell-1976]

Lake Lillian Club, Highland Lakes

Lake Lillian Club, Highland Lakes, Avon Park, Fla. The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), page 163. Avon Park Historical Society.[maxwell-1976]

“Hardly had the Highlands Lakes Hotel started to prosper when the 1929 crash struck. People no longer came and this plush hotel was forced to close.” For some years it opened only for particular local occasions; the last that residents remembered was the high school’s junior-senior banquet of 1940.[maxwell-1976]

The health resort of 1936

Evidence: corroborated.

In 1936 Helen G. Randall, “a self-proclaimed ‘Doctor,’” was said to have bought the hotel and opened a “Sun & Diet Health Resort” in it, backed by the Chamber of Commerce and many of the town’s business men, on a plan to make Avon Park “the ideal health resort of the nation.” Her plans ended suddenly and “she was proven to be a phony.”[maxwell-1976] The resort was advertised from “AVON PARK, FLA.” in a Washington newspaper on 20 December 1936,[star-1936-12-20] twelve days after a Massachusetts court had held its proprietor, Mrs. Helen Gertrude Randle, for the grand jury on a charge of practicing medicine without a license; she had run a sun and diet health resort at Hendersonville, North Carolina, the previous summer, and gave Avon Park as one of her four mailing addresses.[tn-1936-12-09] In February 1937, described as “of Avon Park, Fla.,” she was suing a Massachusetts manufacturer over a promised health resort on his estate.[tn-1937-02-19] The full account is in the finding on the affair.

Barracks and hospital

Evidence: corroborated.

In the Second World War the hotel became the headquarters and cadet quarters of the Lodwick Aviation Military Academy, the civilian flying school that trained army pilots at the municipal airport, and the government put up a second, two-story building beside it for the men.[maxwell-1976][levey-2016]

The hotel and the barracks stood empty after the war until 1946, when Stephen Colquitt Pardee, a local attorney, brought interested citizens together with representatives of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to discuss establishing a community hospital.[maxwell-1976][levey-2016] In June 1947, the federal War Assets Administration transferred the surplus property to the Florida Sanatorium and Benevolent Association at a 100 percent discount, on condition that the community raise $150,000 by October 1947 for remodeling and modern equipment.[levey-2016][adventhealth-75] Citrus leader Charles H. Walker headed the Ridge Area Hospital Association campaign; when pledges left $50,000 still needed, Walker personally secured the balance to meet the federal deadline.[maxwell-1976][levey-2016] Walker died suddenly of a heart attack in October 1947, and the facility was dedicated on January 6, 1948 as the Walker Memorial Sanitarium and Hospital in his honor, with United States Senator Claude Pepper delivering the principal address.[fenton-1958][levey-2016][adventhealth-75]

The hospital admitted its first patients on January 7, 1948, under medical director Dr. C. J. Larsen.[maxwell-1976] The adjacent 1920s casino served the Seventh-day Adventists as their church for thirty years until replaced by a new church building in 1979, and the Church founded the nearby Highlands Lakes Junior Academy (later Walker Memorial Academy).[maxwell-1976] In 1973, a new two-story modern hospital wing was dedicated, expanding capacity.[maxwell-1976] In 1997, Walker Memorial Hospital relocated to a new regional campus in Sebring (later renamed AdventHealth Sebring).[levey-2016][adventhealth-75] The vacant 1920s hotel building on Lake Lillian, damaged during the 2004–2005 hurricanes, was demolished in 2007.[levey-2016] The complete history of the conversion is in the finding on the hospital’s founding.

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 (Held at the Avon Park Historical Society Depot Museum, Avon Park, Florida) (1976) · book
  2. Horace J. Fenton, History of Avon Park, Florida: 1886–1956 (Held at the Avon Park Historical Society Depot Museum, Avon Park, Florida) (1958) · book
  3. Elaine Levey, The man who delivered Avon Park its own hospital (2016) · newspaper
  4. Highlands News-Sun, AdventHealth Sebring celebrates 75 years (2023) · newspaper
  5. Evening Star, Sun and Diet Health Resort advertisement, Resorts column, Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 20 December 1936, page 29 (1936) · newspaper
  6. The Times-News, Mrs. Randle's Case Goes to Grand Jurors, The Times-News (Hendersonville, N.C.), 9 December 1936, page 3 (1936) · newspaper
  7. United Press, in The Times-News, Mrs. Randle Asks Damages, The Times-News (Hendersonville, N.C.), 19 February 1937, page 1 (1937) · newspaper

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