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.

The Founding of Avon Park and Its First Decade, 1886–1897

Summary

Avon Park was begun in about February 1886 by Oliver Marvin Crosby, a Connecticut man who had come to Florida in 1883, asked Hamilton Disston’s land agent for “the prettiest township,” and been sent to Township 33, Range 28.[crosby-1888-pamphlet][findagrave-crosby] He put a plat called Lake Forest at its center, built a thirty-two-room hotel he later called “Crosby’s folly,” incorporated the Florida Development Company with a quarter of a million dollars of capital and offices in London and New York, and sold lots for a dollar down and a dollar a month.[findagrave-crosby][fdc-newspapers]

He chose this site because of a freeze, and lost it to another. The January 1886 freeze in the upper half of the state, he wrote in 1888, “taught us the advisability of getting FARTHER SOUTH than we would have done once.”[crosby-1888-pamphlet] The freezes of December 1894 and February 1895 destroyed the citrus his whole enterprise rested on. His company’s land was sold at a sheriff’s auction at Arcadia in January 1897 and its presses and nursery stock auctioned at Avon Park the following month. He left town with a ten-dollar bill.[fdc-newspapers][pineapple][findagrave-crosby]

The town’s population fell from nearly 500 before the freezes to 128 after, and stood at 225 in 1900.[nrhp-avon-park-district][census-1900]

Confidence: High. This account rests on the founder’s own printed pamphlet of 1888, his own interview of 1923, the local newspaper of the period, and contemporary reporting of the company’s incorporation and collapse.

Title page of Common Sense about Florida, 1888

O. M. Crosby, Common Sense about Florida (New York: South Publishing Co., 1888), title page. Florida State Library copy, via Internet Archive. Public domain.[crosby-1888-pamphlet]

Before the town

Crosby first came to Florida in 1883, but his discovery of the Avon Park site came in May 1885. Seeking the best township in South Florida, he approached Captain C. F. Adams, surveyor and manager of the Disston Company’s Jacksonville office, who directed him to Township 33, Range 28 East.[maxwell-1976]

On 25 May 1885, Crosby traveled by train from Jacksonville to Kissimmee, then to Bartow (the end of the narrow-gauge Florida Southern Railroad). Guided by a Disston man with a two-horse livery rig, they drove southeast through Fort Meade, camped overnight in a deserted log cabin, and mounted horses the next morning. On 26 May, passing Red Hill, they rode into the highlands along the backbone ridge. Looking over what is now Lake Tulane (then known as Tiger Lake), Crosby checked Adams’s map, spotted Carter Lake (now Lake Lotela), and pushed on to explore Lake Lelia and Lake Glenada.[maxwell-1976]

Crosby explicitly noted that he did not see Lake Verona on this first trip, as it was not on the original survey map. The lake naming often attributed to him was largely the work of his financial backer, Obadiah A. Clough, who “wrote the names, as they occurred to him, on the new map we were later to publish.”[maxwell-1976]

The Disston connection matters more than it looks. Hamilton Disston’s purchase of four million acres from the state of Florida in 1881 is why this land could be bought at all, and it is why no federal land patent covers the town’s core section. Crosby signed a contract for 20,000 acres in the township (excluding a few parcels previously picked by Disston agents) for $50,000 in the Philadelphia Disston office on 14 January 1886. The contract was initially in Clough’s name, but after Clough failed financially in 1887, Disston refused to renew with him, and Crosby assumed Clough’s debts and took over the contract in his own name.[maxwell-1976]

The founding, February 1886

The most precise dating comes from Crosby’s own promotional pamphlet of 1888, which says the settlement “was begun eighteen months ago by parties now interested in building Lake Forest” and prints signed testimonials datelined “Avon Park, Manatee Co., Fla.” in March and September 1886. One recalls: “I settled in Avon Park last February with my young wife.”[crosby-1888-pamphlet]

This was Manatee County then. The Florida legislature created DeSoto County in 1887 and Avon Park passed into it; Highlands County followed in 1921.[crosby-1888-pamphlet][nrhp-avon-park-district]

Lake Forest and Avon Park were never rival names. Lake Forest was the plat Crosby laid out in Section 22, “about the center” of a township called Avon Park, and he advertised both names together.[crosby-1888-pamphlet] Accounts that have the town renamed from one to the other are misreading a plat for a town.

The first settlers

Crosby credited William King, whom he said he met on a trip from England, with “the honor of being the first real settler here.”[findagrave-crosby] The Pabor Lake Pineapple called him “the first settler of Avon Park” in August 1893, in his own lifetime.[pineapple] King was born in Birmingham in July 1853; his wife Mary Ann Chinn was from Solihull in Warwickshire; they married in Warwickshire in 1881.[findagrave-king] The Historical Society’s own account says Crosby hired King around 1885 to run the town’s development.[aphs-verona]

King farmed and experimented. In January 1893 the Pineapple printed his signed essay on pineapple culture, delivered to the Avon Park Township Horticultural Association, describing his planting of “the first slips in Avon Park” five years earlier, in August 1887.[pineapple] He later served as a DeSoto County commissioner and nearly two terms as mayor.[findagrave-king]

He was killed in 1929 when a Seaboard Air Line train struck his car at the Main Street crossing.[findagrave-king]

What the town looked like in 1888

Crosby’s pamphlet gives a plain inventory: one sawmill, about ten houses, and a store and hotel building under construction. No railroad. He was answering thirty to fifty letters of inquiry a day.[crosby-1888-pamphlet]

The Hotel Verona was built between 1887 and 1889, with thirty-two rooms.[aphs-verona] Crosby financed it partly on a pledge of $45,000 from a Danbury hat-manufacturing firm, Beckerle, Schuldice & Fay, who paid in only $17,000 before withdrawing, and partly on a $1,000 loan from a man he described as George Frost, “of garter fame.” He called it “Crosby’s folly.”[findagrave-crosby] It burned and was demolished in 1926.[aphs-verona]

Two churches went up in the early 1890s. The Union Congregational Church was built between 1890 and 1892 on land Crosby and his wife donated, holding its first service on 11 September 1892. The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer on East Pleasant Street, a Carpenter Gothic building, dates to 1894.[aphs-verona]

The promotion machine

Crosby did not simply sell land, he manufactured demand for it. He ran a Bureau of Florida Information at 99 Franklin Street in New York, the same address as the Florida Development Company’s office.[pineapple][findagrave-crosby] He edited his own promotional newspaper, the Florida Homeseeker, moved to Avon Park from Fort Meade, with a claimed circulation of ten thousand; no issue of it has ever been located. He published a second paper, the Avon Park Idea. He wrote for a magazine called Florida Life. He published two books of his own in 1887 and 1888.[crosby-1888-pamphlet][findagrave-crosby]

The Florida Development Company was incorporated in November 1891 with offices in London, New York, Jacksonville and Avon Park. Its capital stock is not settled: two contemporary newspaper reports of the incorporation give $250,000 and $350,000, and the company’s own October 1894 stockholders’ meeting reported capital unimpaired at $250,000. Its incorporators were Crosby, Frank E. Sperring (who managed northern sales from New York), Charles H. Smith (Secretary of the Jacksonville Board of Trade, who drafted the charter and by-laws), and former Fourth Judicial Circuit Judge Robert B. Archibald of Jacksonville.[fdc-newspapers][maxwell-1976] The impetus for forming the stock corporation came from London map publisher George Washington Bacon, who visited Avon Park in 1889, urged Crosby to capitalize the enterprise to extinguish the $17,000 Hotel Verona construction debt, and undertook to raise $75,000 from British investors.[maxwell-1976] Crosby sailed to London in May 1891 to assist Bacon, but British bank failures and financial stringency in the aftermath of the 1890 Barings Crisis prevented the capital from being realized.[findagrave-crosby]

In October 1894 the company reported capital unimpaired, land sales up about 300 per cent, and declared a ten per cent dividend.[fdc-newspapers] Two months later it began to end.

The freezes

The winter of 1894–95 broke Florida’s citrus belt. A hard freeze in December 1894 stripped the trees; a second in February 1895, after the trees had begun to push new growth, killed them outright. Groves across the state died to the ground.

Locally the effect was decisive. The National Register nomination records a pre-freeze population of nearly 500 collapsing to 128.[nrhp-avon-park-district] Crosby had organized a bank and propped it up with his own fortune when the run came; he was left holding $96,000 in paper against $26,000 owed, and was sold out “under the hammer.”[findagrave-crosby]

The Pabor Lake Pineapple discusses “the calamitous freeze of last December” and “the great freeze of 1894” in its issue of 15 February 1895, but in general Florida citrus-trade terms drawn from other papers rather than in local narrative.[pineapple] No local, first-hand account of the freezes at Avon Park survives — a notable silence for the event that ended the town’s first citrus economy.

The collapse of the company

The end is now documented in detail from newspapers outside Avon Park.[fdc-newspapers]

  • October 1895 — Abbie R. Dodge sues the company in Duval County for $8,000.
  • May 1896 — the company is still active enough to donate ten acres to Henry H. Todd for a proposed canning factory.
  • January 1897 — the company’s real estate is sold at a sheriff’s sale at Arcadia to satisfy Dodge’s judgment. Judge Barron Phillips confirms the sale at Tampa on 9 January and denies the stockholders’ petition for a receiver.
  • February 1897 — the remaining property is auctioned at Avon Park. The Pineapple, in guarded language and without naming anyone, reports a sheriff auctioning “furniture, fixtures, presses, mills, nursery stock, books and accounts,” and the departure of the unnamed promoter “from the scene of his active operations for the last eight years.”[pineapple]

Mrs. Abbie R. Dodge, co-proprietor of the New Duval Hotel in Jacksonville, thereby acquired 20,000 acres of DeSoto County land including the town of Avon Park itself, and announced she would honor the company’s existing installment contracts rather than void them.[fdc-newspapers] That she did so probably saved a good many settlers.

Crosby’s wife, Mary Emma Crosby, stayed roughly twenty months after the collapse, personally untangling land titles for contract holders. In 1923 a Frostproof man proposed the town build her a monument.[findagrave-crosby]

The railroads that were not built

Two railroad ventures ran through this decade and neither delivered what it promised.

The Frost-Proof Line was incorporated at Avon Park in November 1892, capitalized at $50,000 with authority to increase to a million, and projected from Haines City south through Crooked Lake, Midland, Pabor Lake and Avon Park, then on via Fort Myers to a Gulf port, with branches to Bartow and Arcadia. Its incorporators included Crosby, W. E. Pabor, W. J. Hill, J. C. Burleigh and W. W. Davis of Midland, Harrison Jones of Haines City, and C. H. Smith of Jacksonville.[pineapple] Nothing on that scale was ever built.

The Avon Park & Haines City Railroad was organized at Avon Park on 5 January 1895 with two-thirds of its stock subscribed and officers elected: President Clark D. Knapp, Vice-President O. M. Crosby, Secretary and Treasurer C. C. Chollar.[pineapple] What was actually built was four miles of wooden tramway to Pabor Lake, opened on 7 September 1895 under the name of the Avon Park Transportation Company. Whether these are two names for one venture or two related companies is not resolved.

Steel rail did not reach Avon Park until 1912, and the town was incorporated the year after.[nrhp-avon-park-district]

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. O. M. Crosby, Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (1888)
  2. Find a Grave, Oliver Marvin Crosby memorial, Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park, with transcribed Tampa Tribune articles 1923-1932 (2026)
  3. Find a Grave, William A. King and Mary Ann (Chinn) King memorials, Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park (2026)
  4. W. E. Pabor and E. A. Pabor, Pabor Lake Pineapple, October 1892 to September 1897 (1897)
  5. Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation / National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Avon Park Historic District (ref. 90000486) (1990)
  6. contemporary Florida and Georgia newspapers, via digitised collections, Savannah Morning News and Weekly Floridian reports on the Florida Development Company, 1891-1897 (1897)
  7. Avon Park Historical Society, The Verona Hotel: The early years of Avon Park (2026)
  8. U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, Volume 1, Population, Part 1, Table 5, page 92 (1901) · official
  9. 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

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