The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886The Archive
Comprehensive historical reports compiled from hundreds of primary sources, church registers, deeds, census schedules, and oral histories. Each report states its evidence grade and verification status.
Two training operations ran side by side at Avon Park in the war — Albert Lodwick's civilian primary school in town and the Army's own bomber base on the range to the east — and between them they killed at least twenty-four airmen in crashes, trained thousands more, and displaced a hundred-year-old settlement whose graves are still out on the range.
Working research behind the Baseball Museum pages: spring training 1927-1929, Babe Ruth's 1928 visit, local major leaguers, ballparks, the Black Tigers, and claims to avoid.
Between 1920 and 1922, the Florida Secretary of State issued corporate charters to five Avon Park companies covering citrus, real estate, publishing, and cattle.
Comprehensive history of the Avon Park High School Red Devils baseball program, its eight FHSAA state championships (1948–1987), four coaching eras, and professional alumni.
The Federal Writers' Project's numbered walking tour of the town, thirty landmarks in the order a visitor would meet them, and what has become of each since.
What a complete reading of the digitized De Soto County News shows of the town in two windows - a village with a post office store and a sixty-book school library in 1905, and an incorporated town with a council, an electric light station and a high school in 1915.
A hundred and forty-six pages of a DeLand farm weekly, worked through for the first time, produce the founder's settler count, the town's lost newspapers quoted at length, a canning factory, four pineries, an opened burial mound, and the only first-hand account of the freezes yet found.
An overview of major league baseball players born or schooled in Avon Park, Florida, as well as collegiate and professional alumni from local programs.
How newspapers in New York, Connecticut, Georgia, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and across the United States recorded the promotion, banking, wooden railroad, freeze collapse, and post-freeze recovery of Avon Park during its first fifteen years.
What can be learned about Avon Park between the First World War and the Second from newspapers published everywhere except Highlands County — bankers, a station agent charged with murder, the 1926 hurricane relief trains, the Cardinals, the packing houses of 1930, the county's finances in 1932, and proof that the Avon Park Times existed.
What the Florida gazetteers record of Avon Park across thirty years - a town of 500 with a bank and a newspaper in 1895, 300 and no railway in 1911, and 1,200 with two banks by 1925.
The commercial ecosystem of Avon Park during the post-railway expansion of 1915, documenting building suppliers, hardware and undertaking establishments, dry goods merchants, barbers, and banking operations.
The history of journalism and newspaper publishing in Avon Park from 1888 to the late twentieth century, encompassing promotional organs, pioneer weeklies, regional correspondence networks, and commercial successors.
Documented refutations of unverified or false historical claims regarding Avon Park baseball.
Constructed in 1926–1927 as Cardinal Field, this municipal ballpark served as spring training headquarters for the St. Louis Cardinals and six minor league clubs, and remains the home field of the Avon Park Red Devils.
Present condition, municipal ownership, high school use, and the 2026 purchase inquiry for Avon Park's historic ballpark.
What Avon Park's economy was built on between the arrival of the railway in 1912 and the end of the land boom - packing houses, crate mills, a sawmill, a citrus nursery, and a county that still ran eighteen thousand head of cattle.
A centralized list of inquiries to be presented to the Avon Park Depot Museum research desk, including requests for access to physical archives, out-of-print reference books, and exhibit source materials.
The leadership of Mayor E.A. Delaney Sr., the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s, citrus expansion, and modern municipal development in Avon Park.
The founding and development of Avon Park's earliest congregations, including Union Evangelical, First Baptist, First United Methodist, and Church of the Redeemer.
The development of sawmills, crate mills, the post office, telephone lines, municipal electric power, banking, and public works in early Avon Park.
The earliest homesteaders and pioneer families of Avon Park, including Mary and A.B. Dewey, William A. and Mrs. King, the Dilley family, Cora Gray Wray, and the Shockleys.
The evolution of Avon Park schools from A.B. Dewey's first log-cabin class to the 1913 brick school, the 1927 High School, E.O. Douglas School, and modern school facilities.
What fire and weather did to Avon Park's buildings, from the school house burned in 1895 and the hotel that went up in flames in February 1927 to the hurricanes of 1894, 1926, 1928 and 1960, with the fire company that grew from a hand cart under the bandstand into a town department, and the landmarks the town later pulled down itself.
A synthesis of the founding families of Avon Park and the Pabor Lake Colony, including the Crosbys, Kings, Pabors, and Davidsons, and their descendants' impact on the region's development.
From its creation in 1921 until federal court reapportionment in 1967, Highlands County held a single dedicated seat in the Florida House of Representatives and shared District 27 in the Florida Senate, with Avon Park citizens repeatedly holding legislative leadership.
Avon Park as a winter resort from the Verona's opening in 1889 to the Winter Guest Club of the 1970s - the three hotels of 1920, the boom hotels of the Twenties, the tent city, the cabins and the trailers, the health-resort promoter exposed in 1936, and the shuffleboard courts the WPA built in Donaldson Park in 1938.
What is and is not known about the people who lived on the Lake Wales Ridge and in Highlands County before Europeans arrived, why the ridge drew them, and why the local record is nearly silent about them.
Research report establishing that Burleigh's steam engine was a twelve-ton Lima Shay locomotive hauled twenty-three miles overland on relaid wooden rails in December 1894, and tracing what became of it.
How the Pleistocene dune ridge, twenty karst solution lakes, and cold-air drainage created the physical site of Avon Park and made it the geographic anchor of Florida's citrus industry.
The town marshal of 1913 and the mayor's court, the whiskey-still murder of March 1920 and the county sheriff's manhunt, the jail of 1923 and the fire-and-police building of 1928, the chiefs of police from 1919 to 1938, a Prohibition conviction of 1929, the county sheriffs and jails since 1921, the first Black officers of 1955, and the end of the Avon Park Police Department, whose work the sheriff has done since an agreement of 2021.
How Avon Park got its electricity, ice, water and sewers, from William King's windmills and the light plant L. O. Feagin ran as the ice manufacturer of 1918, through the Florida Ice and Power Company's 1920 waterworks and the boom's $210,000 sewer bonds, to the generating plant the Florida Public Service Company opened on Lake Lotela on 31 January 1928, which Florida Power Corporation enlarged in 1952 and 1968 and Duke Energy retired in October 2020.
The distinctive mile-long Mall through downtown Avon Park, featuring its 40-foot central parkway, flowering trees, historic bandstand, and business district.
The seventeen buildings of the Avon Park Historic District and what became of them, from the first brick building of 1912 that was always a bank to the Art Deco theater of 1935 that is now a church, with the county's own year-built record set against the National Register's dates, the shops that came and went in each block, the Wild Building pulled down in 2021, and the City Hall of 1929 at the head of the Mall.
Synthesizes the residential architectural history of Avon Park from pioneer frame homesteads to boom-era Mediterranean Revival and Classical estates, documenting master builders C. W. Pabor and William J. Heim, and the landmark residences of the King, Wolff, Lanier, Donaldson, Davidson, and Todd families.
Oliver Marvin Crosby's exploration of South Florida in 1885, his purchase of 20,000 acres from the Disston Company, and the initial layout and promotion of Avon Park.
Comprehensive historical roster of families and residents who settled in Avon Park before, during, and after the 1920s, compiled by Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell.
Three institutions held or were readied for people around Avon Park in the middle of the century — the county road camp on Lake Bonnet, a federal emergency detention camp under the 1950 McCarran Act that became the state prison in 1957, and the state alcoholism center south of town — and this report details their history, sites, and governance.
A comprehensive architectural and institutional history of Avon Park's civic core, documenting City Hall, the 1928 Fire and Police Station, the historical post office buildings, the Public Library on Lake Verona, the Bandstand, and Highlands County administrative satellite facilities.
What is documented about Seminole presence in the Kissimmee and Peace river country, the forts and forced removals of 1837-1858, and the continuing Seminole nation whose nearest reservation lies just south of the county line.
A comprehensive history of Black Avon Park across eight decades, tracing neighborhood settlement, crate mills and turpentine camps, nine WPA-documented churches, Hopewell School and its 1968 desegregation, local businesses, and civil rights struggles from the 1951 voting case to municipal leadership.
In September 1951 Avon Park opened a separate polling place for its Black voters, counted their ballots, certified the result, and then ten days later voted to declare every one of those ballots void; this is the fullest account the record now allows, from the court file, the press, and the census.
A federal survey sent workers round Avon Park in 1938 to write down every congregation in the town; nine of the cards are for Black churches, and between them they give the streets, the buildings, the ministers, the record books and the names of dozens of Black townspeople this project had no other way of knowing.
The three burial grounds of Avon Park - Bougainvillea Cemetery, the ten acres Oliver Crosby laid out and gave the town, where a three-month-old child was buried in 1888; the Lakeside Historical Cemetery on Cummings Avenue, the Black community's burial ground since at least 1928 and still in use; and Lakeview Memorial Gardens, opened in 1969 - with the undertakers who served them and the Sebring cemeteries that are sometimes mistaken for Avon Park's.
Nine congregations founded between 1890 and 1920, including two Black churches that predate the town's first Black school, a church school held at a turpentine still, and a building blown down by the 1926 hurricane.
The municipal campaign, 1965 establishment under Florida's community college master plan, 1966 opening in downtown Avon Park storefronts, and permanent campus development.
A township bought from Hamilton Disston, a plat called Lake Forest, a hotel called Crosby's folly, an English first settler, and a freeze that destroyed all of it in two winters.
Tom "Flash" Gordon and his sons Dee Strange-Gordon and Nick Gordon each reached the major leagues, two schooled in Avon Park and one born there.
The devastating back-to-back freezes of December 1894 and February 1895, the financial collapse of the Florida Development Company, and the resilience of the families who stayed.
Forty-one subdivisions in four and a half years, a whole township annexed, $355,000 of bonds voted in one election, a hotel finished at the exact moment the boom broke, and $50,000 borrowed to beautify a highway in 1927.
The Board of Trade that ran the town's affairs before it had a council, the Masonic lodge chartered in January 1914 whose members' wives had sewn the aprons the spring before, the Woman's Club of 1919 that hosted the state federation in 1933, the American Legion post of 1923 that doubled as the fire company, the Rotary Club of 1924, the Winter Guest Club of 1937, the Garden Club of 1946 and its markers on the Mall, and the Old Settlers Association of October 1945 that became the Historical Society.
Resolving the six competing naming accounts, the Stratford-upon-Avon origin suggested by Mary Ann King, the absence of an organized English colony, and the postal record showing Lake Forest was never the town's name.
The institutional history of the Old Settlers Association of Avon Park from its founding on October 9, 1945, through its annual pioneer reunions, archival preservation work, 1970–1971 Bandstand restoration, 1975–1978 reorganization into the Historical Society of Avon Park, and 1979–1981 establishment of the Avon Park Depot Museum.
How the townsite left public ownership as swamp land in 1879, why the original plat cannot be found, what the 1920 Sanborn map shows of the town's built form, and when Main Street became the Mile Long Mall.
How a town founded in 1886 spent twenty-six years without a railway, what it tried instead, what changed when the Atlantic Coast Line arrived in 1912 and the Seaboard Air Line in 1925, and what is left of both.
Ninety years of schooling in one small Florida town, from a schoolhouse that burned in 1895 to the closing of the Black school in 1968, reconstructed from the state's own county-by-county education reports.
The St. Louis Cardinals held Major League Baseball spring training in Avon Park for three consecutive seasons from 1927 through 1929, transforming the Lake Wales Ridge town into a Grapefruit League hub at Cardinal Field (Head Field).
Avon Park gave the State of Florida the same piece of land three times in eight years — for a venereal hospital in 1943, for the South Florida State Hospital in 1945, and at last for a hospital for alcoholics in 1951 — and by 1955 it was a voluntary rehabilitation center paid for out of the state's liquor tax.
The 1889 Verona Hotel on Lake Verona, its role as a sanitarium and social hub, and other historic landmarks including the Poinsettia Hotel, Hollyhurst, and Highlands Lakes Hotel.
A Philadelphia lumber company's two crate mills of 1922 on a rail spur south-west of town, the workers' houses beside them that a 1938 survey called the Mill Quarters, and the turpentine camps in the pine country beyond — a first account of the industries that made a Black working town at Avon Park.
The nine officers the Legislature named for the new Town of Avon Park in 1913 are now, for the most part, people rather than initials — a Boston-born hardware merchant as mayor, an English-born storekeeper's son as clerk, a cattleman and a freight-driver among the aldermen — and this report sets them beside the mayors, councilwomen, legislators and civic leaders found since.