The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
Menu
Admin Sign-In

Lake Wales Ridge

What it is

A sand ridge running north to south through Polk and Highlands counties, roughly 110 to 115 miles long and four to fifteen miles wide, with a crest around three hundred feet above sea level. Avon Park sits on it. It formed from beach and dune systems built when higher Pleistocene seas covered the rest of the peninsula and left the ridge standing as a chain of islands, and it has remained above water for hundreds of thousands of years — one of the oldest and most stable exposed landforms in the southeastern United States.[fwc-ridge-history][fsp-ancient-dunes]

Why it matters to Avon Park’s history

Everything about the town’s early history follows from the ridge. Dry, well-drained sand in a region of seasonally flooded flatwoods and marsh is what made year-round occupation possible, first for Indigenous people over thousands of years and later for settlers. The ridge sits on the divide between the Kissimmee drainage to the east and the Peace to the west, which made it a corridor as well as a refuge. Its lakes and seep springs supplied water. Later, the same well-drained sand and the frost protection given by the lakes made it citrus country, and the elevation made it a selling point in land promotion.

Ecology

The ridge’s long isolation as an island chain produced the Florida scrub, now recognized as one of the oldest and most endangered natural communities in North America, with the highest concentration of endemic species in the continental United States. Thirteen of the twenty-seven rare scrub plants of the ridge are found nowhere else on earth.[fsp-ancient-dunes] Most of that habitat has been cleared for citrus and development, which is why so much of what remains is now in conservation ownership.

Lake Tulane and the deep record

Lake Tulane, inside Avon Park, sits in a sinkhole formed by dissolution of the limestone beneath the ridge. A sediment core taken from its bottom preserves roughly fifty to sixty thousand years of Florida vegetation and climate. The record shows the landscape swinging repeatedly between pine-dominated wetter phases and oak, ragweed and rosemary-scrub drier phases, in step with cold events in the North Atlantic.[grimm-tulane][wiki-lake-tulane]

For local history this matters in a concrete way: the lakes of Avon Park are tens of thousands of years older than any human presence in Florida, and the vegetation the first people found here was not the scrub of today.

A widely repeated claim that Lake Verona is “33,000 years old” and the deepest natural lake in peninsular Florida could not be traced to any cited study and should not be repeated until it can.

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. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Lake Wales Ridge: History (2026)
  2. Florida State Parks, Florida's Ancient Sand Dunes on the Lake Wales Ridge (2026)
  3. E. C. Grimm and others, A 50,000-Year Record of Climate Oscillations from Florida and Its Temporal Correlation with the Heinrich Events (Science 261) (1993)
  4. Wikipedia, Lake Tulane (2026)

Something here wrong, or incomplete? The Society would rather know. Tell a volunteer.

Have a question about this record?

← Back to collection

Ask A.P.

Ask the archive

    Try asking:

    0 / 500

    A.P. answers only from the Society's own archive and cites what it used. Questions are not linked to you; search history is stored on your device only (how it works).Ask a volunteer for anything it cannot answer.