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Avon Park is a city in Highlands County, Florida, United
States. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated the city's population
in 2009 at 8,824.[3]
It is the oldest city in Highlands County, and was named after
Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
History
The first permanent settler in Avon Park was Oliver
Martin Crosby, a Connecticut native who moved to the
area in 1884 to study the wildlife of the Everglades. By
1886, enough people had followed that the town of "Lake
Forest" was founded. An English woman who had settled in
the area convinced Crosby that the area was reminiscent
of her home of
Stratford-upon-Avon, and persuaded him to change the
name of the settlement to Avon Park.
In 1956 and 1957, several U.S. Army biological warfare experiments were conducted in Avon Park. In the experiments, Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the town, in order to see if the insects would spread yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of illnesses, including fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths, encephalitis, and typhoid. Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, so that they could photograph and perform medical tests on the victims. Several people died as a result of the experiments.[6] In 2006, then-mayor Thomas Macklin proposed City Ordinance 08-06, which that would have blocked the issuance or renewal of city licenses to businesses that hired illegal aliens, fined any property owner who rented and leased property to illegal aliens, and established English as the city's official language, banning the use of other languages during the conduct of official business except where specified under state or federal law.[7] The ordinance was narrowly defeated by the city council, on a 3-2 vote.[8] .
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