The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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William and Mary King

If Avon Park has a first family, this is it. The town’s founder named William King as the first real settler, and the Pabor Lake Pineapple called him “the first settler of Avon Park” in his lifetime, in print, four miles from his own grove.[findagrave-crosby][pineapple]

Who they were
William A. King Born ca. 1856–1857 (or July 1853), Birmingham, England; died 11 February 1929, Avon Park
Mary Ann (Chinn) King Born April 1858, Solihull, Warwickshire, England; died 25 August 1938, Avon Park
Married 10 April 1881, Warwickshire, England
Buried Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park — the same cemetery as Crosby

Source: their Find a Grave memorials.[findagrave-king] The Historical Society’s own account of the Verona Hotel describes King as English, hired by Crosby around 1885 to run the town’s development.[aphs-verona] Crosby said he met King “on a trip from England.”[findagrave-crosby]

They are, so far, the only English settlers of early Avon Park who can be named with an English place of origin. That matters: the “English colony” of local tradition dissolves under examination, but the Kings are real, and they were English.

What William King did here

He grew fruit, and he experimented. The Pineapple of August 1893 mentions limes from his grove being used to make lemonade at the Founder’s Day picnic — the passage that names him first settler.[pineapple] In January 1893 it printed his own signed essay, “Pineapple Culture,” delivered before the Avon Park Township Horticultural Association, in which he describes planting “the first slips in Avon Park” as an experiment.[pineapple] That essay is the earliest first-person writing by an Avon Park settler yet found.

He went on to four decades of elective and appointive public life across municipal and county government:

  • Councilman of Avon Park, 1897–1899. Following the Great Freezes of 1894–1895, town electors organized Avon Park’s first municipal incorporation under Florida general law in January 1897, electing William King to the five-man town council alongside Mayor Clark D. Knapp and councilmen B. F. West, L. W. Mix, H. B. Todd, and J. T. Hendricks.[savannah-1897-01-15] He served until 1 March 1899, when town voters approved a referendum to dissolve the municipal corporation.[savannah-1899-03-09]
  • Alderman of Avon Park, 1913. When the Florida Legislature chartered the Town of Avon Park under Chapter 6662, approved 23 May 1913, Section 47 named “Wm. King” as an inaugural alderman alongside W. O. Skipper, G. F. Kellogg, W. H. Daugherty, and H. E. Godwin under Mayor Herbert Seaverns.[lof-1913-6662]
  • Mayor of Avon Park (First Term), 1919–1922. Elected mayor on 13 December 1919, King led the town through its post-World War I industrial development, including the establishment of the Flint Lumber Company, Mutual Crate Company, and Avon Manufacturing Company mills.[maxwell-1976] He served until succeeded by Mayor D. A. Sapp on 6 February 1922.[maxwell-1976]
  • Inaugural Highlands County Commissioner and Board Chairman, 1921–1925. Upon the creation of Highlands County from DeSoto County under Chapter 8513 in April 1921, Governor Cary A. Hardee commissioned King as the inaugural commissioner for District 1 (Avon Park) on 23 April 1921.[fl-secstate-1921-1922] When the board held its first organizing meeting on 9 May 1921, the commissioners elected King Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners.[wpa-hrs-highlands] Following the November 1922 general election, King was re-elected and re-commissioned on 8 December 1922, serving until 6 January 1925 when William A. Marshall succeeded him.[fl-secstate-1921-1922][fl-secstate-1923-1924] (The family tradition that King served as a “DeSoto County commissioner” is disproved by the official Secretary of State rosters from 1887 to 1920, which contain no record of King holding county office in DeSoto County; his county service was exclusively on the Highlands County board.)[sos-reports-1887-1920]
  • Mayor of Avon Park (Second Term), 1925–1929. King was elected to a second mayoral tenure on 2 December 1925, presiding during the peak of the Florida Land Boom, the 1926 hurricane reconstruction, and the 1927 legislative enactment of Chapter 12514 expanding Avon Park into a thirty-six-square-mile city.[maxwell-1976] He served until 11 February 1929, when he was fatally injured in an automobile-train collision at the Main Street crossing.[maxwell-1976]

Death

Mayor William King was killed on Monday, 11 February 1929, when a northbound Seaboard Air Line Railroad train struck his automobile at the Main Street crossing in Avon Park.[arcadian-1929] The collision instantly killed his passenger, thirty-five-year-old Avon Park City Comptroller Chester Arthur (C. A.) Crews (formerly of Arcadia), while King, aged 72, survived for nearly two hours.[arcadian-1929][sebring-correspondence-1929] Sebring local correspondent C. Wolf recorded in his diary that King’s funeral was held on Wednesday, 13 February 1929, and that the Highlands County courthouse closed during the services in honor of his inaugural tenure on the county commission.[sebring-correspondence-1929] A detailed account of the accident was published in the Arcadia weekly newspaper, The Arcadian, on Thursday, 14 February 1929.[arcadian-1929]

See Finding: William King’s Elective and Appointive Public Offices (1897–1929).

King in his own words

Everything else known about William King comes through somebody else’s writing. One document does not. The Florida Agriculturist of 11 January 1893 prints, in full, a paper “read before a recent meeting of the Avon Park Township Horticultural Association by Mr. Wm. King, and published in a recent number of The Pineapple.”[fa-1893-01-11]

It begins:

At the last meeting of this society I was requested to make a report on the pineapple and pineapple culture. Five years ago last August I planted the first slips in Avon Park, just as an experiment, not knowing anything about their culture or whether they would be a success here.[fa-1893-01-11]

That dates the first pineapple planting at Avon Park to August 1887, about a year after the founding party arrived, and it puts King at the front of the town’s first commercial crop. The rest of the paper is a patient, unromantic account of five years’ trial and error — spacing, fertilizer, whether to strip the bottom leaves, which varieties would ship — written by a man who had reaped four crops and was giving the results away to his neighbors. His largest pineapple weighed eight and three-quarter pounds.

It is the only substantial first-person writing by a founding Avon Park settler yet located. See Finding: William King planted Avon Park’s first pineapples in August 1887.

The well works

The 1895 state business directory gives William King a trade. Among the thirty-four Avon Park businesses it lists “King Wm, well works,” and separately the partnership “Nevans & King, drays and express wagons.”[gaz-1895]

This is the first documentary account of how the Kings made a living beyond the grove, and it is a practical one. Avon Park sits on the sand of the Lake Wales Ridge, where surface water is scarce and every household, grove and hotel needed a driven well; the town’s own municipal well, sunk in March 1915, went down four hundred feet. A well works in 1895 was the business that made settlement physically possible, and the man running it was the town’s first settler.

Whether the King of Nevans & King is William, a son, or an unrelated namesake is not established. A dray and express business in a town with no railway carried everything that came in from Fort Meade, twenty miles away.

The Episcopal church, and a deed

The Kings were founding members of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, built at 20 East Pleasant Street in 1894, and “obtained the deed for the land for $1.”[newssun-churches]

Two things follow. First, an Episcopal congregation — the American branch of the Church of England — raised in a Florida citrus settlement in 1894 by an English couple is the most concrete evidence yet that the “English settlers” tradition has something real behind it, whatever becomes of the claim that there was an organized English colony. Second, this represents the earliest documented deed associated with the King family in the regional land records.

The same article says the town was renamed in honor of “Mr. and Mrs. William A. King of Stratford-upon-Avon, England.” It differs from the Find a Grave account, which puts her home at Solihull in Warwickshire rather than Stratford itself.

How he died

In 1929 a northbound Seaboard Air Line train struck the car he was driving at the Main Street railroad crossing in Avon Park. His passenger, C. A. Crews, was also killed. King died about two hours after the collision.[findagrave-king] A contemporary 1929 diary and local correspondence account, written two days after the crash, explicitly records his age at death as 72, which points to a birth year of 1856 or 1857, contradicting the July 1853 date on Find a Grave.[sebring-correspondence-1929] The contemporary primary account of his age is likely more reliable.

There is a bleak symmetry in it. The man who settled the town before any railroad reached it was killed by a train on its main street.

Mary King and the name

Three modern accounts, none of them citing a source, credit Mary Ann King with the name.

  • The Avon Park Historical Society’s own article on the Verona Hotel: after “Mr. King’s wife, Mary joined her husband in Lake Forest … the name of the town was changed to Avon Park to reflect the King’s England home of Strattford-on-Avon.”[aphs-verona]
  • A biography on her Find a Grave memorial, which credits her with suggesting “Avon Park” in place of Crosby’s “Lake Forest” because the landscape reminded her of her home country near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire.[findagrave-king]
  • The Highlands News-Sun’s article on the town’s old churches, which says the town was renamed in honor of “Mr. and Mrs. William A. King of Stratford-upon-Avon, England.”[newssun-churches]

This represents the focal point of the naming inquiry, identifying the “unnamed Englishwoman” of regional lore as Mary King. The connection aligns geographically: Mary Chinn was native to Warwickshire, where Stratford-upon-Avon is situated, and her husband was the settlement’s acknowledged first resident.

While preserved through community and institutional tradition across multiple independent accounts, contemporaneous documentary confirmation from the founding decade remains the subject of ongoing historical investigation.

Estate and Lineage

William and Mary Ann King had no children. Following Mary Ann King’s death on 25 August 1938, her estate was administered by Avon Park attorney Miss Mattie Tompkins.[maxwell-1976] Probate confirmed that Mrs. King left no surviving children or direct descendants; her sole living relative and heir was a niece, Mrs. Charles (Bertha) Nichols of Longwood, Florida.[maxwell-1976]

The founding King family was entirely unrelated to the later Avon Park hotelier and Realtor Robert King Jr. (1919–2013), whose family arrived in Avon Park in 1946 from South Carolina to operate the Hotel Jacaranda.[maxwell-1976] See Finding: The Two King Families of Avon Park: William King and Robert King Jr..

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. William King, via The Florida Agriculturist (DeLand, Fla.), The Florida Agriculturist, 11 January 1893, page 6: Pineapple Culture in DeSoto County, by Wm. King (1893)
  2. Belden Publishing Company, Florida Railroad Gazetteer and State Business Directory, 1895, s.v. Avon Park (1895)
  3. Find a Grave, William A. King and Mary Ann (Chinn) King memorials, Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park, with transcribed newspaper material (2026)
  4. W. E. Pabor and E. A. Pabor, Pabor Lake Pineapple, October 1892 to September 1897 (1897)
  5. Find a Grave, Oliver Marvin Crosby memorial, with transcribed Tampa Tribune articles 1923-1932 (2026)
  6. Avon Park Historical Society, The Verona Hotel: The early years of Avon Park (2026)
  7. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 6662 (No. 242), Laws of Florida 1913, Special Laws, section 47 (1913)
  8. Robert Miller, Highlands News-Sun, 29 January 2023, 100-year-old churches in Avon Park (2023)
  9. Works Progress Administration, Historical Records Survey (Florida County Histories, Series S 1284, Box 2, State Library and Archives of Florida), Historical Sketch of Highlands County / A Brief Sketch of the Creation and History of Highlands County (1939)
  10. 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
  11. State of Florida, Office of the Secretary of State, Report of the Secretary of State of the State of Florida for the Period Beginning January 1, 1921, and Ending December 31, 1922, pages 109, 324–325 (1923) · official
  12. State of Florida, Office of the Secretary of State, Report of the Secretary of State of the State of Florida for the Period Beginning January 1, 1923, and Ending December 31, 1924, pages 106–107, 386 (1925) · official
  13. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News, Savannah, Georgia, 15 January 1897, page 6, Florida column: the incorporation of Avon Park and the election of its officers (1897) · newspaper
  14. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News, Savannah, Georgia, 9 March 1899, page 6: the election at Avon Park on whether the municipal government should continue (1899) · newspaper
  15. Secretary of State of the State of Florida, Report of the Secretary of State of the State of Florida, biennial rosters of county officers, 1887–1920 (1921) · official
  16. C. Wolf, Sebring Local Correspondence / Diary Entry (First National Bank - Sebring, FL) (1929) · newspaper
  17. The Arcadian (Arcadia, Fla.), The Arcadian: C.A. Crews is Wreck Victim / Killed When Train Hits Car at Avon Park (1929) · newspaper

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