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.

Nalaka turpentine camp

The turpentine industry around Avon Park has long been known only by the presence of stills in the pine country, with none of them named. Nalaka is the first that can be described in detail.

What it was

Nalaka was a turpentine camp of the Consolidated Naval Stores Company of Jacksonville — the 1902 combination of seven naval-stores firms that came to hold about a million and a half acres of pine and cypress in south-central Florida, later the Consolidated-Tomoka Land Company — on Kissimmee Island, the tract enclosed by the Kissimmee River and Lakes Kissimmee, Arbuckle and Istokpoga, in the Polk County part of what is now the Avon Park Air Force Range. It was reached by a spur of the Atlantic Coast Line.[zeil-2013]

It was one of eighteen turpentine locations Consolidated ran by the 1910s, and the only one of the eighteen any source yet found names.[zeil-2013]

Dates

The best-grounded account, a University of Central Florida master’s thesis built on Consolidated’s own corporate history of 1972, the 1920 federal census and an archaeological survey of the site, puts Nalaka’s founding at 1919 and its abandonment at 1928, when the pine had been tapped out.[zeil-2013] The range’s own cultural resources staff and the Highlands News-Sun give 1918 to 1930.[newssun-nalaka-2025][cemml-nalaka] The disagreement is a year or two at each end and is not resolved.

The people

Consolidated’s own figure was about 250 people at the camp’s height. The 1920 federal census, read from the schedule images, enumerates 213 residents — 26 white and 187 Black or “mulatto” — in at least fifty-three dwellings.[zeil-2013] The enumerator walked the camp from north to south and wrote down the seven white households first, then all the Black ones: the camp was laid out by race, and the surviving scatter of artefacts on the ground follows the same line.[zeil-2013]

The camp had its own still and cooperage about a mile from the houses, a commissary that paid in scrip and kept the workforce in debt, and — on the word of long-time Kissimmee Island residents rather than any document — its own school and church.[zeil-2013] The archaeologists’ name for their study, Which Way to the Jook Joint?, comes from the camp’s own social life.

After

When the trees gave out, the workers went elsewhere. The range’s cultural resources manager, Kathy Couturier, and her assistant, Ellie Azulay, told the newspaper in 2025 that Nalaka’s people may have moved on to Hicoria, the Sherman Lumber Company’s boom town south of Lake Placid that grew from fifty to five hundred and fifty people in 1928-29 on timber rights bought from Consolidated; to Florinda, near Frostproof; or to Sumica, east of Crooked Lake — but that they had “hit snags in the historic records on who went where and when.”[newssun-nalaka-2025][cemml-nalaka]

The site is recorded in the Digital Archaeological Record as the Nalaka Turpentine Camp.[tdar-nalaka] It is one of thirty-seven archaeological sites first identified across the range by a preliminary assessment, in a class that includes turpentine camps and mills alongside Seminole War forts and homesteads.[zeil-2013]

What it means for Avon Park

Nalaka was not in the town, and its people did not vote in it. But it was in Avon Park’s country, on land the town’s founders sold as pine forest and the Army took in 1942, and it is the clearest evidence yet of the kind of place the Black families who came to Avon Park’s Mill Quarters and Fairfield Avenue in the 1920s came from. A camp of two hundred, run on scrip, laid out by color, with its own church and school, abandoned when the trees were bled dry — that is the naval-stores South, and it was ten miles from the Mall.

Hagan’s still is a different place. The turpentine still near Avon Park whose closed camp school sent Black children to St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church after 1916 must have stood close to the town and closed around that date; Nalaka began in 1918 or 1919 out on Kissimmee Island. Nothing found connects them, and no source yet locates Hagan’s.

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. Deborah Zeil, Which Way to the Jook Joint? Historical Archaeology of a Polk County, Florida Turpentine Camp (M.A. thesis, University of Central Florida, 2013) (2013)
  2. P. Attinger, Highlands News-Sun, Archeologists seek anecdotes about Nalaka (2025)
  3. Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands, Colorado State University, History in her hands: CEMML intern's interests piqued at Avon Park Air Force Range (2025)
  4. The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR), Nalaka Turpentine Camp — site name browse (2026)

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