All-White One-Room Schools 

As Daisy Butler finished teacher’s college in Indiana in 1894, she was invited to begin her career on Lake Worth by a friend whose husband, William L. Widmeyer, had just been elected to the Board of Public Instruction of Dade County. Although Butler said she had her choice of schools, including Riviera, Lantana, and Palm Beach, she chose the one that was about to open in West Palm Beach. Charles C. Haight had contracted with the county to build the one-room schoolhouse for $1,500 on the corner of Datura Street and Olive Avenue. Henry Flagler donated the lot plus $1,000; the county supplied $600. 

In the one room, Butler taught only white students, grades K-8. She received $60.00 a month, from which she paid about $4.00 for room and board. After the first school year, Widmeyer sent Butler to teach in Lantana, thinking the incoming railroad workers’ families would make her job too difficult in West Palm Beach.

Just to the north, Stella Ezell was a student at Mangonia:

Our first schoolhouse was almost the same land that the Northboro School now is on [at 40th Street and Poinsettia (aka Flagler Drive)], but at that time, it was just one good-sized building with a peaked roof and just one room with no finish inside of anything and just wooden benches at first. Afterwards they had those desks where two children could sit.  There must have been about a dozen of us, all in one room, and no particular grades—we went according to the readers. I was ahead of everything because I could read.