The Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse
Near St. Augustine, Florida
On Saint George Street stands a small, weathered building that calls itself the oldest wooden schoolhouse in the United States. It is a wonderful story, and one to enjoy with a little caution. The house is built of bald cypress and red cedar, joined with wooden pins and iron spikes rather than modern nails.
It first appears in the town's tax records around seventeen sixteen. In seventeen eighty a Greek carpenter named Juan Genopoly bought the property, and by about seventeen eighty-eight it was serving as a school, teaching boys and girls together in the same room, which was unusual for its day. Younger children paid about twelve and a half cents a week.
You will also hear that a great chain wraps the building to hold it down against hurricanes. That is true, but the chain was added in nineteen thirty-seven, not in colonial times. As for the boast of being the oldest, historians treat it gently.
No wooden building here could predate seventeen oh two, when the British burned the town, and an older wooden schoolhouse survives in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Still, few classrooms anywhere can claim roots this deep, in the heart of the old Minorcan quarter.
