The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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This is a draft. It is published so it can be read and corrected, not because it is finished.

The state hospital at Avon Park, 1943-1955

Between 1943 and 1955 the Legislature of Florida four times voted to put a state institution on the same piece of Avon Park land, and each time it was for a different kind of patient: people with venereal disease, then the mentally ill, then chronic alcoholics committed by a judge, then alcoholics who came of their own accord. The first two came to nothing. The last was built.

1943: a hospital for venereal disease

Chapter 21841 (No. 207), Committee Substitute for Senate Bill No. 5, approved by the Governor on 25 May 1943, established “at or near Avon Park, Florida, a State Hospital For the Care and Treatment of Persons Afflicted With Venereal Disease.”[lof-1943-21841]

Section 1 accepted a donation of 210 acres in Section 34, Township 33 South, Range 28 East, described quarter by quarter and excluding the water of Lake Lelia and Lake Glenada, “made by the City of Avon Park, Florida.” Section 4 appropriated $150,000 for buildings. Section 6 authorized the Board of Commissioners of State Institutions to take money “from the United States Government or any agency thereof.”[lof-1943-21841]

The context is the war. Florida in 1943 was covered in military installations — Avon Park had an Army airfield, a bombing range and the Lodwick flying school — and the control of venereal disease around them was a declared federal and state priority. An inland site with an airfield and a range at hand was the sort of place such an institution was put.

Chapter 23096 (No. 582), House Bill No. 924, repealed the whole act. It became law without the Governor’s approval and was filed on 11 June 1945 — two years and seventeen days after the original was signed. The repealing act is two sections long and gives no reason.[lof-1945-23096]

1945: the South Florida State Hospital

In the same session, the Legislature took the land for something else. The preamble of a later act recites what happened, and it is the only surviving account of it:

Pursuant to Chapter 22696, Laws of Florida, Acts of 1945 … The Board of Commissioners of State Institutions of the State of Florida was authorized, empowered and directed to establish a branch of the Florida State Hospital, to be known and designated as the “South Florida State Hospital,” in Highlands County, Florida, on lands therein described, the location of said hospital being conditioned upon the said lands being conveyed to the State of Florida gratuitously and/or as a donation or gift.[lof-1951-26817]

Highlands County met the condition, and the recital records exactly who paid what:

Pursuant to the condition of said law, various citizens of Highlands County, Florida, conveyed portions of said lands as donations or gifts to the State of Florida, and the Board of County Commissioners of Highlands County, Florida, expended Ten Thousand Dollars, and the City Council of the City of Avon Park, Florida, expended Five Thousand Dollars, to purchase portions of said lands and donated same to the State of Florida.[lof-1951-26817]

And more than money:

the citizens of Highlands County, Florida, expended much time and great sums of money providing land surveys, topographical surveys, perfecting title to said lands, and in compliance with various requirements necessary to the establishment and construction of said hospital on said lands.[lof-1951-26817]

Then the state changed its mind, for a reason it states plainly:

by reason of an urgent emergency caused by overcrowding existing at Florida State Hospital, then existing facilities in DeSoto County, Florida, were donated to the State of Florida, and by it utilized to establish a branch of Florida State Hospital, and, it would be poor business practice to discard such facilities, thereby doing away with the need for construction of said South Florida State Hospital at Avon Park, Florida.[lof-1951-26817]

Avon Park lost the South Florida State Hospital to Arcadia because Arcadia had buildings already standing. The town had bought and surveyed the land and given it away, and the state took a set of DeSoto County buildings instead.

1949-1951: the Florida State Hospital for Alcoholism

The land sat. Then, by Chapter 25371, Laws of Florida 1949, the Legislature authorized the Board of Commissioners of State Institutions “to select and acquire a site for a hospital for the treatment of chronic alcoholics,” and at a meeting on 6 July 1950 the Board designated the Avon Park land as that site, “contingent upon the necessary legislation being enacted at the 1951 session.”[lof-1951-26817]

That legislation is Chapter 26817 (No. 338), Senate Bill No. 254, approved by the Governor on 4 June 1951 and filed the next day. It repeals the 1945 South Florida State Hospital act and directs the Board

to establish, construct, equip, staff and maintain and operate a hospital … together with all buildings, dormitories, auditoriums, detention houses, warehouses, workshops, barns, shops, parks, driveways, or otherwise … for the treatment of chronic alcoholics, said hospital to be known as the “Florida State Hospital for Alcoholism.”[lof-1951-26817]

The land

Section 3 describes it — the same Section 34, Township 33 South, Range 28 East, plus a hundred acres more:

The west half of the northeast quarter; the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter; the fractional east half of the northwest quarter; the fractional west half of the southwest quarter, less the northwest quarter of the northwest quarter of the southwest quarter; and the fractional north half of the northwest quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 34, in township 33, south, of range 28 east, Tallahassee Meridian, together with approximately one hundred acres of land lying east of and contiguous to the hereinbefore specifically described lands and lying and being between public road known as the “Sebring highway” and the right-of-way of the Seaboard Air Line Railway.[lof-1951-26817]

That fixes the site on the ground: south of the town, between the Sebring highway and the Seaboard line.

How it was paid for

Section 12 appropriates, until 30 June 1953, twenty per cent of the additional tax on alcoholic beverages imposed by Chapter 25340 of 1949, to be credited to a “Florida State Hospital for Alcoholism Fund.”[lof-1951-26817] The state built a hospital for drinkers out of a tax on drink.

How a person got in

The commitment machinery in section 6 is worth reading closely, because it is the part that touched people’s lives. A county judge anywhere in Florida could commit a person to Avon Park on a sworn petition brought by the person himself, or by “the mother, father, brother, sister, spouse, child or next of kin,” or “by any three interested citizens of the State of Florida,” or by the county sheriff.[lof-1951-26817]

The judge set a hearing, gave notice to the person and to one relative, and could hold the person in detention for up to three days beforehand. He appointed an examining committee of one citizen and two physicians, who examined the person and reported on his “physical and mental condition, financial condition and any other facts.” If the judge found chronic alcoholism, he committed the person “for an indeterminate period not to exceed one hundred and eighty days.” Release came when the hospital’s director reported the person “cured” and the judge agreed.[lof-1951-26817]

Two provisions soften it and one hardens it. Section 9 lets the person have the whole record sealed on request, openable afterwards only by his own written request or a circuit court order — an unusual privacy protection for 1951. Section 10 admits only Florida residents of at least one year. And section 6E provides that until the hospital is finished, a judge may instead commit a person to a private home or hospital, provided one of the petitioners posts a bond for the costs.[lof-1951-26817]

1953: from a hospital to a rehabilitation center

Two years later the Legislature rebuilt the scheme from the ground up, and changed what it was for.

Chapter 28134, Senate Bill No. 783, approved by the Governor on 11 June 1953, repeals Chapter 396 of the Florida Statutes — the codified 1951 act — and puts in its place a statewide program for “the prevention, care, treatment and rehabilitation of alcoholics,” with the Avon Park building as one part of it. The Board of Commissioners of State Institutions is now to furnish aid to alcoholics generally, to “set up and operate out-patient clinics in the various geographic areas of the state,” to “carry on an educational program on alcoholism for the benefit of the general public,” and to arrange hospital care on a cost basis for indigent alcoholics.[lof-1953-28134]

Section 3 directs the board to “forthwith construct and equip a rehabilitation center for alcoholism” on the same Section 34 land, described word for word as in 1951. Section 4 names it the “Florida Rehabilitation Center for Alcoholism.” Section 10 creates a governor-appointed advisory council of five — a doctor of medicine, a hospital administrator, and three representatives of non-governmental organizations “concerned with the prevention treatment, care and rehabilitation of alcoholics,” which in 1953 can only mean Alcoholics Anonymous and bodies like it.[lof-1953-28134]

And the compulsion is gone. Where the 1951 act let a county judge commit a person for up to 180 days on the petition of “any three interested citizens,” section 6 of the 1953 act provides:

No person shall be received for treatment and care in said rehabilitation center who has not been a bona fide resident of the State of Florida continuously for one (1) year immediately preceding admission thereto. All such admissions shall be on a voluntary basis upon payment of such fees for service as shall be set by the board.[lof-1953-28134]

In two years the institution changed from a place people could be sent to a place people could go. The liquor-tax funding stayed: section 12 keeps the twenty per cent, renames the account the “Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Fund,” and transfers the old “Florida State Hospital for Alcoholism Fund” into it.[lof-1953-28134]

1955: still building

Chapter 29811, Senate Bill No. 164, approved 11 June 1955, amends the statute again.[lof-1955-29811] Two things in it matter.

The legal description changes from quarter-sections to platted lots and blocks — “Lots two and three, block one; the North two hundred feet of lots three and four, block five together with lots one and two of the said block five; all of blocks two, three, six, seven, ten and eleven, all in section 34, township thirty-three South, range twenty-eight East as per the recorded map of the Avon Park township,” plus the same hundred acres between the Sebring highway and the Seaboard Air Line right-of-way.[lof-1955-29811] The state’s land was inside a platted subdivision, and by 1955 somebody had gone and worked out exactly which lots it was.

And the board is given $6,500 to buy five more acres “adjacent to the present site of the rehabilitation center,” out of the alcoholic rehabilitation fund, with a warning that “if additional money is required such sums must come from private interests.”[lof-1955-29811] The phrase “the present site” is the first indication in the statute book that anything actually existed on the ground. The appropriation of twenty per cent of the additional liquor tax is extended to 1 July 1957.[lof-1955-29811]

What this means for Avon Park

The town wanted a state institution badly, and worked for it for eight years. The city council spent $5,000 of public money and the county $10,000 to buy land to give away; citizens gave more land, and paid for the surveys and the title work. Two attempts failed. The third succeeded, and Avon Park got Florida’s state hospital for alcoholism.

A hospital with dormitories, workshops, barns, a director, doctors, nurses, technicians, dieticians, orderlies and guards is a payroll, and it sat on the south edge of a town of 4,612 people.

The institution changed its nature twice before it opened. A venereal hospital in 1943; a general state mental hospital in 1945; a hospital for the compulsory commitment of chronic alcoholics in 1951; a voluntary rehabilitation center and the hub of a statewide program in 1953. What Avon Park was being asked to host kept changing while the land sat there.

The center received its first patients in December 1956 and was dedicated on 6 February 1957; by 1962 it had sixty-four beds and four outpatient clinics; in the early 1960s its board gave twenty-four acres for the new junior college, whose Avon Park campus stands on this land today; and its successor, the Florida Center for Addictions and Dual Disorders, still operates at the rear of the college. See Entity: Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center, Avon Park.

Chapter 26817’s date of 4 June 1951 also accounts for a discrepancy found elsewhere: the Avon Park Air Force Range’s own management plan dates the opening of “a state institution” to 1951, while a former warden’s congressional testimony dates the state prison itself to 1957. The two are separate institutions — the alcoholism hospital, on the south side of town, and the state prison, on the range ten miles east — and the 1951 date belongs to this one. See Report: Prisoners and patients — the state institutions around Avon Park, 1940-1978.

A note on who was in Tallahassee

Highlands County’s member of the Florida House of Representatives in 1941, and again in 1945, was C. E. Lanier of Avon Park — the same name as the town’s first tax collector of 1913, its First National Bank cashier of 1918, and the Avon Park member of the county’s Highway Beautification Board of 1927.[lof-1941-house] The 1945 session is the one that voted the South Florida State Hospital to Highlands County and repealed the venereal hospital act. That is not proof he was behind either, but it is where to look.

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 21841 (No. 207), Laws of Florida 1943 (Committee Substitute for Senate Bill No. 5): An Act to Establish At or Near Avon Park, Florida, a State Hospital For the Care and Treatment of Persons Afflicted With Venereal Disease (1943)
  2. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 23096 (No. 582), Laws of Florida 1945 (House Bill No. 924): An Act to Repeal Chapter 21841, Laws of Florida, 1943 (1945)
  3. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 26817 (No. 338), Laws of Florida 1951 (Senate Bill No. 254): An Act Authorizing and Directing the Establishment ... of a Hospital for the Care and Treatment of Chronic Alcoholics, in Highlands County, Florida; Designating Same as Florida State Hospital for Alcoholism (1951)
  4. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 28134, Laws of Florida 1953 (Senate Bill No. 783): An Act authorizing the formulation and operation of program for prevention, care, treatment and rehabilitation of alcoholics; requiring construction of rehabilitation center for alcoholism in Highlands County, Florida (1953)
  5. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 29811, Laws of Florida 1955 (Senate Bill No. 164): An Act relating to the rehabilitation of alcoholics; amending Sections 396.031 and 396.121(1), Florida Statutes; revising the legal description of the site of the rehabilitation center (1955)
  6. Legislature of the State of Florida, Members of the House of Representatives, in Laws of Florida 1941, General Acts, Volume 1 (1941)

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