Melbourne's Little Red Schoolhouse (1883) — Melbourne, Florida

Melbourne's Little Red Schoolhouse stands today at the entrance to the Joy and Gordon Patterson Botanical Garden on the Florida Institute of Technology campus. Florida Tech historian Gordon Patterson, in a January 2020 Florida Tech News history, writes that since 1970 the Little Red Schoolhouse has welcomed visitors to the university's botanical garden. The current Florida Tech garden page, checked on October 8, 2026, still directs visitors to Melbourne's Little Red Schoolhouse, located in the Botanical Garden, so the building has stayed in the same campus spot for more than 55 years.

The garden is open to the public. Florida Tech lists its hours as Monday through Sunday, sunrise to sunset, and posts guided tours on Sunday afternoons, scheduled from 2 to 3 p.m. on September 20, October 18 and November 21, 2026. The garden map page says visitor parking is in the red-striped spaces of a lot off Babcock Street, across from the Southgate intersection, at the wooded edge of the Melbourne campus.

Patterson credits the town's earliest settler families. In 1883, he writes, Melbourne's pioneer families led by John Goode raised the funds to build the one room schoolhouse. It was tiny, about 10 by 12 feet, and it first stood on Riverside Drive next to what is now US 1, in the young settlement that Weona Cleveland's history places along Crane Creek. Classes in Melbourne's first school were split by time of day: by Patterson's account, white children were taught in the morning and African American children in the afternoon.

The Goode family was central to early Melbourne. The history of Melbourne by Weona Cleveland, published by the Genealogical Society of South Brevard, records that the Richard W. Goode family came from the Chicago area in 1877, that the first post office was established in 1880 and that Melbourne incorporated in 1888. The Downtown Melbourne history page adds that Mrs. R. W. Goode suggested the Melbourne name in honor of Cornthwaite John Hector, the first postmaster, who later opened a general store at Crane Creek.

The schoolhouse was part of a short burst of institution building in the 1880s settlement. Cleveland's chronology lists the arrival of Melbourne's first doctor in 1883, the same year as the school, followed by Allen Chapel A.M.E. in 1885, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in 1886 and the town's first newspaper, The Indian River News, in 1887. Even two decades later Melbourne was small: Cleveland puts the population at slightly under 300 in 1906, when the first telephone switchboard was installed in a Goode family house.

The one-room building served only briefly. Patterson writes that the little red schoolhouse remained in use for six years. In 1889 Richard Goode, John Goode's son, paid for a larger schoolhouse beside his own home, and the 1883 building was left behind. A local historian quoted in the 2020 article said it languished in disuse for nearly fifty years.

The building moved several times around Melbourne before reaching the university. In 1940, according to Patterson, the schoolhouse was restored and moved to the grounds of the Ruth Henegar Elementary and High School in downtown Melbourne, the school complex on New Haven Avenue that is now the Henegar Center. The Henegar Center's building history notes that the school there was named for Ruth Henegar in 1963 and that the Ruth Henegar Elementary School closed on June 11, 1975.

The schoolhouse did not stay on the school grounds long. Soon after the 1940 restoration it was moved across Crane Creek and used as emergency housing for an African American family whose home had burned. Nearly three decades later, in 1968, the newly formed South Brevard Historical Society and the Abigail Wright Chamberlin Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution used money raised by the Melbourne Rotary Club to repay the family for the improvements they had made to the building.

In 1970 the schoolhouse was moved to its present location at the entry to the university's botanical garden, then a palm garden that Florida Tech's founding president, Jerome P. Keuper, had begun planting with help from palm collector Dent Smith in the Crane Creek floodplain. The garden history page records that the Florida Tech Board of Trustees formally dedicated the hammock as a botanical garden in 1972, two years after the schoolhouse arrived.

The schoolhouse sits on coquina, the shell rock found along the Indian River shore at Eau Gallie. Patterson writes that the stone was given to Florida Tech by descendants of William Henry Gleason, the Reconstruction-era lieutenant governor who settled at the place then called Arlington and renamed it Eau Gallie. For Patterson, the coquina connects Melbourne's first school with Gleason's 1870s campaign for a state-funded land grant college in Eau Gallie, a college whose building was completed but which never held classes there.

Weona Cleveland's history gives the dates for that earlier effort: in 1872 Gleason offered the Florida legislature 2,320 acres in the Eau Gallie area for a state agricultural college, but in 1877 a political change in Tallahassee moved the site to Lake City. The two stories meet on the Florida Tech campus, where an 1883 Melbourne schoolhouse now rests on Eau Gallie stone, inside the Joy and Gordon Patterson Botanical Garden.

Patterson opens his 2020 article with a January 1996 morning at the garden entrance. Florida Tech president Lynn Weaver had invited directors of the F.W. Olin Foundation to visit the Melbourne campus as part of a campaign for a major grant, and one director asked about the Little Red Schoolhouse. The guide, Patterson himself, answered that the men and women who made the twentieth century had gone to school in buildings like it, then pointed toward the campus quad as the foundation for science and engineering education in the 21st century. Four months later, he writes, the F.W. Olin Foundation awarded the university a $50 million grant.

Independent local accounts agree on where the building is. Cleveland's history for the Genealogical Society of South Brevard, last updated in 2000, says the first schoolhouse was built in 1883 and is still existing on the campus of Florida Institute of Technology. Together with the 2020 Florida Tech article and the university's 2026 garden page, it places Melbourne's oldest school building on University Boulevard, inside the botanical garden along Crane Creek.