- April 25, 2024
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A red-brick, one-room schoolhouse sits quietly in the center of a soon-to-be busy Bunnell Elementary School. Built in 1938, The Little Red School House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007, but there was still one detail missing from its structure.
That detail was added Friday, Aug. 12, with the finishing touch of a cupola.
At the request of his mother, Diane, Josh Marquis, of J and M Carpentry, built a base for the schoolhouse topper, which has been in a box for the last year-and-a-half.
“It’s a crowning achievement,” Diane Marquis said. “It’s a project that sat there for a while, and we just got it completed. We’re trying to do it before the start of school so it would be there for the children and the students to see.”
This quaint brick building was first used as the Future Farmers of America classroom/workroom at Bunnell High School.
After the school caught fire in 1970, the lone FFA building was left in the center of the new elementary school campus.
“In the early ’80s, this building was in great disrepair,” Marquis said. “Of course, the bricks were all there, but all the windows were broken out. Inside there was a nasty rug.
“Nobody knew we had this beautiful floor,” she said, as she admired the heart-pine floors made from Flagler County timber. “There was an old, saggy, dropped ceiling, plaster falling down, and we knew that the day was going to come real soon when this building was going to be torn down.”
With the building being the oldest school building owned by the School Board in Flagler County, Marquis knew it must be saved.
Together with Nell Brown and Bette Lathan, the three Bunnell Elementary School teachers worked on raising money for the restoration of the building.
“The school children all jumped in,” Marquis said. “They painted milk cartons red, cut a hole in the roof and put school houses all around town for people to drop change in.”
They had bake sales and craft sales but never raised more than $3,500 for a project that was estimated to cost $30,000.
But in the mid-’80s, the focus of the nation was on the new millennium, Marquis said, and Blueprint 2000, a Florida Department of Education grant, was on the way.
“We submitted, and, lo and behold, we got $10,000,” Marquis said. “With that seed money, we began in earnest to repair this building.”
With the help of many groups throughout the county, The Little Red School House was restored and turned into a living museum for Flagler County.
“I don’t know of another elementary school that has a full-fledged historic museum,” Marquis said.
Contact Shanna Fortier at [email protected].
