The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Main Street’s buildings and the City Hall

Summary

Avon Park’s Main Street was rebuilt in brick between 1912 and 1935, and most of what was built then is still there. The National Register listed the district in 1990 with sixteen contributing resources; the county’s own tax roll, filled in from a survey of 1989, gives a year for nearly every one of them, and where the two disagree the county’s dates match the Society’s 1976 history. The first brick building, of 1912, was always a bank. The Brickell Building of 1919 was the town hall, the lodge hall and the first college. The Whidden and Wild buildings of 1913 and 1921 held the shops of the west block until the Wild Building came down in 2021. The Park Theater of 1935, where Black patrons climbed to the balcony by the side door, closed in 1979 and is a church. And the City Hall of 1929 at the head of the Mall is still the city hall.

The record and its dates

The district’s buildings are listed in the National Register nomination, which dates each from a survey made in 1989. Highlands County entered those dates in its property roll in 1995, and the roll notes on each parcel that its year built comes from the “historic property survey.”[hcpao-parcels] The two records agree on the First National Bank (1912), the Coen Building (1921), the first Whidden Building (1913), the Ridge Chevrolet building (1923), the Jacaranda (1926) and the Park Theater (1935). They part on two. The Brickell Building is 1921 in the nomination and 1919 in the county roll, as in the 1976 history; and the small frame shop at 22 East Main Street, “about 1915” in the nomination, is 1894 in the county roll, which would make it the oldest building on the street.[hcpao-parcels][nrhp-90000486][maxwell-1976]

The south side, west of Lake Avenue

The First National Bank building, 1-9 West Main Street, 1912. “In 1912 the first brick building was erected on the south side of Main Street, by Fritz Williams. This became the First National Bank building. The second story was used for office space and later for a rooming hotel.” It “was always a bank location”: the First National, then from February 1930 the Barnett National Bank, then the Sottile Bank, until the Avon Citrus Bank moved across the street. Beside it R. I. Harris and T. J. McGinnis kept the drug store that Dr. J. A. Lander bought and sold to Dr. W. C. Touchton, whose family ran Touchton’s Rexall Drugs there for the rest of the century, taking over the bank’s corner in the end.[maxwell-1976] The nomination gives the builder as William L. Smith, who also built the Methodist church, the Coen and Whidden buildings and brick buildings at Charlotte Harbor, Venus, Haines City and Mountain Lake; when the building was remodeled in 1920 its marble corner column was taken down and set up in the Mall in front of it.[nrhp-90000486] The column now marks a time capsule buried in 1985, to be opened in 2085.[newssun-walking-tour-2026] The building is privately owned and let as suites.[hcpao-parcels]

The Coen Building, 15-21 West Main Street, 1921. J. B. Coen, who came in 1921, built the one-story brick block next to the bank. The Western Union office was at its west end on Forest Avenue, where Miss Ida Skipper took the flood of telegrams of the 1928 hurricane; F. S. Jordon moved his jewelry business in from a wooden shop and Jordon and Son were still there in 1976, “the oldest continuous business in the same location in Avon Park.” Ratcliff’s Red and White grocery, Cliff Thomas’s meat market, the A and P, Epperson’s dry goods, Ben Franklin’s five-and-ten and two optometrists all traded there in their turn.[maxwell-1976] The county roll records it remodeled in 2005 as a restaurant.[hcpao-parcels]

The Whidden buildings, 115 and 117-123 West Main Street, 1913 and 1921. Walter Whidden, who had “a private banking business and maintained a New York Stock Exchange daily report in his bank,” built a two-story block of cream brick at the corner of South Butler Avenue; its upper floor was a hotel with a balcony over the sidewalk, kept for many years by Mrs. H. C. Bigbie, where in the Depression a room could be had for three dollars a week.[maxwell-1976]

The Wild Building, 101-111 West Main Street, 1921. Max Wild, who came from Switzerland in 1892 and to Avon Park in 1895, built the two-story brick next to Whidden’s, out to the corner of Forest Avenue, leaving George Mostris’s fruit stand on the corner until the block was finished. B. H. James’s grocery, Clark’s Mercantile, Ott and Son, the McCarthy Bakery, Pearl Spinks’s five-and-ten, the Avon Park Times printing shop and the Mostris pool hall of the 1930s were all in this block. Both buildings “stood vacant much of the time until 1956,” when the Swistons bought the Whidden and Dr. M. S. Michaels the Wild building and renovated the whole block,[maxwell-1976][newssun-wild-2020] joining the two with a small one-story link. The Wild Building was demolished in 2021, and its lot is now the city’s, vacant.[hcpao-parcels]

The north side

The Brickell Building, 2-12 East Main Street, 1919. The block opposite the bank, with its polychrome brick and swan’s-neck pediment, is described in The Brickell Building: the council chamber, lodge hall and dance floor of the 1920s, the city hall of 1926-28, the junior college’s first classrooms in 1965, and since 2023 a gym.

The Hotel Jacaranda, 7-23 East Main Street, 1926, William J. Heim’s largest work, is described in The Hotel Jacaranda; it is owned by the South Florida State College Foundation and was restored in 1991.[hcpao-parcels]

22 East Main Street. The one frame building on the street, the Avon Park Book Exchange of the nomination, was Arthur Sargent’s post office: “about 1908 Arthur Sargent built a small two-story house on East Main Street, which became the post office and was used for more than 20 years.” His daughter Fannie, Mrs. Reeves and later Mrs. Glen Spinks, was postmaster there for seventeen years, so it became the Spinks building; when the new post office was built in 1922 the city took it for the Chamber of Commerce, and by 1976 it was the Betts Book Exchange.[maxwell-1976] The county roll dates the house to 1894.[hcpao-parcels]

The Park Theater, 36 East Main Street, 1935. Heim’s Art Deco theater, the only one in the town, whose completion the nomination takes as the end of the district’s historic development.[nrhp-90000486] The Floyd Theaters chain took it over in 1940, renamed it the Hilans in April 1950, and closed it on 6 September 1979, and it was a church by 1981.[cinema-treasures-hilans] Black patrons “had to walk in the side door and watch movies from upstairs because of segregation.”[newssun-walking-tour-2026] It belongs to Faith Temple Ministry, which remodeled it in 1999.[hcpao-parcels]

The City Hall, 110 East Main Street, 1928-29, is described in Avon Park City Hall.

The Seaboard station on North Museum Avenue, of 1925, is described in The Seaboard Air Line station, and the Mall, its bandstand and the Davidson flagpole in The Mile Long Mall and The Avon Park bandstand.

The pictures

The nomination’s twenty-two photographs of 1989-90 are not the public’s to copy: the National Park Service says that registration-form photographs may be “contributed or licensed by third parties that may be protected by copyright,” and that reproduction beyond fair use “requires the written permission of the copyright owners.”[nps-copyright] The pictures of the street reproduced here are therefore the Society’s own plates of 1976, the State Archives’ postcards, and a photographer’s Creative Commons views of 2010.

The Mall in the 1920s, facing the First National Bank building

The Mall in the 1920s, its central parkway newly planted, looking toward the First National Bank building. The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976), page 173. Avon Park Historical Society.[maxwell-1976]

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. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Avon Park Historic District (1990) · 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. Highlands County Property Appraiser, Highlands County Property Appraiser, parcel records for the Avon Park Historic District: 28332201006900010A (1 W. Main), 28332201006900020A (15 W. Main), 28332201007000010A (101 W. Main), 28332201007000020A (119 W. Main), 28332201007200020A (307 W. Main), 28332201004200045A (2 E. Main), 28332201004800100A (19 E. Main), 28332201004200042A (22 E. Main), 28332201004200030A (36 E. Main), 28332201004200040A (110 E. Main) (2026) · official
  4. Elaine Levey, Avon Park Depot Museum, in the Highlands News-Sun, September 2020, Wylde versus Wild, or Wild-Whidden Building (2020) · newspaper
  5. Highlands News-Sun, 2026, Learn some of Avon Park's history on a walking tour (2026) · newspaper
  6. Cinema Treasures, Hilans Theater, Avon Park (2026) · secondary
  7. National Park Service, National Register Content and Copyright (2026) · official

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