The Original Town Plat, the Land Title, and the Shape of Avon Park

Summary

The land Avon Park stands on left federal ownership as swamp. The General Land Office tract book for Township 33 South, Range 28 East records Section 22 — the section containing Main Street — as “Selected as Swamp Act of Sept. 28, 1850. Approved Nov. 8, 1879,” meaning it passed to the State of Florida’s Internal Improvement Fund and never to a homesteader.[glo-tract-book] That single line explains why sixteen federal land patents exist in these townships and none in the town’s own section, and it puts the title trail firmly in state records.

Sheet 1, the index sheet: the key map of the whole town with every block numbered. Sanborn Map Company, via Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Public domain.[sanborn-1920]

The original plat has not been found. The Highlands County Property Appraiser carries the whole townsite under the subdivision name “TOWN OF AVON PARK” with no plat book or page cited for any of roughly 2,400 parcels, while every later subdivision layered on top of it cites one.[hc-property-appraiser] Three parcels instead cite an unindexed “Transcript Book” — the usual vehicle for copying a parent county’s records into a new county’s after a split, which fits Highlands County’s creation out of DeSoto in 1921. Confirming that would require a visit to the courthouse.

What can be seen is the town itself, in November 1920, on four Sanborn fire insurance sheets.[sanborn-1920]

How the land left public ownership

Florida’s Internal Improvement Fund was created by the legislature in 1855 to hold the state’s federal land grants — an 1845 statehood grant and land under the Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act of 1850 — as collateral for railroad bonds. Reconstruction-era railroad defaults left it insolvent, owing roughly a million dollars by 1880 and facing federal foreclosure.[davis-disston]

Hamilton Disston solved that in 1881 by buying four million acres for a million dollars, the largest single land purchase by one person in American history. His contract specified no particular location: he could select from about twelve and a half million acres of unsold swamp land statewide. He resold half to the English investor Sir Edward J. Reed that December and marketed the rest through the Florida Land and Improvement Company.[davis-disston]

Whether Township 33 South, Range 28 East was among Disston’s selections is not established. No township-level list of what he actually chose has been found. Extensive historical audits of the Disston Land Purchase have failed to locate a Disston-side deed, map, or State Archives Internal Improvement Fund trustee-minutes record explicitly naming this township.[davis-disston][dodson-1971] (AI-generated search snippets claiming the Florida Land and Improvement Co. explicitly transferred this specific township were rejected upon audit as factually unsupported). The link rests entirely on Crosby’s own word: his 1888 pamphlet lists Disston as a financial reference, and his 1923 interview names Disston’s agent, Captain Adams, as the man who gave him a contract for the township.[crosby-1888-pamphlet] That is a plausible and probably correct account, but it is one man’s recollection and should be labeled as such.

Section 22’s approval as swamp land in November 1879 is consistent with it: the state had it, and the state was selling it to Disston two years later.

The plat: three dates and no document

The National Register nomination’s narrative calls the town “originally platted in 1892.” Its own bibliography lists three filings: Manatee County, 23 December 1887; DeSoto County, 23 September 1887; and DeSoto County, 1 January 1892. The nomination never mentions the discrepancy, let alone resolves it.[nrhp-avon-park-district]

Crosby’s 1888 pamphlet already describes Lake Forest as a laid-out plat in Section 22, “about the center” of the township, which is consistent with a filing existing by late 1887.[crosby-1888-pamphlet] Whether the 1892 filing is a fresh plat, a re-plat, or a correction is unknown.

A second and much fuller account of the filings exists, and it does not match the nomination’s. Barbara Berry Darsey, writing the Avon Park Guide for the Federal Writers’ Project, copied the plat entries straight out of the Highlands County clerk’s transcript books in 1936 or 1937. She found two maps, numbered 13 and 14: a map of Avon Park in Manatee County filed for record on 11 May 1886 and recorded on 16 June 1886 at plat book page 4, and a map of Avon Park in DeSoto County filed on 23 September 1889. Both were filed in Crosby’s name as general manager. Her dates and the nomination’s cannot both be right.[darsey-1937]

The county boundary history is part of why this is tangled. DeSoto County was created out of Manatee in 1887 — the same year as two of the three filings — and Highlands County was created out of DeSoto in 1921. A plat could have been filed at Bradenton, refiled at Arcadia, and copied again at Sebring.

Highlands County’s own online index covers only records from 1981 forward, and DeSoto County’s are not searchable online at all.

What the 1859 survey shows

The original federal township survey plat for Township 33 South, Range 28 East was retrieved. It was made by deputy surveyors William Mickler and John S. Jackson and approved by Surveyor General Francis L. Dancy on 27 August 1859.[glo-tract-book] It is a rectangular-survey plat, not a town plat, and it predates the town by twenty-seven years — but it fixes the section geometry that Crosby later laid his streets over, and it is the earliest map of this ground that exists.

The federal patents that do exist

Sixteen patents were issued in Townships 33 and 34 South, Range 28 East, between 1891 and 1929.[glo-tract-book] They are the homesteaders and cash buyers around the town rather than in it, and they matter for a separate question about early land claims. In Township 33 South the patentees were James H. Thompson (1891), Charles J. Williams (1893), Albert E. Bennett (1895), Katie Wilson (1910) and Edwin D. Putney (1910) — four of the five in Section 10. The eleven in Township 34 South run from Andrew O. Caldwell in 1918 to Gerald H. Bee in 1929.

Who these individuals were and what became of their land holdings remains unestablished in the public historical record. A comprehensive review of openly indexable web sources—including Florida Memory, Chronicling America, and the Bureau of Land Management tract books—yielded no verifiable connections to their subsequent land dispositions or personal biographies. Tracking these titles forward and locating reliable census schedules will require direct county courthouse title research or access to subscription genealogical databases.

Section 22 in Township 34 South does have patents — Butler, Stephens and Bee — but that is a different section of the same number, one township south, and it is not the Avon Park townsite.

Avon Park in November 1920

Four Sanborn fire insurance sheets record a town of 1,200 people, still in DeSoto County, water supplied by the Florida Ice and Power Company, and a volunteer fire department with one chemical engine and no enforced fire limits.[sanborn-1920]

The town is a regular grid of numbered blocks, at least 1 through 156, each split by a mid-block alley into a base block and an “A” half-block. At least twenty-eight named streets appear and none is numbered: Avon, Bell, Butler, Camphor, Canfield, Central, Church, Cornell, Dixie Highway, Fairfield, Feagin, Forest, Glenwood, Hall, La Grande, Lake, Main, Michigan, Mill, Pine, Pleasant, Prospect, Railroad, State, Thomas, Tulane Circle, Verona Avenue and Circle, Walnut, and Winthrop. Some are trees, some are lakes and places, some are evidently people. There is no single naming scheme.

The commercial core sits where Main Street crosses the Atlantic Coast Line’s diagonal right of way. The map shows the Park Hotel, Smith & Gaylord Garage, the Ford Sales Company garage, a two-story brick building, the First Baptist Church, a bakery, the printing office of the Highlands Pilot, and a building under construction labeled “to be Motion Picture Theatre.” Two citrus packing houses — the Avon Park Citrus Growers’ and Roberts Brothers’ — back onto the railroad. Around Lake Verona stand the Hotel Avon, the Masonic Temple, the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer and the First Congregational Church.

The industrial district lies about a mile and a quarter south of the post office: the Flint Lumber Company’s steam saw mill and planing mill with loading platforms, a tram railway, a log run, a slab pile and a refuse burner, together with the Mutual Crate Company and the Avon Manufacturing Company’s crate mill. The Atlantic Coast Line’s freight and passenger depot stands on Michigan Avenue at Church Street beside company section housing.

Main Street on this map is an ordinary street of standard width, lined directly by building fronts. There is no median and no greenspace.

Looking down Main Street, Avon Park, Florida, November 1916. Sand asphalt pavement is being laid on Main Street by the W. P. Kennedy Construction Company. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. [fl-memory-rc17233]

The Mile Long Mall

That absence dates the Mall. The National Register nomination records it as laid out in phases between 1920 and 1927: a City Council bond issue in May 1920, an extension west to the Atlantic Coast Line tracks in 1922, and completion in 1927 to its present length, from Central Avenue on the west to Verona Avenue on the east.[nrhp-avon-park-district] The November 1920 Sanborn map catches the town just before the work became visible.

The planting design was drawn up in 1923 by the landscape architect W. A. Cook, with foliage supplied under contract by the Reasoner Brothers Nursery of Oneco, Florida — jacaranda, palm, royal poinciana and live oak.[nrhp-avon-park-district]

So the Mall is not a founding-era feature. It is a boom-era civic improvement, laid over a street that Crosby platted as, in the nomination’s words, “a narrow, one lane road.”

The historic district today

The Avon Park Historic District is a roughly one-mile linear district following Main Street and its Mall greenspace, from the greenspace just east of South Delaney Avenue west to U.S. 27, plus the Seaboard Air Line depot about a hundred yards north of the Mall on Museum Avenue. It contains seventeen standing buildings, thirteen of them contributing.[nrhp-avon-park-district]

No building in the district predates 1912 except the Bandstand. The first brick building was the Old First National Bank of 1912, and development runs through the Park Theater of 1935. Everything Crosby built is gone.

Who owned the town after Crosby

By the mid-1890s, Crosby’s enterprise faced significant controversy. In 1896, a series of lawsuits erupted that called into question the land titles sold by the Florida Development Company, causing a panic among residents who feared losing their properties.[nps-crosby] Crosby eventually left Avon Park amid this scrutiny.

Abbie R. Dodge (Mrs. A. K. Dodge) acquired the Florida Development Company’s land at the January 1897 sheriff’s sale. A Savannah newspaper report adds detail: her hotel partnership was Dodge & Cullens, her judgment was for $10,000, and the 20,000 acres included “a large nursery of fruit trees, a saw mill and six cottages.” Following the purchase, she carried out installment contracts to clear title for the settlers who had been caught in the legal panic.[savannah-morning-news]

She held it for years. A tax-deed notice in the De Soto County News of February 1906 shows lots in “the town of Avon Park… in sec 22 tp 33 r 28e” still carried in the name of “Abbie R. Dodge and Wm. Boyd” on tax certificates of 1898 and 1900.[desoto-news-1906] That notice also independently confirms the townsite’s section, township and range from a county record entirely outside the newspaper and federal land sources.

While the specific identity of William Boyd has not been definitively proven, two contemporary figures emerge from the regional records: William Boyd, an attorney practicing in Jacksonville in 1901–1902, and William F. Boyd, a citrus grower and utility operator in neighboring Winter Haven. Given Abbie R. Dodge’s simultaneous presence in Jacksonville rebuilding and operating the Windsor Hotel, the Jacksonville attorney is the most probable candidate for joint investment or legal representation on her DeSoto County tax certificates. What happened to the town’s ownership between 1900 and the appearance of the Scenic Highlands Development Company by 1918 remains largely untraced, though Florida Supreme Court records confirm that Abbie R. Dodge did deed Avon Park property directly to her Jacksonville business partner Frank T. Cullens.[smith-v-wilson-1916] Tracing the exact chain of title from Dodge to the 1918 syndicate will require physical research in DeSoto County title deed books and tax rolls.

The Pabor Lake Pineapple ran a standing Real Estate Record column through its whole run, October 1892 to September 1897, listing conveyances by name as they were made — a running index of who was buying lots at Avon Park in exactly the years the county deed books are not available. About fifty purchaser and resident names appear in it, including twenty-two specific buyers in the January and February 1893 columns alone.[pineapple]

The Florida Development Company’s own November 1891 incorporation is itself recorded at two different capital figures in contemporary newspapers: $250,000 and $350,000.[savannah-morning-news]

References

• darsey-1937 — Barbara Berry Darsey. Avon Park Guide, typescript for the Federal Writers’ Project, pages 190 and 192: Bibliography of Chronology. 31 December 1938. avon-park-guide-federal-writers-project-1937.md
• sanborn-1920 — Sanborn Map Company, via the Library of Congress. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Avon Park, DeSoto County, Florida, November 1920 (4 sheets). 1 November 1920. sanborn-1920-avon-park.md
• nrhp-avon-park-district — Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation / National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Avon Park Historic District (ref. 90000486). 22 March 1990. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/90000486_text
• glo-tract-book — Bureau of Land Management. General Land Office tract book and 1859 township survey plat for Township 33 South, Range 28 East, Tallahassee Meridian. 31 August 2026. https://glorecords.blm.gov/s/
• hc-property-appraiser — Highlands County Property Appraiser. Parcel records for the TOWN OF AVON PARK subdivision, Sections 15, 22 and 23, Township 33 South, Range 28 East. 31 August 2026. https://www.hcpao.org
• crosby-1888-pamphlet — O. M. Crosby. Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park. 1888. crosby-1888-common-sense-about-florida.md
• davis-disston — T. Frederick Davis. The Disston Land Purchase, Florida Historical Quarterly (1939). 1939. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/
• dodson-1971 — Pat Dodson. Hamilton Disston’s St. Cloud Sugar Plantation, 1887-1901, Florida Historical Quarterly (1971). 1971. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/
• nps-crosby — United States National Park Service. Florida Development Company and Oliver Crosby. 17 September 2026. nps.gov
• desoto-news-1906 — De Soto County News (Arcadia, Florida). Tax-deed legal notice naming lots in the town of Avon Park, De Soto County News, February 1906. 1 February 1906. https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/
• savannah-morning-news — Savannah Morning News. Reports on the Florida Development Company’s incorporation (November 1891) and the sheriff’s sale to Abbie R. Dodge (February 1897). 1 February 1897. https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/
• pineapple — W. E. Pabor and E. A. Pabor. Pabor Lake Pineapple, October 1892 to September 1897, including its Real Estate Record columns. 15 September 1897. pabor-lake-pineapple.md
• fl-memory-rc17233 — Unknown / W.P. Kennedy Construction Company. Looking down Main Street - Avon Park, Florida (November 1916). 1 November 1916. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/28841
• smith-v-wilson-1916 — Supreme Court of Florida. Southern Reporter, Volume 71, page 919 (Smith v. Wilson). 1916. https://cite.case.law/so/71/919/

Related

• Reference: the 1920 Sanborn map of Avon Park
• Mile Long Mall
• Avon Park Bandstand
• Finding: Section 22 left federal ownership as swamp land in 1879
• Finding: the original Avon Park plat cannot be found online
• Finding: Pabor Lake Colony Real Estate Record Buyers, January–February 1893
• Report: the founding of Avon Park and its first decade
• Florida Development Company
• Entity: Abbie R. Dodge

Where this comes from

Evidence

corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.

Review

unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.

Rights

society

Sources

1. Barbara Berry Darsey, Avon Park Guide, typescript for the Federal Writers' Project, pages 190 and 192: Bibliography of Chronology (references/avon-park-guide-federal-writers-project-1937.md) (1938) · archival
2. Sanborn Map Company, via the Library of Congress, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Avon Park, DeSoto County, Florida, November 1920 (4 sheets) (1920)
3. Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation / National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Avon Park Historic District (ref. 90000486) (1990)
4. Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office tract book and 1859 township survey plat for Township 33 South, Range 28 East, Tallahassee Meridian (2026)
5. Highlands County Property Appraiser, Parcel records for the TOWN OF AVON PARK subdivision, Sections 15, 22 and 23, Township 33 South, Range 28 East (2026)
6. O. M. Crosby, Common Sense About Florida: Lake Forest and Avon Park (1888)
7. T. Frederick Davis, The Disston Land Purchase, Florida Historical Quarterly (1939) (1939)
8. Pat Dodson, Hamilton Disston's St. Cloud Sugar Plantation, 1887-1901, Florida Historical Quarterly (1971) (1971)
9. United States National Park Service, Florida Development Company and Oliver Crosby (nps.gov) (2026)
10. De Soto County News (Arcadia, Florida), Tax-deed legal notice naming lots in the town of Avon Park, De Soto County News, February 1906 (1906)
11. Savannah Morning News, Reports on the Florida Development Company's incorporation (November 1891) and the sheriff's sale to Abbie R. Dodge (February 1897) (1897)
12. W. E. Pabor and E. A. Pabor, Pabor Lake Pineapple, October 1892 to September 1897, including its Real Estate Record columns (1897)
13. Unknown / W.P. Kennedy Construction Company, Looking down Main Street - Avon Park, Florida (November 1916) (1916)
14. Supreme Court of Florida, Southern Reporter, Volume 71, page 919 (Smith v. Wilson) (1916)

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