The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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This is a draft. It is published so it can be read and corrected, not because it is finished.

Nathaniel S. C. Perkins

A notary, land agent, and civic promoter in early Avon Park who held corporate office in the two companies that developed the town and who raised the funds that built Avon Park’s second school. Born in Massachusetts in 1823, he was a machinist and sewing machine manufacturer in Ohio before moving to Florida, where he served as Superintendent of Schools for Volusia County in 1888 before arriving in Avon Park by 1893.

At Avon Park

Perkins was at Avon Park by the summer of 1893 at the latest. On 5 July 1893, The Florida Agriculturist published a letter under the heading “DeSoto County Pines”:

“Mr. N. S. C. Perkins, of Avon Park, writes under a recent date: We forward this morning to Mr. Crosby at Chicago, Niagara grapes and pineapples which will be object lessons in the possibilities of Florida, and a credit to DeSoto County. The pineapples grown without protection will bear elegant testimony that Avon Park the last winter was free from harmful frosts.”[fa-1893-07-05]

“Mr. Crosby at Chicago” in July 1893 was Oliver M. Crosby at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Perkins packed and shipped fresh Avon Park fruit — George Edmiston’s Niagara grapes and field- grown pineapples — to the Fair as evidence of the ridge’s frost-free microclimate (see Finding: Avon Park at the 1893 World’s Fair).[fa-1893-07-05]

Vice President of the Avon Park Town Company

On 15 August 1893, at the first-anniversary celebration of the founding of the Pabor Lake Colony, the Pabor Lake Pineapple reported:

“Hon. N. S. C. Perkins was invited to say a few words in behalf of the Avon Park Town Company of which he is Vice President.”[pineapple-1893-08-15]

In his remarks, according to the same report, Perkins alluded to the land’s prior Seminole and Indigenous presence and its subsequent use for open-range cattle grazing before colonization.[pineapple-1893-08-15]

The “Avon Park Town Company” is attested only in the Pabor Lake Pineapple: here at the Founder’s Day celebration in August 1893 and again in March 1897, when the paper states that the Avon Park Idea newspaper “was established by the Avon Park Town Co., to boom the town.” No independent incorporation record for this company has been found (see Finding: The Florida Improvement Co. Is the Florida Development Company).

Vice President and Treasurer of the Florida Development Company

At the Florida Development Company’s annual stockholders’ meeting in October 1894, the Savannah Morning News reported the officers elected:

“The officers elected by the company are: O. M. Crosby president, N. S. C. Perkins vice president and treasurer, R. D. Hall secretary, O. B. Thatcher superintendent.”[smn-1894-10-16]

This establishes that by October 1894, Perkins held the second-highest corporate position in Crosby’s Florida Development Company, the principal land and development enterprise at Avon Park, which had been incorporated on 23 October 1891 with $250,000 capital.[smn-1894-10-16]

Whether the “Avon Park Town Company” of August 1893 and the Florida Development Company of October 1894 were the same entity under different informal names, or genuinely separate concerns, has now been resolved. A search of Florida’s incorporation ledgers and Supreme Court title litigation (Smith v. Wilson, 71 Fla. 624; The Fla. Dev. Co. v. The Polk Cnty. Nat’l Bank, 76 Fla. 629) confirms that the “Avon Park Town Company” was never a separate legal corporation. It was a colloquial name used by the Pineapple and others for the Florida Development Company (see Finding: Avon Park Town Company Was an Informal Name for the Florida Development Company). Therefore, Perkins’s position as Vice President of the “Avon Park Town Company” in August 1893 was an informal reference to his role in Crosby’s Florida Development Company, which was formalized in October 1894 when he was officially named its Vice President and Treasurer.

The school subscription

According to Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell’s The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), when the community decided in 1892 to relocate its school from the original “Little Blue School House” near Lake Tulane to a site nearer the Hotel Verona commercial district, “N.S.C. Perkins was instrumental in contacting the non-residents and securing much of the needed funds for the school building which was erected at the corner of South Forest Avenue and West Walnut Street.” The building opened on 8 January 1894 (see Finding: Avon Park School House Burned, 1895).[maxwell-1976]

In the 1895 directory

The Florida Railroad Gazetteer and State Business Directory of 1895 lists “Perkins U S C, notary” at Avon Park.[gaz-1895] The initials “U S C” are a garble of “N S C” — the compositor misread the handwritten “N” as “U.” No other Perkins with those initials appears anywhere in the directory or in any Florida source of the period.

Pre-Florida biography

Nathaniel S. C. Perkins was born in 1823 in South Braintree, Massachusetts. As a young man, he moved to Norwalk, Ohio, where he worked as a machinist and operated the Eagle Iron Works. In 1864, Perkins partnered with William A. Mack to found the Domestic Sewing Machine Company in Norwalk.[firelands-1896][fiddlebase-domestic]

Volusia County and St. Petersburg

Before arriving in Avon Park in 1893, Perkins served in Volusia County, Florida, where he is listed as the Superintendent of Schools in 1888, corroborating mentions of him as an education officer in DeLand in the early 1890s.[langlotz-2000]

Following the 1895 freeze in Avon Park, Perkins relocated to the Gulf coast. He died on 28 April 1896 at his home in St. Petersburg, Florida.[firelands-1896]

What is not established

A “Sidney Perkins” appears in Maxwell’s list of names that continued in the early Avon Park newspapers after the 1895 freeze; whether Sidney was related to Nathaniel is unknown.[maxwell-1976]

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, Pabor Lake Pineapple, 15 August 1893, pages 1 and 4: Founder's Day celebration (1893) · newspaper
  2. N. S. C. Perkins, in The Florida Agriculturist (DeLand, Fla.), The Florida Agriculturist, 5 July 1893, page 4: DeSoto County Pines (1893) · newspaper
  3. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), 16 October 1894, page 6: Florida Development Company annual meeting (1894) · newspaper
  4. Belden Publishing Company, Florida Railroad Gazetteer and State Business Directory, 1895, s.v. Avon Park (1895)
  5. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (Avon Park Historical Society Archives) (1976) · book
  6. Firelands Historical Society, The Firelands Pioneer, Obituary Section, Volume IX, 1896 (1896) · book
  7. Patricia Langlotz, The Odyssey of an American School System: Volusia County Schools, 1854 to 2000 (2000) · book
  8. Kelsew / Fiddlebase Archive, Domestic Sewing Machine Company (2026) · secondary

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