The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Law and order at Avon Park

Summary

Avon Park policed itself for a century and then stopped. The charter of 1913 gave the town a marshal, Irvin Raulerson, and made the mayor its magistrate. The 1920s brought a purpose-built jail, a chief of police under the charter of 1927, and the power to work off fines on the streets. The first Black officer, Fred L. C. Conner, walked a beat from 1955. The Avon Park Police Department was disbanded in the 2010s, and since an agreement of September 2021 the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office has policed the town under contract, at a cost the council was told in 2025 would soon pass four million dollars a year. Around that municipal story runs the county’s: a sheriff since 1921, one of them an Avon Park man, a county jail at Sebring since 1924, and, in the years before, the DeSoto County sheriff’s hunt for a man who killed a farmer beside a whiskey still two miles south of town.

The marshal and the mayor’s court, 1913

The act that incorporated the Town of Avon Park in 1913 vested its authority in “a mayor, town council, clerk, assessor, treasurer, marshal, collector and town attorney,” made the mayor “the magistrate for offenses against town ordinances, with power to summon witnesses and administer oaths,” and named the first marshal outright: Irvin Raulerson.[lof-1913-6662] The first town government is described in Who governed Avon Park. The marshal remained the town’s whole police force into the 1920s. The Society’s 1976 history prints the succession from 1919: E. N. Dickerson, “Town Marshall,” who resigned on 7 July 1919, was replaced by C. E. Lee, and came back on 20 October when Lee resigned, was re-elected on 24 November, and resigned again on 5 July 1920; J. B. Williams from 12 July 1920; W. N. Fertic from 29 November 1920; L. M. Marsh from 29 November 1921, re-elected in 1922 and 1923; L. D. McGiboney from 24 November 1924; George Prescott from June 1926, and again in 1929; A. F. Helms in 1928; W. D. Adams in 1932; J. J. “Bob” Still in 1934 and 1936; and from 1938 W. H. McCarthy, who was already the fire chief and held both posts.[maxwell-1976] Marsh was the Atlantic Coast Line’s section foreman when the railway reached the town in 1912.[maxwell-1976]

There was a lynching threat before there was a marshal. When Squire Budd burned the school house in December 1895, William King “confronted him in a public gathering, telling him that following the next burning there would be an ‘expeditious’ hanging.” Budd left town “just in time to avoid being lynched,” and years later came back, “begged forgiveness and were given work to do.”[maxwell-1976] The fire is in The Avon Park school house burned in 1895.

Deputy Sheriff Love Cash and precinct policing, 1916

Before Highlands County was created in 1921, policing in Avon Park and its surrounding countryside was divided between the municipal marshal operating under town council authority and precinct deputy sheriffs commissioned by the DeSoto County sheriff and county commissioners. William Krause held the deputy-sheriff title in September 1905; his documented investigation of illegal game killing near Lake Jackson shows county enforcement reaching the rural country south of town.[dsc-1905-09-29-krause]

In May 1916 the Board of County Commissioners appointed Love Cash as Deputy Sheriff for Avon Park Precinct No. 14 under Florida’s primary election law, alongside election inspectors George F. Kellogg, J. C. Skipper, and John Wilson and clerk M. T. Whidden under Sheriff John L. Dishong.[dsc-1916-05-11]

In July 1916 Cash participated in regional prohibition enforcement under Florida’s local-option dry laws. On a Saturday night, Deputy Sheriffs Thad Carlton and W. T. Garner of Arcadia traveled to the eastern part of DeSoto County and, “aided by Deputy Cash of Avon Park,” arrested Dan Maynor, Amos Purifoy, and Eugene Dukes on a charge of selling liquor.[dsc-1916-07-06] Purifoy and Dukes were tried on Thursday morning, 6 July 1916, in county court before County Judge W. D. Bell and prosecuting attorney Hugh G. Jones, each receiving a sentence of six months on the county road force.[dsc-1916-07-06] Love Cash left no landholding or census household record in Avon Park, illustrating the rural practice of appointing unpropertied local men for short-term precinct deputizations, detailed in Deputy Sheriff Love Cash, Avon Park Precinct No. 14, 1916.

The still by the ravine, 1920

Evidence: corroborated.

The one crime of the marshal years that reached the outside press was a killing over whiskey, seven months into national Prohibition. John D. West, a farmer of eighty, left home on the morning of Thursday, 25 March 1920, “with his shotgun, telling his wife he was going to try and kill a bird or a rabbit,” and did not come back. His sons found his remains the next afternoon “in a ravine running between two lakes about two miles south of Avon Park,” near the Sebring road, the body partly burned. “About seventy-five yards from the scene of the tragedy was a whiskey still. It was partly destroyed, but about half a barrel of ‘buck’ and a part of still remained.” A Black man believed to have run the still was arrested.[pgh-1920-04-08] A week later officers arrested Son Simpson, who confessed to helping burn the body and named the killer as Ed Castello, who had shot West “near his still, not far from Avon Park.” Castello had left Avon Park on the night of Wednesday, 31 March. Sheriff Dishong of DeSoto County, the county Avon Park still belonged to, circulated his description: “five feet six or seven inches tall; weighs 200 pounds, 45 years old, black, has real short neck, hair grows low on forehead,” last seen in a gray wool shirt, formerly of Blakely, Georgia and Birmingham.[pgh-1920-04-15] Whether he was ever caught is not recorded in any paper that can be read.

The men behind the roster

The names on the list were ordinary townsmen who held the office for a year or two at a time. Love D. McGiboney, marshal from November 1924, was born in Georgia on 2 June 1895, married Carrie Skipper of the Skipper family in 1921, kept a citrus store in the town by 1950, and died on 29 August 1954; he is buried at Lemon Grove in Hardee County.[maxwell-1976][census-1950-mcgiboney][fag-mcgiboney] George Randell Prescott, chief from June 1926 and again in 1929, was born in Bradford County on 15 January 1872 and served past the roster’s last date for him: when he died suddenly on Monday, 11 December 1933, after plowing a fire break to save his own farm from a grass fire, the Avon Park Times reported that “all stores and business houses were closed Tuesday afternoon during the funeral hour as a mark of respect to Police Chief George R. Prescott,” who “had been connected with the Avon Park Police Force for a number of years.” He lies in Bougainvillea Cemetery.[fag-prescott] James Jackson “Bob” Still, chief in 1934 and 1936, born 20 July 1889, stands as “Police Chief” in the photograph of the city’s officers taken on 30 January 1934; he died on 30 September 1975 and is buried at Bougainvillea.[maxwell-1976][fag-still] William H. McCarthy, who held the fire and police posts together, and who sat for his photograph on the town’s first fire truck, lived from 1892 to 1971 and is buried there too.[maxwell-1976][fag-mccarthy] An Aaron Franklin Helms (1889-1943) and a William David Adams (1871-1957) in the same cemetery are the likely A. F. Helms of 1928 and W. D. Adams of 1932, though nothing on their graves says so.[fag-helms][fag-adams] L. M. Marsh, marshal for three terms from November 1921, was Lewis Marion Marsh (1876–1943), whom the town history names as the Coast Line’s section foreman from 1912 (see Lewis Marion Marsh).[maxwell-1976] Of E. N. Dickerson, C. E. Lee, J. B. Williams and W. N. Fertic nothing beyond the roster has been found.

The jail

The town’s first jail was “a small wooden building.” On 7 May 1923 the council let a contract for $1,325 to Winter and Raab to build a jail “on Park Property at rear of Christian Church”; the history’s narrative places the 1923 jail “near the fire station on South Butler Avenue,” and the two statements have not been reconciled. On 21 March 1928 the council moved “to erect City Hall, Fire Dept. & Jail,” and the fire station completed that December, later the police station, is the building that resulted.[maxwell-1976] The county’s own jail came first at Sebring: the county commissioners bought Block 74 there in August 1923 for a courthouse and jail site,[wpa-highlands-history] and the Sheriff’s Office dates the jail’s opening to early 1924, with room for thirty-two; a new jail of 1957 held eighty-two, when the whole office had ten employees.[hcso-about]

Chief of police, 1927

The city charter of June 1927 replaced the marshal with a Chief of Police, one of the officers “elected by the City Council upon its organization.” Its powers section let the council put “hard labor on the streets” on those who could not pay their fines, alongside its powers over gambling, disorderly assemblies, stock running at large and speed limits.[lof-1927-12514]

Prohibition’s one recorded Avon Park case came in that decade. On 1 November 1929 a federal jury at Tampa found Peter Brown, “owner of a gas station located on the road between Avon Park and Wauchula,” guilty of having alcoholic beverages in his car and resisting federal agents. The agents had stopped him for the smell from the car; three witnesses said the agents had not mentioned any smell at the preliminary hearing.[gaceta-1929-11-02]

The county sheriff and the 1921–1922 inaugural officers

Highlands County was created in April 1921, and on 16 May 1921 Governor Cary A. Hardee commissioned an Avon Park resident, W. M. Griffin, as the county’s inaugural sheriff.[metropolis-1921-05-18] Sheriff Griffin presented his official commission and statutory $2,000 bond at the Board of County Commissioners’ organizational meeting in Sebring on 23 May 1921, where it was accepted under Board Chairman William King of Avon Park.[wpa-highlands-history] With no permanent courthouse constructed, Griffin initially operated from Avon Park while coordinating with temporary county rooms in Sebring’s Sebring-Hainz Building.[wpa-highlands-history]

During his nine months in office, Sheriff Griffin repeatedly sought legal guidance from Florida Attorney General Rivers Buford regarding statutory law enforcement authority and compensation under Florida’s fee system.[fl-ag-report-1921-1922] In July 1921, Buford advised Griffin on enforcing forfeitures on ninety-day cost bonds and committing defendants under Section 6122 of the Revised General Statutes; in August 1921, the Attorney General advised that vehicle search warrants for contraband liquor could not issue against an automobile by description alone, but had to name an individual operator; and in October 1921, Buford strictly ruled that a sheriff was entitled to only $5.00 plus actual travel mileage for executing an entire court venire across the county’s vast flatwoods.[fl-ag-report-1921-1922]

Under Florida’s statutory fee system, sheriffs received no state salary and were required to cover deputy pay, vehicle upkeep, and travel from process and court fees. In a rural county of fewer than 3,000 people, Griffin incurred persistent personal financial losses. On 23 February 1922, he submitted his resignation to Governor Hardee.[kvg-1922-03-03] As reported by the Highlands County Pilot of Avon Park, Griffin explained that he had lost money ever since taking the oath, and while he had considered running in the 1922 general election, the cost of a political campaign and the reality of serving a full term at an ongoing operating deficit led him to conclude he would be “money ahead to accept the loss now rather than risk losing more.”[kvg-1922-03-03] Governor Hardee immediately commissioned Deputy Sheriff Robert H. (R. H.) Hancock, a seasoned former DeSoto County deputy who had served as Griffin’s chief deputy in Highlands County; Hancock won election in November 1922 and served through 1927 (see Highlands County Inaugural Officer Resignations and the Fee System (1921–1922)).[hcso-history]

In District 1 (Avon Park), Governor Hardee appointed Curtis Mathews as constable in July 1921 alongside Justice of the Peace S. F. Tucker.[metropolis-1921-07-15] Mathews resigned on 22 September 1921, and the constabulary remained permanently vacant thereafter because Avon Park’s municipal town marshal and the county sheriff handled local policing, leaving no fee-generating caseload for a district constable.[metropolis-1921-07-15]

The Sheriff’s Office lists Griffin’s successors: R. H. Hancock 1922-27, J. M. Hancock 1927-29, O. E. Wolff 1929-33, Doyle Schumacher 1933-41 and 1945-49, E. G. Long 1941-45, Broward Coker 1949-69, Joe D. Keene 1969-70, O. L. Raulerson 1970-77, Joe Sheppard 1977-88, Howard Godwin 1988-2005, Susan Benton 2005-17 and Paul Blackman from 2017.[hcso-history] Oscar E. Wolff was an Avon Park man, a son of Lucien Alexander Wolff who came from Mississippi in 1912; the town history gives his term as 1929 to 1932.[maxwell-1976] He lived from 1883 to 1971, built a large two-story house on the north shore of Lake Verona, and is buried at Bougainvillea beside his parents.[maxwell-1976][fag-wolff] Broward Coker served five terms from 1949 to 1969 as Highlands County’s longest-tenured sheriff; on 11 September 1951 he attended Voting Place No. 2 at City Hall and gave the testimony relied upon by the council to void the Black precinct’s ballots, claiming more than half were unlawfully assisted (see Sheriff Broward Coker and the City Clerk in the 1951 Avon Park election and The Avon Park election of 1951).[gough-1951][hcso-history] The county’s own prison camp on Lake Bonnet, with its twenty-one prisoners of 1940, is described in The Highlands County Prison Camp in 1940, and the federal and state prisons that came later in Prisoners and patients.

The first Black officers, 1955

In April 1955 the city council, petitioned by the Black churches’ Progressive Civic Club, appointed Fred L. C. Conner the town’s first Black police officer; he walked his beat without a car and served more than seventeen years, joined from about 1957 by Robert Britt, who later sat on the council.[newssun-conner-1995] Their story is in Fred L. C. Conner.

The pension fund

The department had a pension fund under the state’s general law for municipal police, Chapter 185 of the Florida Statutes, until the Legislature abolished it by a special act filed on 22 April 1961, which ordered the city to return the state’s contributions to the state treasurer and the officers’ own contributions to the officers.[lof-1961-1868] The city’s present Police Officers’ Retirement System, which still has a board, gives its own founding date as 1959.[avonpark-police-pension] How the fund of 1959 relates to the one abolished in 1961 is not explained in either record.

The end of the department

Evidence: contested.

The Avon Park Police Department no longer exists, and its sources disagree about when it ended. The Highlands News-Sun says the Sheriff’s Office “has provided these services since 2012 after the Avon Park Police Department’s disbandment that year”;[newssun-contract-2025] Wikipedia’s county article says the department “closed its doors in 2015.”[wiki-highlands-county] The city’s own statement is that it “entered into an interlocal agreement for law enforcement services with Highlands County Sheriff’s Office on September 13, 2021,”[avonpark-law-enforcement] which dates the present contract and not the disbandment. On 24 July 2025 the council voted two to two, and so failed, on a motion to study bringing the department back; the city manager put the sheriff’s contract at $2.7 million for the year with $210,000 for cars, and “well over $4 million” the year after, for a town of 10,588. A former councilwoman, Brenda Gray, told the meeting the department had been disbanded for “corruption” and “unfair treatment” toward residents.[newssun-police-2025]

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. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 6662 (No. 242), Laws of Florida 1913: An Act to Incorporate the Town of Avon Park (1913) · official
  2. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (Held at the Avon Park Historical Society Depot Museum, Avon Park, Florida) (1976) · book
  3. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 29 September 1905, page 18: Deputy Sheriff William Krause (1905) · newspaper
  4. The Punta Gorda Herald, The Punta Gorda Herald, 8 April 1920, page 1: the murder of John West near Avon Park (1920) · newspaper
  5. The Punta Gorda Herald, Was Cold-Blooded Murder, The Punta Gorda Herald, 15 April 1920, page 1 (1920) · newspaper
  6. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 11 May 1916, page 2: County Commissioners Proceedings, Election Officers for Precinct 14 (1916) · newspaper
  7. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 6 July 1916, page 3: Liquor Cases in County Court, Deputy Cash of Avon Park (1916) · newspaper
  8. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12514 (No. 709), Laws of Florida 1927, Special Acts: An Act to Abolish the Present Municipal Government and Municipality of the City of Avon Park (1927) · official
  9. La Gaceta, La Gaceta (Tampa, Fla.), 2 November 1929, page 1: federal court report (1929) · newspaper
  10. Highlands County Sheriff's Office, Sheriff History, Highlands County Sheriff's Office (2026) · official
  11. Highlands County Sheriff's Office, About the HCSO, Highlands County Sheriff's Office (2026) · official
  12. Works Progress Administration, via Genealogy Trails, History of Highlands County, Florida (Works Progress Administration county history, about 1939), transcribed (1939) · secondary
  13. United States Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census population schedules, Florida, Highlands County, enumeration district 28-19, sheet 14: household of Love C. McGiboney (1950) · official
  14. Find a Grave, Love D McGiboney (1895-1954), Hart Cemetery, Lemon Grove, Hardee County, Florida (2026) · secondary
  15. Find a Grave, George Randell Prescott (1872-1933), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park, with his obituary from the Avon Park Times reprinted in the Bradford County Telegraph, 15 December 1933 (2026) · secondary
  16. Find a Grave, James Jackson 'Bob' Still (1889-1975), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park (2026) · secondary
  17. Find a Grave, William H. McCarthy (1892-1971), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park (2026) · secondary
  18. Find a Grave, Aaron Franklin Helms (1889-1943), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park (2026) · secondary
  19. Find a Grave, William David Adams (1871-1957), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park (2026) · secondary
  20. Find a Grave, Oscar E. Wolff (1883-1971), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park (2026) · secondary
  21. Supreme Court of Florida, Special Division B (Chapman, J.), Gough et al. v. State ex rel. Sauls et al., 55 So. 2d 111 (Fla. 1951) (1951) · official
  22. Romona Washington, Highlands News-Sun, Conner first Black to serve as police officer — Highlands News-Sun, 25 February 2025, reprinting Romona Washington's profile of 1995 (2025) · newspaper
  23. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 61-1868, Laws of Florida 1961: An Act abolishing the city of Avon Park police officers' retirement fund and providing for the distribution of such fund (1961) · official
  24. City of Avon Park, Police Pension Board, City of Avon Park (2026) · official
  25. City of Avon Park, Law Enforcement, City of Avon Park (2026) · official
  26. Highlands News-Sun, 25 May 2025, Avon Park discusses law enforcement contract (2025) · newspaper
  27. Wikipedia, Highlands County, Florida (2026) · secondary
  28. Highlands News-Sun, 26 July 2025, Avon Park decides not to pursue police department (2025) · newspaper
  29. The Florida Metropolis, The Florida Metropolis (Jacksonville, Fla.), 18 May 1921: W. M. Griffin Named Highland's Sheriff (1921)
  30. The Kissimmee Valley Gazette (reprinting Highlands County Pilot), The Kissimmee Valley Gazette, 3 March 1922, page 4: Sheriff of Highlands Resigns His Position (1922)
  31. Rivers Buford, Attorney General, Report of the Attorney General of the State of Florida for the Period Beginning January 1, 1921, and Ending December 31, 1922 (1923)
  32. The Florida Metropolis, The Florida Metropolis (Jacksonville, Fla.), 15 July 1921: Curtis Mathews Appointed Constable for District 1 (1921)

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