The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Light, water and power at Avon Park

Summary

For its first quarter-century Avon Park drew its water from hand pumps, driven wells and the lakes, and lit itself with kerosene. William King, who drilled wells and built windmills for the groves, put up the first water tower about 1900 to serve the Verona Hotel. The first electric light, water and ice service was a private plant built about 1913 by Luther O. Feagin, who appears in the 1918 state directory as the town’s ice manufacturer; by 1915 the town council was paying a “Light Company” and the light station was sinking a well four hundred feet deep. In November 1920 the Florida Ice and Power Company supplied the town’s water from a fifty-thousand-gallon tank a hundred feet in the air, for domestic use only. The boom brought sewers, voted at $210,000 in July 1926, and a power station: the council sold land for it in February 1927, and the Florida Public Service Company put the Lake Lotela plant into service on 31 January 1928. Florida Power Corporation, which absorbed that company, added a 45,000-kilowatt unit in 1952 and two 33,700-kilowatt gas turbines in December 1968, and its successor Duke Energy retired the plant in October 2020.

Wells, windmills and a water tower

The 1976 history remembers the water of the settlement years as something people fetched. “Most of the people had only hand pumps. Running water was only for those who would ‘run and get it’ at the pump or the lake.” William A. King, the town’s first settler, “had a tube well drilling business and windmills,” which drew water for the groves’ first irrigation and for the houses, and “about 1900 Mr. King installed the first water tower, furnishing water for the Verona Hotel and also the grove irrigation.”[maxwell-1976]

The first ice plant, 1905

Ice came to Avon Park before electricity did, and it came from the wood dealers. In September 1905 the Avon Park column of the county paper reported that William Krause Jr. had gone to Punta Gorda “to take the place of the engineer of the Ice and Power Company for a couple of weeks,” the engineer and other employees being sick, and that “his knowledge gained there by experience will help him in his ice making enterprise here”; and that William Krause and son, then “filling a good many orders for stove wood,” expected “to be ready early in October to manufacture ice,” having “ordered certain pieces of machinery to complete their ice making plant, which are expected here within about two weeks.”[dsc-1905-09-08] Whether the plant made ice that October the surviving issues do not say. The elder Krause did not live to see the electric company’s ice: the Avon Park column of 4 February 1915 recorded the death of William Krause on 30 January 1915, born in Germany in 1840, at the Park since 1888, “engaged in many different enterprises here,” and buried in the Avon Park cemetery.[dsc-1915-02-04]

William Krause and son’s ice plant, Avon Park Locals, September 1905

The Avon Park Locals of 8 September 1905. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Public domain.[dsc-1905-09-08]

Feagin’s light plant

The same history credits the town’s first utility to a newcomer from Polk County. Luther Octavos Feagin moved to Avon Park with his family “in 1912 or 1913,” and “built the first electric light plant, water and ice service. Mrs. Feagin read the light and water meters. He later sold the business to the Stuarts of Bartow.”[maxwell-1976] The state business directory of 1918 lists him, alone among the town’s thirty-five names, in that trade: “Feagin L O, ice mfr.”[gaz-1918] The book’s separate account of electricity, which does not mention Feagin, says that after the railway came in 1912 “a power plant was built on the east side of the railroad track near where the water tank now stands,” run “with a diesel engine” whose generator “was hardly waist high to a man,” with a capacity of 150 kilowatts.[maxwell-1976] Whether that plant was Feagin’s is not stated, but the dates agree.

The town’s Avon Park column of 25 February 1915 caught the work in progress: “W. O. Feagen has a force at work on his water system for the town. He has a well 400 feet deep. We are to have pure water, and in any quantities for all purposes.”[dsc-1915-02-25]

The county paper shows the plant at work. On 4 January 1915 the town council ordered its bills paid, among them $11.50 to the “Light Company.”[dsc-1915-01-07] In March the Avon Park column reported work at “the Avon Park electric light station” and the “sinking [of a] well 400 feet”[dsc-1915-03-11], and the same month the council asked the State Board of Health to send an officer “for the purpose of inspecting and testing the water … from the city water supply and wells and sanitary conditions.”[dsc-1915-03-18]

An earlier scheme had come to nothing. Dr. James McCartney, who bought the Verona in 1900, organized “The Florida Highlands Fruit and Power Company” about 1901 to generate “several hundred horse power” at the outlet of Lake Letta, light Avon Park, Zolfo, Fort Meade and Bartow, run an electric railway to Zolfo, make paper from saw-palmetto and plant a thousand acres of citrus; it “never got beyond the printing of a few ‘promising prospectus and a few reams of handsome stock certificates.’”[maxwell-1976] No other record of the company has been found.

Typhoid and the well of 1915

Evidence: corroborated.

The council’s request to the State Board of Health in March 1915 was not routine. The Board’s own bulletin for that month records “Avon Park: Investigation of typhoid fever cases. Samples of water taken for examination,”[fhn-1915-03] and its annual report says that “the health condition of DeSoto County was very good with the exception of an outbreak of typhoid fever at Fort Ogden and also at Avon Park. Both places were visited.”[fsbh-1915] One Avon Park resident died of typhoid in the year the Board counted.[fhn-1916] The four-hundred-foot well sunk at the light station that same month was the town’s first deep well of record. Two years earlier the United States Geological Survey had described Avon Park’s water as coming from driven wells twelve to eighty feet deep in the sand, “large” in supply and soft, with no deep well to report.[usgs-wsp-319]

The Florida Ice and Power Company, 1920

The Sanborn Map Company’s surveyors recorded the town’s utilities in November 1920 for the fire-insurance underwriters. Water came as “domestic service only from Florida Ice & Power Co.,” through two- and three-inch mains “supplied from 50,000 gal. W.T. elevd 100’,” with “no fire service.” The company’s plant stands on the map west of the Atlantic Coast Line track near Walnut Street, with the tank beside it, a steam-powered works with “no watchman” and electric lights; a second, thirty-foot water tower stood on the shore of Lake Verona near the foot of Church Street. Public lighting was electric.[sanborn-1920] The council minutes record on 31 October 1923 that the “Florida Ice and Power Company agreed to make extensive improvements to town water system,” and the history says that “from 1922 the electric service was furnished to the Ridge area of Florida by the Florida Ice & Power or the Florida Public Service and later the South Florida Gas & Light. Ice plants were operated by the electric company,” Avon Park’s under Dan Norris, with an ice truck making daily deliveries.[maxwell-1976]

Sewers, 1926

The boom paid for the sewers. On 17 February 1926 the council authorized a $375,000 bond issue “for sewage and site for municipal building,” and on 9 June 1926 passed the ordinance borrowing $210,000 for sewers, $30,000 for a city hall and $115,000 for parks.[maxwell-1976] That ordinance, No. 110, and the election of 20 July 1926 that carried it, were validated by the Legislature the next year as $210,000 for “sanitary and storm sewerage and a disposal plant.”[lof-1927-12513] The new charter of June 1927 gave the council power over “water works and lighting plants” and over franchises to telephone and street-railway companies.[lof-1927-12514] What became of those bonds is told in The land boom and the bust at Avon Park.

The state health bulletin of March 1926 counted Avon Park among the towns “engaged in this necessity of modern existence,” the sewer.[fhn-1926-03]

The wells of the Floridan aquifer

By 1950 the town’s water came from three deep wells into the Floridan aquifer, the limestone under the whole peninsula, one layer of which geologists had in 1944 named the Avon Park limestone after a test well on the bombing range. The Florida Geological Survey described the supply in 1956: “Well 391 is 1,040 feet deep and is cased to 350 feet with 10-inch pipe. Well 392 is 1,153 feet deep and is cased to 260 feet with 15-inch casing. Well 403 is 1,301 feet deep and is cased to 301 feet with 10-inch pipe. The three wells together can produce about 1,800 gallons per minute with the present pumps. The estimated total pumpage for the year 1950 was about 375,000,000 gallons.” A pumping test on well 403, made by the engineers who drilled it, showed that the last 85 feet, into the Lake City limestone below, raised its yield from 463 to 636 gallons a minute, and the water of well 391 came up at 77 degrees, with 106 parts per million of hardness.[fgs-ri-15] The city’s own account today puts its system at seven wells in the same aquifer.[avonpark-utilities]

The plant on Lake Lotela, 1928

Evidence: corroborated.

On 1 February 1927 the council “agreed to sell land and other concessions to Fla. Public Service Co. to build Power Plant.”[maxwell-1976] A survey of Florida’s new power stations published in November 1928 lists the one “at Avon Park (put into service January 31, 1928) by the Florida Public Service Company.”[gct-1928-11-08] The 1976 history says the plant on Lake Lotela, on South Highlands Avenue, was built in 1928 by “the Florida Power Corporation”;[maxwell-1976] the contemporary record names the Florida Public Service Company, and the two are reconciled by the companies’ own history. Florida Power Corporation, the St. Petersburg utility that took that name in 1927,[duke-125] came under a holding company after the crash of 1929 which at the same time took over “the Florida Public Service, headquartered in Deland, which powered much of Central Florida,” and “towards the end of World War II, Florida Power officially merged with the Florida Public Service company.”[iltb-florida-power] The old name outlived the merger in the town: in April 1946 the Avon Park baseball club “obtained material from the Florida Public Service Cos.” for the lights at its field, “120 bulbs of 1500 watts each mounted on 80 foot poles.”[kwc-1946-04-16]

The history says the company “enlarged the plant in 1945 and again in 1952. It was enlarged again in 1970,” and gave its output in 1976 as 104 megawatts with 35 employees.[maxwell-1976] The company’s own statements support the middle date and change the last two. In January 1951 Florida Power Corporation advertised that “another 40,000-kw generator is being installed at the Avon Park Plant and should be ‘on the line’ in 1952,”[bj-1951-01-18] and by November 1952 it was counting “the new 45,000 kilowatt addition to our Avon Park plant” among 166,000 kilowatts of new capacity.[bs-1952-11-21] Its 1976 report to the Florida Public Service Commission lists a boiler at Avon Park in service since January 1952, burning oil and gas; two gas-turbine generators, P-1 and P-2, installed in 1968 and rated together at about 67,600 to 69,900 kilowatts; and the renewal that year of its franchise with the City of Avon Park, at six per cent of residential and commercial revenue less municipal taxes.[fpsc-fpc-1976] In 1963 the company’s advertisements listed the “Avon Park Plant” among its six generating stations.[bsj-1963-02-14]

The federal generator register carries the plant to its end. Plant 624, “Avon Park,” at 1415 South Highlands Avenue, drawing its water from Lake Lotela, held two 33.7-megawatt combustion turbines, P1 burning natural gas and P2 distillate oil, both in service since December 1968, owned by Duke Energy Florida.[eia-860-2019] Both were retired in October 2020.[eia-860-2021]

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. S. F. Tucker (department editor), The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 25 February 1915, page 7: Avon Park Department, S. F. Tucker, Editor (1915) · newspaper
  2. S. F. Tucker (department editor), The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 4 February 1915, page 5: Avon Park Department, S. F. Tucker, Editor (1915) · newspaper
  3. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 8 September 1905, page 8: Avon Park Locals, William Krause and son's ice plant (1905) · newspaper
  4. 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
  5. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 7 January 1915: Avon Park notes and advertisements (1915) · newspaper
  6. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 11 March 1915: Avon Park notes (1915) · newspaper
  7. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 18 March 1915: Avon Park notes (1915) · newspaper
  8. Florida State Board of Health, Florida Health Notes, volume 10, number 3, March 1915: State Health Officer's report of work (1915) · official
  9. Florida State Board of Health, Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Florida, 1915, page 85 (1916) · official
  10. Florida State Board of Health, Florida Health Notes, volume 11, 1916: typhoid fever deaths by municipality (1916) · official
  11. George Charlton Matson and Samuel Sanford, United States Geological Survey, Geology and Ground Waters of Florida, United States Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 319, 1913, page 296: general water resources of De Soto County (1913) · official
  12. Florida State Board of Health, Florida Health Notes, volume 18, number 3, March 1926 (1926) · official
  13. Ernest W. Bishop, Florida Geological Survey, Geology and Ground-Water Resources of Highlands County, Florida, Florida Geological Survey Report of Investigations No. 15, 1956, pages 18-19, 51-53, 62-65 (1956) · official
  14. City of Avon Park, Utilities, City of Avon Park (2026) · official
  15. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1918 (1918) · book
  16. Sanborn Map Company, via the Library of Congress, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Avon Park, DeSoto County, Florida, November 1920 (4 sheets) (1920) · archival
  17. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 12513 (No. 708), Laws of Florida 1927: validating Ordinance No. 110 and the Avon Park bond election of 20 July 1926 (1927) · official
  18. 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
  19. Gadsden County Times, Phenomenal Growth Seen in Section by Public Development, Gadsden County Times (Quincy, Fla.), 8 November 1928, page 31 (1928) · newspaper
  20. The Key West Citizen, Lights For Avon Park Club Too, The Key West Citizen, 16 April 1946, page 3 (1946) · newspaper
  21. I Love the Burg, St. Petersburg, drawing on the Duke Energy company archivist, 125 Years of Power and Light in St. Petersburg, part two (2024) · secondary
  22. Duke Energy, 125 years strong: celebrating our commitment to Florida (2024) · secondary
  23. Florida Power Corporation, in The Brooksville Journal, Florida Power Corporation advertisement, The Brooksville Journal, 18 January 1951, page 9 (1951) · newspaper
  24. Florida Power Corporation, in The Brooksville Sun, Florida Power Corporation advertisement, The Brooksville Sun, 21 November 1952, page 6 (1952) · newspaper
  25. Florida Power Corporation, in The Brooksville Sun-Journal, Florida Power Corporation advertisement, The Brooksville Sun-Journal, 14 February 1963, page 2 (1963) · newspaper
  26. Florida Power Corporation, Florida Power Corporation, Annual Report to the Florida Public Service Commission for the year ended 31 December 1976 (1977) · official
  27. United States Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-860, Annual Electric Generator Report, 2019: plant 624, Avon Park (2020) · official
  28. United States Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-860, Annual Electric Generator Report, 2021: retired and cancelled generators, plant 624, Avon Park (2022) · official

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