The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Avon Park in the state business directories, 1895–1925

Avon Park kept no record of itself that survives. Its own newspapers are gone; the Pabor Lake Pineapple stops in September 1897 and the Avon Park Sun only begins on microfilm in 1946. For half a century the town has to be reconstructed from outside.

The Florida business directories are the best outside source there is. Five of them list Avon Park, and each one is a canvasser’s inventory of the whole town on a single day: how many people lived there, which railway served it, which churches it had, who kept the post office, and the name and trade of every business that would give one. Set side by side they show a town that boomed, was ruined, sat still for fifteen years, and then boomed again.

1895 1907 1911 1918 1925
Population 500 300 300 350 1,200
County DeSoto DeSoto DeSoto DeSoto Highlands
Railway none none none Atlantic Coast Line Atlantic Coast Line
Nearest shipping point Fort Meade, 20 mi. Wauchula, 22 mi. Wauchula, 22 mi. at Avon Park at Avon Park
Bank Bank of Avon Park a private bank a private bank First National Bank two banks
Newspaper Avon Park Idea South Florida Sun South Florida Sun Avon Park Press Highlands County Pilot
Business entries 34 9 21 35 —

Before 1895: no entry at all

Neither of the two earliest volumes has an Avon Park entry. The 1886-87 gazetteer, compiled when the founding party had been on the ground about a year, lists no business at Avon Park and does not name the place — though it does carry Danbury, Marion County, the Connecticut colony that O. M. Crosby was then managing from Jacksonville.[gaz-1886] The town enters the state’s commercial record only in 1895, and it enters it fully formed.

1895: five hundred people and thirty-four businesses

The 1895 volume gives Avon Park a fuller entry than most towns twice its size. Population 500, “20 m from Fort Meade,” a money-order post office and a telegraph office; the compiler adds that “this is an enterprising town, well laid out and under good management,” with “clear water lakes, good hunting and fishing.”[gaz-1895]

The businesses, as printed:

  • J. T. Ashman, laundry
  • Avon Park Idea, A. L. Blue, editor
  • Bank of Avon Park, C. C. Chollar, cashier
  • A. E. Bennett, livery stable
  • R. W. Bourne, boot and shoe maker
  • F. M. Bunker, real estate and railroad agent
  • S. J. Brown, manager, Hotel Vendome
  • J. C. Burleigh, general merchandise, carpenter and builder
  • C. C. Chollar, banker
  • W. H. Clark, hardware
  • S. J. Clark, druggist
  • John Cordulio, barber
  • O. M. Crosby, president, Florida Development Co.
  • C. L. Farnham, bakery
  • Florida Development Co., O. M. Crosby, president
  • H. A. Frentz, carpenter and builder
  • A. Gandier, physician and surgeon
  • Frank Haines, painter
  • James Holland, general merchandise, saw mill and notary
  • J. T. Hendricks, notary, abstracts
  • S. A. Hessler, jeweler
  • Hotel Verona, S. J. Brown, manager
  • O. P. Huntington, boarding
  • Frank Hyres, carpenter and builder
  • D. D. Kinney, postmaster and notary
  • William King, well works
  • G. W. Kittelle, physician and surgeon
  • C. D. Knapp, attorney and notary
  • Nevans & King, drays and express wagons
  • U. S. C. Perkins, notary
  • F. S. Prior, restaurant
  • C. H. Thompson, photographer
  • Frank Thompson, carpenter and builder
  • H. B. Todd, tinsmith
  • N. C. Wigg, painter

Four things in that list are new to this bundle.

William King kept a well-drilling business. The town’s first settler, whose grove and livelihood have never been documented, is listed simply as “King Wm, well works” — and a second King appears in the partnership Nevans & King, drays and express wagons. On the Lake Wales Ridge, where every household needed a driven well and Avon Park’s own town well would later be sunk four hundred feet, well works was a serious trade. See William and Mary King.

There were two hotels, or one hotel with two names. S. J. Brown is listed as manager of the Hotel Vendome and, four lines later, as manager of the Hotel Verona. The Verona is well attested; the Vendome appears nowhere else in this bundle. Either the canvasser took the name twice and got it wrong once, or Avon Park had a second hotel in 1895 that has left no other trace. See Hotel Verona.

A second saw mill. James Holland kept a general store, a saw mill and a notary’s commission. The Avon Park saw mill in the literature is always John C. Burleigh’s, on what is now Lake Brentwood. Burleigh is in this same list, but as a storekeeper and builder, not a miller. Two mills, or a mill that had changed hands, or a compiler’s error — but Holland is a name that belongs in the town’s timber history and has not been in it.

Four carpenters, two painters and a tinsmith in a town of five hundred. That is a building trade, not a repair trade, and it is the clearest measure in any source of how fast Avon Park was going up in the year the wooden railway was being laid.

The same volume’s statewide bank table records the Bank of Avon Park, established 1894, O. M. Crosby president and C. C. Chollar cashier, with $20,000 of capital and $5,000 of deposits.[gaz-1895] A bank founded by the town’s founder the year before the freeze is treated separately in Finding: Avon Park had a bank in 1894.

1907 and 1911: the town that the freeze left

Twelve years later the population is 300 and the business list has nine names. Crosby is gone, the Florida Development Company is gone, the bank is gone — replaced by “a private bank” — and so are the laundry, the bakery, the livery stable, the photographer, the druggist, the doctors, the lawyer and every one of the carpenters.[gaz-1907]

What survives is a store. John C. Burleigh, general store is listed in both 1907 and 1911, which puts him at Avon Park a full sixteen years after the wooden railway that made him briefly famous, and answers a question this bundle had left open about when he left town — he had not. Beside him are S. A. Hessler, still in dry goods after twelve years; A. Winthrop Sargent, general store and justice of the peace, whose relative Miss M. W. Sargent is postmaster; E. L. Hall, jeweler; I. C. Smith, the railroad and express agent; R. F. West & Son, general store and bankers — the private bank; and the South Florida Sun, O. R. Thacher editor.

By 1911 the list has grown back to twenty-one and its shape has changed completely. It is now an agricultural service town: Jesse Bennett, nursery; E. E. Thompson, nurseries; R. F. Whitnall, florist; Walter Hart, saw mill; Harry Dilley, brick manufacturer; E. T. Boyd, blacksmith; J. T. Williams, meat market; George F. Smith, grocer. There is an architect, J. Bouyiere; a schoolteacher, John Bethea; a dentist; and for the first time two named clergymen, the Rev. C. W. Meyers for the Congregationalists and the Rev. E. R. Richardson for the Episcopalians.[gaz-1911]

Two of those names close open questions elsewhere in this bundle. E. E. Thompson, who complained to the Florida Railroad Commission in 1915–16 that the Avon Park depot had no toilets, was a nurseryman — a shipper, with a shipper’s reason to spend time at the station. And the nurseries themselves, three of them by 1911, are the first documentary sign of the citrus replanting that the railway would turn into the town’s second economy.

Both volumes say the nearest shipping point is Wauchula, twenty-two miles away. That is the single hardest fact in these directories. Whatever else was true of Avon Park in 1911, everything it grew went twenty-two miles by wagon before it went anywhere by rail.

1918: the railway town

The 1918 entry opens “Located on the A. C. L. Ry.,” and the list has thirty-five names. The town has a First National Bank with $25,000 of capital, C. A. Skipper president and C. E. Lanier cashier; a weekly, the Avon Park Press, printed for it by the Zolfo Springs Publishing Company; a Magnolia Theatre under P. F. Krause; two garages; an ice manufacturer; a bottling works; a laundry; a bakery and restaurant; four general stores; two meat markets; and Fannie P. Reeves as postmaster.[gaz-1918]

It also has, for the first time in any source, a timber and naval stores industry that can be named:

  • Hagan Naval Stores Co.
  • A. J. Pollard, saw mill
  • W. E. Shockley, saw mill
  • DeForest Canfield, lumber

Those four entries answer three questions this bundle had open. Hagan’s Turpentine Still, the place where Avon Park’s Black children went to school until it closed, was the Hagan Naval Stores Company — see Finding: Hagan’s Turpentine Still was the Hagan Naval Stores Company. “Shockley’s Spur near Avon Park,” the private siding whose removal the Railroad Commission approved in the year ending February 1921, served W. E. Shockley’s saw mill. And DeForest Canfield, the lumber dealer, is almost certainly the D. F. Canfield who became Highlands County’s first tax collector three years later. Whether Canfield Street, one of the twenty-eight named streets on the November 1920 Sanborn map, is named for this family has not been established.

Three more names in the list carry forward. C. A. Skipper, bank president, and W. L. Skipper, druggist, belong to the Skipper family whose members had been aldermen and postmasters at Avon Park since at least 1905. P. F. Krause of the Magnolia Theatre is presumably of the same family as the William Krause & Son who sold stove wood in 1905 and the Kraus theater that hosted a tent minstrel show in March 1915 — a family in the entertainment and fuel business at Avon Park for at least thirteen years, and twenty years before William J. Heim built the Park Theater. And the Rev. Benjamin Stock, Congregational, is the “Rev. Ren Stock” this bundle had recorded from a garbled 1912 newspaper item.

1925: the boom

The last volume gives no business list, only a summary, and the summary is the boom itself: population 1,200, Highlands County, two banks, the Highlands County Pilot as the weekly paper, “churches of the leading denominations,” and Fannie P. Reeves still at the post office.[gaz-1925] Within two years the town would annex a whole thirty-six-section township and vote $355,000 of bonds.

Avon Park is usually described as founded in 1886, wrecked by the freeze of 1894-95, and then dormant until the railway arrived. The directories show a town with further to fall than that: in 1895 it had a bank, a newspaper, two physicians, a lawyer, a jeweler, a photographer and four carpenters, and it fell all the way to 300 people and nine businesses. The recovery was not the railway alone — the nurseries were in place by 1911, before the railway reached town — but by 1918 Avon Park had rebuilt its economy on two things it had not had in 1895, citrus nurseries and pine, and it was the pine side, the timber and turpentine, that left almost no trace in the town’s own memory.

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. South Publishing Company, The Florida State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1886-87 (1886)
  2. Belden Publishing Company, Florida Railroad Gazetteer and State Business Directory, 1895 (1895)
  3. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1907 (1907)
  4. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1911 (1911)
  5. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1918 (1918)
  6. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida, "The Playground of the Nation" - a gazetteer and business directory (1925)

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