Melbourne's Little Red Schoolhouse (1883)

Melbourne's Little Red Schoolhouse stands 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 13, 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 18, 2026, still tells visitors to be sure to visit Melbourne's Little Red Schoolhouse, located in the Botanical Garden.

The garden is open to the public. Florida Tech calls it a public garden and lists its hours as Monday through Sunday, sunrise to sunset. Its fall 2026 calendar lists Botanical Garden Tours on Sundays from 2 to 3 p.m. on September 20, October 18 and November 21, 2026, and Clean-up Saturdays from 9 to 11 a.m. on September 19, October 17 and November 14, 2026. The garden map page says parking is in the red-striped spaces of the Jungle-adjacent lot along the wood line, off Babcock Street, across from the Southgate intersection; the campus address is 150 W. University Blvd., Melbourne, FL 32901.

Florida Tech's history credits Melbourne's pioneer families, led by John Goode, with raising the funds to build the one-room schoolhouse in 1883.

In Patterson's account, the schoolhouse measured 10 by 12 feet and originally stood on Riverside Drive adjacent to US 1 in Melbourne. The school was segregated, he writes, with white students attending in the morning and African American students coming in the afternoon.

The one-room building served only briefly. Patterson writes that the little red schoolhouse remained in use for six years. In 1889 John Goode's son, Richard, paid for the construction of a larger schoolhouse adjacent to his home, and the 1883 building was left behind. Patterson quotes Helen De Groodt, a local historian, as saying the schoolhouse languished in disuse for nearly fifty years.

The schoolhouse moved twice around Melbourne before it reached the garden entry in 1970.

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 Henegar Center's building history notes that the school building there was named for former teacher and principal Ruth Henegar in 1963 and that the Ruth Henegar Elementary School closed on June 11, 1975. That history says construction of the Melbourne School began in 1919, that it opened for students in the fall of 1920, that it was the only school in the area during the 1920s and 1930s, and that it saw a peak enrollment of 1,400 in 1959. The surviving building is now the Henegar Center at 625 E New Haven Ave.

The schoolhouse did not stay on the school grounds long. Shortly after the restoration was completed, Patterson writes, it was moved across Crane Creek to serve as emergency housing for an African American family whose home had been destroyed by a fire. In 1968 the newly formed South Brevard Historical Society and the Abigail Wright Chamberlin Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution used funds raised by the Melbourne Rotary Club to reimburse the family for 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. Florida Tech's garden history page, Jerome Keuper's account, describes that garden as a native hardwood hammock in the floodplain of Crane Creek, credits palm collector Dent Smith with helping to develop it, and records that the Board of Trustees formally dedicated the hammock as a botanical garden in 1972, two years after the schoolhouse arrived.

The schoolhouse rests on a coquina rock foundation that, by Florida Tech's account, Lansing Gleason and his daughter, Jean Madry, gave to the university.

Patterson identifies Lansing Gleason as the grandson of William Gleason, and he presents the stone as a link between the schoolhouse and Gleason's earlier hope for a college in Eau Gallie. The state's own record fills in that history. The 2013 William H. Gleason House marker says Gleason bought a 16,000-acre tract in Brevard County in 1870 and named the area Eau Gallie, with "Gallie" a derivative of a Seminole word meaning rocky, and that he was Florida's first elected Lieutenant Governor, under Governor Harrison Reed, in 1868. Gleason moved his family to Eau Gallie in 1882, the marker continues, practiced law there, was a partner in a sawmill and a director of the State Bank of Eau Gallie, and in 1887 persuaded Henry Flagler to extend his railroad to Eau Gallie by offering the right of way.

The National Register nomination for the Gleason House adds that through Gleason's influence Eau Gallie was selected in 1872 as the site for the Florida Agricultural College, and that although several buildings were constructed for the school, it never opened; state legislators decided the area was too remote and inaccessible and located the school at Lake City instead. The same nomination says Eau Gallie became the county seat of Brevard County in 1874, that the NASA program at nearby Cape Canaveral in the 1950s promoted development in Melbourne and Eau Gallie, and that Eau Gallie was incorporated into Melbourne in 1969. The two stories now meet in the botanical garden, where an 1883 Melbourne schoolhouse sits on Eau Gallie stone.

In Florida Tech's telling, the schoolhouse was a stop on a 1996 campus tour that preceded a $50 million grant to the university.

Patterson opens his 2020 article on a cold January morning in 1996 at the garden entrance. Florida Tech president Lynn Weaver had invited directors of the F.W. Olin Foundation to visit as part of his campaign for a major grant, and one director asked about the Little Red Schoolhouse. The professor leading the tour, whom a footnote identifies as Patterson himself, answered that the men and women who made the twentieth century went to school in buildings like it, then pointed toward the Quad and the Crawford Science Building. Four months later, he writes, the F.W. Olin Foundation awarded the university a $50 million grant.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against Gordon Patterson's Florida Tech News history of the schoolhouse, Florida Tech's garden home, map and history pages, the Henegar Center building history, and the state's Gleason House marker and National Register nomination.