The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Who governed Avon Park

The eight of 1897

The 1913 charter was the town’s second municipal government, not its first. In the first week of January 1897 the settlers who had stayed on through the freeze incorporated Avon Park under Florida’s general law and elected a full slate, which a Savannah newspaper printed on 15 January: Clark D. Knapp, mayor; B. F. West, L. W. Mix, H. B. Todd, J. T. Hendricks and William King, councilmen; R. D. Hall, clerk and treasurer; and J. J. Dobbins, marshal.[savannah-1897-01-15] Alongside the well-known figures of Knapp, West, Todd, and King, the remaining four officers belong to documented pioneer households: John T. Hendricks (1851–1917) was a Canadian-born notary, title abstractor, and model pineapple grower on Pleasant Street married to James W. Woodruff’s daughter Florence Adell Woodruff; L. W. Mix appears in the 1900 Avon Park census as New York-born farmer Lawrence W. Mix (born March 1843); R. D. Hall had been elected corporate secretary of the Florida Development Company at its annual stockholders’ meeting in October 1894; and J. J. Dobbins belonged to the Kansas-born Dobbins family into which sawmill manager John C. Burleigh married in November 1897.[savannah-1894-10-16][census-1900-desoto-ap] It stopped on Wednesday 1 March 1899, when the town voted on whether to keep a municipal government at all and, of forty-seven votes polled, only twelve were for keeping it.[savannah-1899-03-09] Avon Park then had no government of its own for fourteen years. Nothing is yet known of what the government of 1897 did in the two years it lasted.

The nine of 1913

When the Legislature made Avon Park a town on 23 May 1913, it did not wait for an election. Section 47 of the charter appointed the first officers outright, to serve “until the regular election in 1913”: Herbert Seaverns, Mayor; Irvin Raulerson, Marshal; S. F. Tucker, Assessor; Ellis R. West, Clerk and Assessor; C. E. Lanier, Tax Collector; and five aldermen, W. O. Skipper, Wm. King, G. F. Kellogg, W. H. Daugherty and H. E. Godwin.[lof-1913-6662] The Arcadia paper’s Avon Park column, which runs from 1905, and the town’s cemetery records identify most of them.

Herbert Seaverns, the mayor, was a New Englander in his late fifties: born in Boston on 26 July 1854, the son of Stephen Seaverns, a merchant by trade. In January 1915 he was advertising the Avon Park Hardware and Furniture Company in the county paper. He left for Lake Placid about 1921 and died there on 1 August 1946, aged ninety-two, and was cremated.[fag-seaverns][ca-avon-park-1905-1922] A town that chose a hardware merchant from Massachusetts as its first mayor was a Northern town still.

Ellis R. West, the clerk, was the storekeeper’s son. B. F. West & Son — feed, hay, fertilizer and general merchandise — advertised in the Arcadia paper through 1905 with Ellis West named as its man; he hauled freight to the railroad with a team until October that year, when he sold it. He served as an election inspector for the Avon Park precinct from 1915. He was born in England on 5 May 1877, married Flora Otho Hunt in 1913 — the year he became clerk — and died at Sarasota on 7 April 1957, coming home to Bougainvillea Cemetery.[fag-west][ca-avon-park-1905-1922] His father Benjamin Francis West (1847-1926) was by 1918 running both the store and a bank, “West B. F. & Co., bankers.”[gaz-1918]

Irvin Raulerson, the marshal, had a cottage at Avon Park by December 1905 and witnessed homestead claims there in 1916. He is very probably the Irving Raulerson, 1861-1920, buried at Bereah in Polk County, whose son Clayton was reported wounded from “Avon Park” in the casualty lists of November 1918.[fag-raulerson][ca-avon-park-1905-1922] If so he died before the town was a decade old.

W. H. Daugherty, alderman, drove B. F. West & Son’s freight team to the railroad in August 1905, and his house stood near Seaverns’s in 1915; H. E. Godwin, alderman, was a cattleman, out “on the Kissimmee cattle range to complete the exchange of cattle” in 1905 while his wife lay ill in hospital at Fort Meade; G. F. Kellogg, alderman — George F. Kellogg — was on Lake View Avenue by 1905, signed the school-district petition of 1906 with King, Raulerson and West, and by 1921-22 was president of the Associated Boards of Trade of the Scenic Highlands; S. F. Tucker, assessor, was “one of the leading citizens of Avon Park” in 1915, six years in California behind him, and sat as an election inspector with Kellogg and Daugherty.[ca-avon-park-1905-1922] None of these four has yet been found in a grave. W. O. Skipper has not been found at all, though the Skipper family — C. A. and D. L. Skipper, “bankers in Punta Gorda, La Belle, Zolfo and Avon Park,” and Skipper Bros. selling grove tracts — ran the town’s First National Bank by 1918.[gaz-1918][ca-avon-park-1905-1922]

The picture is of a small Northern colony that had grown a Southern layer: a Boston merchant and an English storekeeper’s son at the top, a freighter and a Kissimmee-range cattleman on the board, and a family of Georgia-and-Florida bankers with their name on the money.

The petition of 1906

Seven years before the charter, thirty-odd men signed a petition to enlarge the Avon Park school district, and the list is the nearest thing to a census of the settlement’s men that exists: O. R. Thacher, O. P. Wernicke, J. C. Burleigh, G. F. Kellogg, E. L. Richardson, R. T. Whitnall, D. L. Sessions, E. E. Thompson, O. W. Tabor, William King, Irvin Raulerson, B. F. West, W. E. Tabor, H. T. Wray, P. L. Wells, C. L. Gunter, George Smith, A. Winthrop, E. T. Boyd, S. Prior, M. O. Goodell, Frank Thompson, E. L. Hall, S. J. Brown, W. S. Butler, W. R. Wayman, W. V. Krause, Ellis R. West, W. S. Armstrong and J. Townsend.[ca-avon-park-1905-1922] Four of the nine officers of 1913 are on it; Seaverns, Tucker, Daugherty, Godwin and Skipper are not, and had come since.

The mayors, 1913 to 1980

The town history prints the town’s own list of “Mayors of Avon Park Elected,” with the date of each election, from the first mayor under the charter of 1913 to the last before the book’s centennial edition.[maxwell-1976]

Elected Mayor
23 May 1913 Herbert Seaverns
6 June 1915 R. W. Swearingen
7 January 1918 W. C. Touchton
13 December 1919 William King
6 February 1922 D. A. Sapp
2 April 1922 T. J. McGinnis
1 January 1924 G. L. Crews
2 December 1925 William King
2 April 1929 C. S. Donaldson
1 November 1931 Marcus E. Covington
14 September 1943 E. A. Delaney, Sr.
9 September 1947 O. C. Wilkes
13 September 1949 Wiley Sauls, Jr.
8 September 1953 E. A. Delaney, Sr.
12 September 1967 James M. Doerr
9 September 1969 Robert J. Barben
4 September 1972 J. Marshall Davis
4 December 1980 David Barefield

The list is the town’s record of elections, not of service: William King, elected in December 1925, was killed by a Seaboard train on 11 February 1929, and E. A. DeLaney Sr. served as mayor pro tem until C. S. Donaldson was elected in a special election that April.[maxwell-1976] Similarly, Wiley Sauls Jr., re-elected in September 1951, married in Ohio in June 1952 and resigned his office in summer 1952 to relocate permanently out of state, leaving interim municipal leadership until DeLaney was elected to another term in September 1953.

Active mayoral service is corroborated in the contemporary county press for R. W. Swearingen, whose continued tenure following his June 1915 election was recorded on 13 April 1916 when he arrived in Arcadia on municipal business as “mayor of Avon Park.”[dsc-1916-04-13]

After

While municipal election returns from the autumn of 1913 to 1920 remain incomplete in surviving regional runs, county-level appointments document the town’s precinct governance. In May 1916 the DeSoto County Board of County Commissioners appointed George F. Kellogg, J. C. Skipper, and John Wilson as election inspectors, Marion Thomas Whidden (M. T. Whidden) as clerk, and Love Cash as deputy sheriff for Avon Park Precinct No. 14.[dsc-1916-05-11] Whidden, who had partnered with Clyde Christopher in Avon Park that spring to build a commercial power boat for Lake Okeechobee, later served as assistant bank cashier in Avon Park before his election as Mayor of Arcadia in 1938 and cashier of the Okeechobee Bank in 1944, detailed in Whidden & Christopher’s Lake Okeechobee Power Boat.[dsc-1916-03-23]

What has been found is a run of later officeholders. Charles Everett Lanier (1889-1975), the tax collector of 1913, was the bank’s cashier by 1918, on the crate mill’s board in 1924, and sat for Highlands County in the Florida House in 1941 and 1945, with Howard Livingston of Sebring holding the seat between and again in 1959 and Morris Adams of Avon Park from 1961.[sos-reports] Avon Park civic leader James Martin Lee (Col. J. M. Lee), who represented Highlands County in the Florida House in 1927 and 1929, went on to be elected Comptroller of the State of Florida, serving from 1933 until his death in 1946.[sos-reports] Mattie W. Tompkins, a Virginia-born lawyer admitted in 1925, sat on the city council from September 1939 to October 1947.[fawl-150] Edgar A. DeLaney Sr. (1891–1979) served twenty-eight years in municipal elective office—ten years as councilman, Council President, and Mayor Pro-Tem, and eighteen years as elected mayor across two administrations (1943–1947, 1953–1967)—and has a street and a housing project named for him.[maxwell-1976][newssun-delaney-2014] And the Black community that the council of 1951 tried to vote out of existence produced, within four years, Queen Coward’s Progressive Civic Club, the town’s first Black policeman Fred Conner, and after him Robert Britt, councilman and mayor. Each has a document of his or her own in this bundle.

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. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News, Savannah, Georgia, 9 March 1899, page 6: the election at Avon Park on whether the municipal government should continue (1899) · newspaper
  2. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News, Savannah, Georgia, 15 January 1897, page 6, Florida column: the incorporation of Avon Park and the election of its officers (1897) · newspaper
  3. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida, pages 199 and 212 (references/the-first-hundred-years-of-avon-park_leoma-bradshaw-maxwell_1976.md) (1976) · book
  4. Legislature of the State of Florida, Chapter 6662 (No. 242), Laws of Florida 1913, section 47: the first officers of the Town of Avon Park (1913)
  5. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: The De Soto County News (Arcadia), the Lakeland Evening Telegram and the Punta Gorda Herald on Avon Park's people, 1905-1922, searched by surname (2026)
  6. Find a Grave contributors, Find a Grave memorial 166614658, Herbert Seaverns (26 July 1854 – 1 August 1946), citing the Carey Hand Funeral Home records (2026)
  7. Find a Grave contributors, Find a Grave memorial 34658389, Ellis Robert West (5 May 1877 – 7 April 1957), Bougainvillea Cemetery, Avon Park (2026)
  8. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 23 March 1916, page 5: Avon Park (1916) · newspaper
  9. Find a Grave contributors, Find a Grave memorial 28574411, Irving Raulerson (7 June 1861 – 26 May 1920), Bereah, Polk County (2026)
  10. R. L. Polk & Co., Florida State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1918, s.v. Avon Park (1918)
  11. Florida Secretary of State, Report of the Secretary of State of the State of Florida, biennial editions: rosters of the Legislature and of county officers (1961)
  12. Phil Attinger, Highlands News-Sun, DeLaney opposes name change — Highlands News-Sun, 26 January 2014 (2014)
  13. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 13 April 1916, page 8: Local and Personal Items, Mayor R. W. Swearingen (1916) · newspaper
  14. The De Soto County News, Arcadia, Fla., The De Soto County News, 11 May 1916, page 2: County Commissioners Proceedings, Election Officers for Precinct 14 (1916) · newspaper
  15. Florida Association for Women Lawyers and The Florida Bar, Celebrating Florida's First 150 Women Lawyers (2017): Mattie W. Tompkins (2017)
  16. The Morning News (Savannah, Ga.), The Morning News, Savannah, Georgia, 16 October 1894, page 6: annual meeting of the Florida Development Company at Avon Park (1894) · newspaper
  17. United States Census Bureau, 1900 United States Federal Census, Precinct 11 (Avon Park), DeSoto County, Florida (1900) · official

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