- April 25, 2024
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Flagler County may soon get a new historical destination: Two organizations hope to bring a historic 1916 church back to its home in Bunnell from its current location in Espanola and repurpose it into a voting rights museum.
"This building was probably where many voting rights discussions happened in Flagler County."
— ED SIARKOWICZ, president, Flagler County Historical Society
The 1916 Seventh-day Adventist Church was built on South Anderson Street in Bunnell and housed various congregations until at least the 1960s, when it was moved to Espanola. The Flagler County Historical Society and the American Association of University Women began working together to bring it back to Bunnell as a museum after discovering an intriguing connection: Noted local suffragist Alice Scott Abbott had been the church's music director.
After the church was first built, Abbott had been impressed enough by the structure — and the fact that a handful of families had raised the money for its construction by selling potatoes, corn, and watermelons, in her telling — to write a blurb about it in the November 1917 edition of The Bunnell Home Builder. Abbott had called it "the church beautiful."
"[Abbot] was one of our first tourist writers, if you will," said Kimble Medley, of the AAUW's Flagler County branch. "She’s quite an amazing woman."
The Historical Society had been looking at the possibility of purchasing, renovating and moving the church since at least 2007, when Flagler County historian Sisco Deen proposed moving it and transforming it into a meeting space, said Ed Siarkowicz, the society's president.
But when the Historical Society's James Deen Fiske make a trip out to the church earlier this year and then mentioned Abbott's connections to it, Medley said, that spurred a new effort alongside the AAUW, which conducts historical skits about voting rights in which Abbott features as one of the characters.
"When we realized that, we said, 'Oh my gosh, we have to move the church," Siarkowicz said. "This building was probably where many voting rights discussions happened in Flagler County."
Women were able to find their voices inside the church, Medley said.
"We know that there were quilting groups: These women would get together and make quilts," Medley said. "This is where women were able to talk to each other about suffrage, about women’s rights."
The proposed Florida Voting Rights Museum would be placed next to the Holden House Museum and would have some standing exhibits, plus rotating ones that would be brought in from other Florida counties. It would serve as a meeting place as well as a museum.
The Historical Society and AAUW earned the Flagler County Commission's support to move the church during a Sept. 9 commission meeting.
"It’s the rotating exhibits that will really help draw people in," Siarkowicz said. "We’re really looking forward to this building, this museum being an educational tool. ... Once the museum is established and open we, as two groups working together, plan on bringing school tours in and all of the things that go with history tourism and education."
The Historical Society and the AAUW are raising money to move and renovate the church and are planning to meet with a historical contractor to get more detail on what the process would involve.
They're also seeking out more stories that could be told at the museum.
In addition to its original function as a Seventh-day Adventist church, the church served as a meeting place over the years for other congregations, including the First Baptist Church, the St. Thomas Episcopal Church and The Glorious Church in Jesus Christ.
The Historical Society has learned some stories of the church's later years, but fewer from the original Seventh-day Adventist congregation, and would also like to learn more stories of local suffragists and voting rights activists.
"There’s a lot of other stories that are still to be told," Medley said. "We have found [the names of] more than 50 black women who were qualified and ready to vote in Flagler County in 1920. ... We want to know what their stores are. These women went out to register, despite the fact that they were being threatened. ... Their stories need to be told."
Anyone with photos or information about the church's early days or about suffragists and voting rights activists in Flagler County is urged to contact Ed Siarkowicz at [email protected].
