Little Red Schoolhouse

Bunnell Elementary School is proud to be the home of the "Little Red School House." It is the oldest school building owned by the school board in the county. It was built in 1938 and is now a living school museum.

In an interview with the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Diane Marquis, a retired Bunnell Elementary teacher and Flagler County Historical Society tour guide, said, "The Little Red School House represents rural schoolhouses throughout the South."

Oddly enough, the Little Red School House was never an actual one-room school. The brick building was built in 1938 for Bunnell High School's Future Farmers of America Chapter by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Before constructing the Vocational Agricultural Building, the club met in the high school's basement. The project was one of three in Flagler County produced by the WPA, which was created to help stimulate the U.S. economy mired by the Great Depression through various projects around the country.

Bunnell's FFA chapter wanted its own building. Their wish was made possible through a $3,500 grant from the WPA and another $1,500 from the Flagler County School Board. The building also represents Flagler's agricultural history, not just the county's educational history. Flagler County's future farmers weren't the only ones to utilize the facility. During World War II, local women brought produce grown in Victory Gardens.
 
The Little Red Schoolhouse, officially known as the Vocational Agricultural Building, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. But the path to be placed on the registry was not an easy one that took a long time and efforts of Marquis, along with teachers Bette Latham and Nell Brown, and a lot of community support.

The story behind the agricultural center becoming a living museum is connected to the county's segregated past and the development that would become the City of Palm Coast which began with the fire that destroyed Bunnell High School in the early morning in July 1970. After the fire, George Washington Carver High School, a formerly segregated school that closed in 1967, reopened for displaced students from Bunnell until 1974, when a new school was built.

After the fire, local officials had to make a decision to either rebuild the school on the original site or build the new one at a different location. At that time, ITT Community Development Corporation was in the process of creating Palm Coast and offered the district a free parcel of land on State Road 100 with the condition that the new school be named Flagler-Palm Coast High School.

Unfortunately, during this time, the Little Red School House experienced a period of decline and fell into disrepair. In 1987, after years of being boarded up and sitting in neglect, a plan was put forth to the Flagler County School Board to restore the Vocational Agricultural Building by a group of advocates for the "Little Red School House." The group was headed up by Marquis, Latham, and Brown and formed the "Friends of the Little Red School House."

With a Parent Teacher Association donation, the Friends of the Little Red School House were able to hire an architect to assess the condition of the building. The project took seven years to complete through bake sales, quilt sales, donations, and any other thing they could think of to raise funds and awareness. Everything came to fruition in 1992 with a $10,000 Blueprint grant from the Florida Legislature. On November 15, 1993, the building was officially dedicated as the Little Red School House Museum. 

The project attracted support from all over the country for artifacts. Over 90 percent of the artifacts on display are genuine antiques, including newspapers, photographs, native American artifacts, a letter from Mary McLeod Bethune (August 27, 1918) endorsing African American teachers, a letter to Charles Lindbergh (March 3, 1932), and a 48-star American Flag. Marquis collected various furnishings for the building, including a blackboard, books, chairs, and desks from various periods of education in America. One of the cabinets in the school house was a student vocational project built on-site in 1942 by Rem Murray, who donated the cabinet.

In 2002, Bunnell Elementary School Principal Phyllis Pearson and Vice Principal Richard Dupont solicited the school board on behalf of Mrs. Marquis and the Flagler Historical Society for funding to have the Little Red School House listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On February 21, 2007, the National Park Service listed the school on its registry, ensuring that funds would be provided for its upkeep.