Sunlight blankets the tall, unkempt grass and speckles through the dense tree canopy. Underneath it rests a modest, single-room building, weathered with red and white paint. The schoolhouse has no current function — just a building to behold and remember.
There is no sign informing visitors what they are looking at. There are no visitors, save for the symphony of chirping birds and rustling trees. A wooden bar across the front door weakly dissuades intruders. It is not necessary. The residents of Rutledge and Liberty Hill, in Alachua County, already know what is inside.
While the schoolhouse remains silent, the building in front of it erupts in people making noise every Sunday. The Greater Liberty Hill Methodist Church is one of the last remaining nuclei of the community for its Black residents, who have seen the area they grew up in succumb to growing developments and fading historical awareness.
“I feel like it’s disappearing. It’s like it never existed. There is nothing in the history books to talk about us,” said Melody Vaughn. “It’s really sad, because it was such a great community. It was so cool.”
A 2006 story in the Gainesville Sun, in 2006, defined the community of Rutledge’s borders as being from Northwest 23rd Avenue to Northwest 39th Avenue and from Northwest 43rd Street to Northwest 83rd Street. This area includes Buchholz High School; Baptist, Methodist and non-denominational churches; apartment complexes, such as Santa Fe Oaks; and restaurants, such as Mother’s Pub & Grill North.
This designated plot is situated between Santa Fe College to the west and Millhopper Square Shopping Center to the east. Part of this area is within the borders of northwest Gainesville, but most of it is unincorporated land.
Some residents of the area contend the Liberty Hill Schoolhouse is actually of a different community than Rutledge — the Liberty Hill Settlement.
Addie Smith, 80, a longtime resident of the area who now lives in Alachua, said the Liberty Hill Settlement runs from Northwest 71st Street westward but that the two communities have always been intrinsically linked.
Vaughn, 59, grew up in Rutledge between the ages of 4 and 17. She is an interior designer based in Atlanta, Georgia, but her family has deep roots in Rutledge. When Vaughn’s grandfather passed, her father, Lawson Brown, moved his five children from New York City to their plot of land in Rutledge. Originally owned by her great-grandfather, who was a sharecropper who grew okra, peas and tomatoes, the plot is still in the family to this day.
“Growing up, Rutledge was a community of affluent African-Americans, affluent within their own rights … Rutledge was the only community in which we were able to just enjoy life,” said Vaughn.
Her father became a popular figure and operated a successful landscaping business, Vaughn said, earning him an unofficial title as “mayor” of Rutledge. She remembers her father driving around the community and helping others settle domestic affairs, find jobs or offer shelter to those in need.
It is this version of Rutledge she treasures the most, said Vaughn. But she has seen the area change drastically since her youth.
Vaughn, who returns to Alachua County to visit her mother and remaining siblings, worries over the state of the community. Landmarks she grew up with — a baseball field, clubs and stores — have disappeared due to increasing development in the area.
“The lotus grows in the muckiest of water and that was Rutledge. Rutledge is that lotus flower.” she said. “That beautiful cornucopia of Black people that looked out for each other and loved each other and flourished and had beautiful homes and lawns in the most modest way. It was the best kept secret Gainesville had to offer.”
The Roots of Rutledge
After the Civil War’s end in 1865, Alachua County boomed with settlers and formerly enslaved people, mostly from South Carolina. They sought opportunity in the fertile farming land. On top of this, the Florida Railroad had connected to Gainesville in 1859, adding to an influx of new residents. From 1860 to 1870, Alachua County’s population doubled from about 8,300 people to about 17,500 people, according to U.S. Census data.
In the rural periphery of Gainesville’s growth sprouted Rutledge, an undefined and predominantly Black settlement unified by access to faith, fellowship and education.
While there is no exact date of Rutledge’s founding, it begins to be mentioned in historical documents starting around the 1880s, such as in a book titled “Alachua, the Garden County of Florida, Its Resources and Advantages” by John W. Ashby.
Rutledge is described as “three stores, a post-office, a large boarding-house, a few comfortable dwellings, a dozen or more buildings altogether, as yet constitute the town,” wrote Ashby. “The beautiful rolling land and rich hammock soil, combined with unusual healthfulness, has highly commended this section to all who have examined it.”
While Rutledge has little historical information on it, the Liberty Hill settlement has even less, with the name not appearing in historical documents, save for the church or the schoolhouse.
The original Liberty Hill Schoolhouse is first mentioned around 1869, with the currently standing building having been built in 1892. It served as a space for children of both Liberty Hill and Rutledge to access education within their own community. Now, the eroded building stands as a reminder of the area’s rich history and charged roots.
Generations of Black children grew up within the walls of the Liberty Hill Schoolhouse, including two older siblings of Addie Smith. Smith’s childhood was a stark contrast to the constant whooshing by of cars on Northwest 23rd Avenue seen today.
“When I grew up, we walked and a lot of people walked to church. We didn't have automobiles, some had horses, wagons and that kind of stuff. … We come together on Sundays, but, during the week, we're just here, there and yonder.”
In 1952, Alachua County stopped supporting schoolhouses and rezoned students to Lincoln High School, where is now the A. Quinn Jones Community Center. But the memory of what once was lives on in the minds of Rutledge’s dwindling and aging residents.
In the past few decades, they have congregated weekly in what is left — the Greater Liberty Hill United Methodist
Church for the residents of Liberty Hill and the Second Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church for the residents of Rutledge.
What Remains?
Reverend Michael Frazier Sr., 61, who is from Reddick, has found a deep appreciation for the Black community here in the past eight years he has preached at the Greater Liberty Hill Methodist Church.
Despite the movement of Black residents out of Rutledge, said Frazier, they commute to the area every Sunday.
At one service, nearly 20 people dotted the dozen pews to listen, clutching their worn pocketbook bibles and scribbling with their pens when Frazier enjoins them to take notes. He makes jokes, they laugh. He calls on them to echo a prayer, and they raise their hands in unison.
“A lot of their heritage and history has been harnessed right there,” he said. “That’s basically the church that many of them have known since they’re alive.”
Despite the loyalty, Frazier said he is curious how this will affect the future of the institution.
Younger members have migrated from Rutledge for their education or careers, leaving the church empty of generations of families. Nowadays, when Frazier looks at his audience every Sunday, it is mainly older faces he sees.
“It’s a historically African-American church … In a community that once was predominantly Black but has changed drastically,” he said. “Now it’s a Black church in a more predominately white community.”
Unless the church blooms into a community, said Frazier, this shift could present some challenges.
Lawson Brown Jr., brother of Melody Vaughn, is the assistant principal at Santa Fe High School and has lived in Alachua County his entire life. Growing up in Rutledge, he said he felt the tension between two cores of the Black community in Gainesville.
Gainesville’s other historically Black communities like Lincoln Estates and Duval Heights can be found in east Gainesville. Lawson Jr. said that there has historically been competition between the communities in the east and those in the northwest.
“It was such a family community that you didn’t lock your doors. … You didn’t realize how safe you felt until you started to grow up and move away and then you realize you have to lock every door,” said Brown Jr. “I didn’t know what a keychain was because you would leave your keys in the ignition and not even take them out of your car.”
What’s Next?
The challenges of the Liberty Hill Schoolhouse mirrors the larger issues these communities face. The National Park Service officially designated the building as a historic place in 2003, but the accolade does nothing directly for the community.
Joel Buchanan, a Gainesville local and historian of Black history, attempted to refurbish the schoolhouse and fortify local recognition. But his efforts were thwarted by funding obstacles and with Buchanan’s passing in 2014, interest in the project has fizzled out.
As the settlement’s population and notable landmarks fade, its cultural awareness has too.
The community of Rutledge has not received cultural support from Alachua County. The county’s bicentennial festivities made no mention of the historically complex and significant area.
“Unfortunately, it's one of those that is in the periphery,” said Salvatore Cumella, executive director of the Matheson History Museum in Gainesville. “I know the name, I know where it is, but I really don’t know much of its history.”
Cumella’s background is in historic preservation and he has experience with projects in Gainesville. He said unpreserved communities like Rutledge are often the result of systemic racism that does not allot importance to their unique cultural fabrics.
“During segregation, a lot of our traditionally Black neighborhoods, even here in Gainesville, were much more vibrant. The businesses were there because they had to be,” said Cumella. “During desegregation, a lot of those businesses, rightfully, were able to spread out and go to more profitable parts of town. But that left this void in a lot of those neighborhoods or, in some cases, entire communities.”
Nevertheless, the Rutledge and Liberty Hill communities have held onto a few spaces where their culture remains, like their two main churches and the Rutledge Community Cemetery nearby.
“The important thing is that you have some of these touch points where you can talk about all those different things, even if there aren’t a lot of buildings left,” said Cumella. “You can still talk about the people who built that community, who were in that community, why the church is still there or that schoolhouse is still there, what it meant then and what it means now.”
The deep history of the Rutledge and Liberty Hill settlements lingers even when their buildings are no longer standing. It can be heard in the yells of churchgoers during service, it can be seen in the humble wooden structures that have stood tall for over a century, and it can be felt in the conversations with residents, young and old.