Welcome!

“We accept and thank you for this splendid building, a building no matter how large and important this community may grow, will ever be the center of its social action and the main cause of any progress we may make. The citizens of Davie will take pride in it, maintain it, and cherish it”

-        Charles A. Walsh at the commemoration for the Davie School in 1918

            Charles Walsh built his home in the western frontier of South Florida in 1914, in the area known as Zona. In May 1918, he commemorated the first schoolhouse in the newly renamed settlement of Davie. Today, his family home can be found just behind that same building—a schoolhouse that has grown to encompass the history of the town that flourished from the black muck of the Everglades. Eighty years after the school welcomed its first students, the Davie School Foundation successfully rallied to protect the invaluable community building from destruction and additionally preserved two of the earliest residences, relocating them to the campus to avoid the imminent threat of development. The ‘splendid building’ that is now the Old Davie School Historical Museum amplifies and embodies Walsh’s counsel to ‘take pride, maintain, and cherish’

            In the 95 years since its construction, the schoolhouse has functioned as a classroom, town hall, dance hall, a refuge from floods and hurricanes, an architectural triumph (with some of the first indoor plumbing around!), Broward County School Board office space—almost a bus depot—and now a museum. As students fill the hall and classrooms here once again, education remains at the heart of the schoolhouse’s mission. The Old Davie School is not a dusty bookshelf for the facts and figures of history, instead it is a vibrant and dynamic mosaic of the contributions from those before us, present and still to come.  It provides a moment of understanding that while our world continues to change, the values of our community are still very much the same. It is a unique opportunity to identify with our place in history as the school nears its first century and continues finding purpose in our lives.

            This blog will work to illuminate the rich legacy of community in Davie by highlighting the objects and stories contributed to and maintained by the museum. My hope is to encourage conversation, ask questions, and invite new interpretations of our past. So now it’s your turn—how have you experienced the town and the Old Davie School?