The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Prisoners and patients — the state institutions around Avon Park, 1940-1978

Around the middle of the twentieth century, Avon Park held three separate institutions that later accounts have often run together: a “prison camp,” a “state institution” dated variously to 1951 and 1957, and a state hospital voted in 1951. They were three different places, run by three different governments, holding three different kinds of people. This report separates them.

Who ran it Where When Who was held
Highlands County Prison Camp The county On Lake Bonnet, north of Avon Park Open by 1940; operating in 1941 County prisoners, 21 in 1940, 17 of them Black
Federal emergency detention camp Federal Bureau of Prisons The bombing range’s cantonment, ten miles east Late 1951 – 1953 Standby McCarran Act detention site; no detainees held
Avon Park Correctional Institution The State of Florida The same cantonment, subleased From April 1957 Minimum- and medium-custody men, 700 by the 1970s
Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center The State of Florida Two miles south of town on the Sebring highway Patients from December 1956 Voluntary patients, 64 beds

The county camp on Lake Bonnet

The oldest of the three institutions is the county’s road camp. The federal census of 30 April 1940 enumerated the Highlands County Prison Camp near Avon Park: twenty-one prisoners, seventeen of them Black and one a woman (Anna Johnson, age 30), under warden A. H. Skinner and guard George Collier.[census-1940-prison-camp]

Under Florida law following the 1923 statutory abolition of private convict leasing (Chapter 9126, Laws of Florida 1923), Florida counties retained direct authority to operate county convict forces for public road and bridge maintenance (Compiled General Laws of Florida 1927, §§ 8612–8622). While the Florida State Road Department maintained thirty-two state convict camps by 1938, no state convict camp was assigned to Highlands County.[srd-reports] The Lake Bonnet camp was established and managed directly by the Highlands County Board of County Commissioners for county road maintenance.

In 1941, the Florida Legislature formally designated the public highway serving the facility as a state road, routing it from State Road 8 approximately one mile north of the Seaboard Air Line Railway crossing directly to the “Highlands County Prison Camp on Bonnett Lake.”[laws-20297-1941]

The federal camp on the range

Under Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950 (the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, 64 Stat. 1019), the President was authorized to declare an “Internal Security Emergency” in the event of invasion, declaration of war, or insurrection in aid of a foreign enemy, empowering the Attorney General to apprehend and detain persons suspected of espionage or sabotage.[mccarran-act-1950] To implement the act, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath directed Federal Bureau of Prisons Director James V. Bennett in late 1951 to establish and maintain six standby emergency detention facilities across the United States: Avon Park, Florida; Allenwood, Pennsylvania; Florence and Wickenburg, Arizona; El Reno, Oklahoma; and Tule Lake, California.[hcis-hearings-1970][time-1969-detention]

At Avon Park, the Bureau of Prisons leased an 800-acre cantonment tract of the former Avon Park Army Airfield from the Department of the Air Force, encompassing eighteen World War II wooden barracks dormitories, mess halls, and utility works.[jubilee-1964-prison][hearing-2001] The camp was maintained on a standby care-and-custody basis by a small civilian caretaker staff; because no internal security emergency was ever proclaimed, no civilian detainees were ever held there, and the facility housed no regular convict population.[hcis-hearings-1970][time-1969-detention] In 1953, Congress discontinued operating appropriations for the Title II detention camps, and the Department of Justice deactivated active operations at Avon Park.[hearing-2001][hcis-hearings-1970] The Bureau of Prisons nonetheless retained its underlying lease on the cantonment, which made the site available for sublease when the State of Florida sought emergency space for state prisoners four years later.[jubilee-1964-prison][hearing-2001] Title II was repealed by Congress in 1971 under the Non-Detention Act (85 Stat. 347, 18 U.S.C. § 4001).[pl-92-128]

The state prison, from April 1957

Florida’s prisons were overcrowded in the 1950s, and the state went looking for a site.

The Department searched the State for possible prison sites, finally selecting the former Federal Bureau of Prison facility located at Avon Park Air Force Base. … Since the Bureau of Prisons still held the lease, the State of Florida subleased the property in 1957 and the Avon Park Correctional Institution began.[hearing-2001]

The prison’s own account, written for the town’s Diamond Jubilee in 1964, gives the month and the acreage: it “began operation in April of 1957,” on 800 acres subleased from the Bureau of Prisons, “primarily to relieve the over-crowded conditions at the Florida State Prison at Raiford,” for “minimum and medium custody adult males.” Its first superintendent was L. L. Wainwright — Louie Wainwright, later the head of Florida’s whole prison system for twenty-five years.[jubilee-1964-prison]

By 1959 “Avon Park Prison” was a line in the state’s general appropriations act: a superintendent at $6,500 a year, ninety-five employees, and money for two more dormitories and a laundry.[lof-1959-500] For twenty years its inmates — more than seven hundred of them — lived in “18 old dormitories that had served as barracks during World War II.” A close-custody unit was built in 1977 and the barracks were demolished in 1992.[hearing-2001] The land was leased for fifteen years, then given and sold to the state in the early 1970s: 143 acres donated by the federal government, 455 more bought.[hearing-2001]

The date is April 1957. The range’s 2004 natural resources plan says the state “opened AvPCI, a minimum-security prison camp, in 1951.”[inrmp-2004] Two independent sources — the prison’s own history and its warden’s sworn testimony — say 1957, and the federal camp was still open in 1951. The 1951 date is a conflation with the alcoholism hospital the Legislature voted for Avon Park that year, which is the fourth institution in this story and a different one.

The alcoholism center south of town

The state hospital that Avon Park spent eight years giving land for — venereal in 1943, mental in 1945, for alcoholics in 1951 — opened at last as the Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center, receiving its first patients in December 1956 and dedicated on 6 February 1957.[kwc-1957-06-05] It stood “two miles south of Avon Park and east off the highway,” modern buildings on a square block of lawn between two lakes.[gct-1959-03-19] It held sixty-four beds, treated patients for thirty days and sent them home to outpatient clinics, and its land later became the campus of the junior college. It is described in its own document, Entity: Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center, Avon Park.

It never had anything to do with the prison. Two miles south against ten miles east; a Methodist minister’s voluntary patients against Raiford’s overflow; the Board of Commissioners of State Institutions against the Division of Corrections. That they opened within two months of each other in the winter and spring of 1957 is why later accounts have run them together.

What the three had in common

All three put people to work on the land around Avon Park. The county camp’s prisoners almost certainly built its roads. The state prison’s minimum-custody men were still, in 2001, going out daily “to work on Department of Transportation road projects and around the range.”[hearing-2001] And the federal camp, whatever else it did, sat on a range that had to be cleared and kept. A town that in 1940 held twenty-one county prisoners, seventeen of them Black, in a camp on a lake was by 1959 hosting a state prison with ninety-five employees, and the labor of the people held there ran through its roads and its range for the whole of the period. That continuity is the thing to hold on to.

References

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. United States House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform, Sustaining Critical Military Training Facilities: Avon Park Air Force Range — hearing, House Committee on Government Reform, 4 August 2001, Serial No. 107-106; testimony of Dale Landress, Warden, Avon Park Correctional Institution (2001)
  2. Elaine Levey, Highlands News-Sun, The beginnings of the Avon Park prison — Historically Speaking, by Elaine Levey, reproducing the institution's own account in the 1964 Avon Park Diamond Jubilee booklet (2020)
  3. United States Congress, Internal Security Act of 1950, Title II — Emergency Detention Act of 1950 (Public Law 81-831, 64 Stat. 1019) (1950)
  4. United States House of Representatives, Committee on Internal Security, Hearings on H.R. 13453 and Related Bills, Directing the Repeal of the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, House Committee on Internal Security, 91st Congress, 2d Session (1970)
  5. United States Congress, Public Law 92-128, An Act to Repeal the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 (85 Stat. 347, 18 U.S.C. § 4001) (1971)
  6. TIME Magazine, Civil Liberties: The Phantom Camps (1969) · secondary
  7. The Key West Citizen (Key West, Fla.), Psychiatrists Aid Alcoholics, Study Causes, by Bill Gibb — The Key West Citizen, 5 June 1957, page 6 (1957)
  8. Gadsden County Times (Quincy, Fla.), Alcolines, by Charley Stookey — Gadsden County Times, 19 March 1959, page 3 (1959)
  9. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 59-500, Laws of Florida 1959: the general appropriations act, Avon Park Prison and Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Program items (1959)
  10. United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population Schedules, Florida, Highlands County, ED 28-4: the Highlands County Prison Camp (1940)
  11. Florida State Road Department, Florida State Road Department, biennial reports, 1915-16 to 1947-48, on the Internet Archive (1948)
  12. United States Air Force, Final Environmental Assessment: Implementation of the Integrated Natural Resources Management Plan for Avon Park Air Force Range, Florida (2004), DTIC ADA638923 (2004)
  13. State of Florida, Chapter 20297, Laws of Florida 1941, designating state roads in Highlands County (1941)

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