The History of Bunnell, Florida, for New Real Estate Agents

Updated August 2026 · Reviewed by Adams, Cameron & Co.

Before Bunnell Stop: Timucua territory and open pine flatwoods

Long before there was a railroad stop to name, the interior of what is now Flagler County was Timucua territory, part of the same St. Johns River region occupied for centuries by Timucua-speaking peoples before European contact. Unlike the coast a few miles east, the inland pine flatwoods and hammocks around present-day Bunnell saw little permanent settlement through the Spanish colonial period and much of the 19th century. It was quiet, unclaimed land right up until the late 1890s, which is part of why what happened next, one man building a mill, could define an entire town’s origin story so completely. There was no earlier settlement to erase or absorb; Bunnell’s history really does start close to where its name does.

A cypress mill gives the railroad a name to call this stop

In late 1897, Alvah A. Bunnell, then in his early forties, built a cypress shingle mill and store next to the newly laid tracks of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway. The railroad ran on wood-burning locomotives in that era, and a working mill next to the line was useful enough that the railroad started calling the location Bunnell Stop for its mail, freight, and passenger service. That is the entire origin of the name: not a founder with a grand plan for a city, but a shingle maker whose mill happened to sit at a spot the railroad found convenient to name and to serve. By 1903 the settlement had grown enough to get its own U.S. Post Office, the first real sign that Bunnell Stop was becoming more than a mill and a water tank.

The Bunnell Development Company plats an actual town

A mill stop is not a town, and the difference came in 1909, when I.I. Moody, J.R. Sloan, and James Frank “Major” Lambert formed the Bunnell Development Company. The company platted streets, sold lots, and built the infrastructure a real town needs: Lambert’s own house, which still stands today as the oldest existing structure associated with the town, the first church in what would become Flagler County, and, in 1910, the Bunnell First State Bank building, later added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. None of this happened by accident or momentum. Three named men decided, in a specific year, to turn a railroad mill stop into a platted town, and the streets an agent walks today largely trace back to that decision.

Incorporated twice: 1911, then again, correctly, in 1913

Bunnell Stop was first incorporated as a town by special act of the Florida Legislature on June 2, 1911. That first incorporation contained a legal description error serious enough that the legislature had to correct it, which meant re-incorporating the town in 1913. That second, corrected act is why 1913 is the date most commonly cited as Bunnell’s official incorporation, even though the town had technically existed as an incorporated body two years earlier. It is a small bureaucratic wrinkle, but it is a real one, and it is worth an agent knowing the difference between the two dates rather than picking whichever one sounds cleaner.

1917: Flagler County is created, and Bunnell becomes its seat

On June 12, 1917, the Florida Legislature created Flagler County by combining the southern part of St. Johns County with the northern part of Volusia County, carving a brand-new county out of two older ones. A new county needs a seat of government, and Bunnell won that role because of what it already had: a central location within the new county’s boundaries, an established commercial base, and both railroad and roadway access that made it a genuinely practical place to run courts, record deeds, and house county offices. Bunnell did not become the county seat because it was the biggest or wealthiest town in the area. It became the county seat because it was the most centrally and logistically sensible one, and that logic has held for more than a century since. Every courthouse function, every recorded deed, every county commission meeting for all of Flagler County still runs through Bunnell today because of a decision made in 1917.

1924: town becomes city, right as the boom arrives

In 1924, Bunnell was formally upgraded from a town to a City by the Florida Legislature, a status change that reflected genuine growth in the years after the county seat designation. The timing put Bunnell right at the front edge of the 1920s Florida land boom, the speculative real estate mania that reshaped the entire state before it collapsed. Even a small, inland railroad town like Bunnell felt it: northern buyers poured in on the promise of cheap Florida land, drawn by aggressive marketing and the same easy train access that had built the town in the first place. Bunnell was never a boomtown on the scale of Miami or the coastal resort towns, but the boom years left a real mark on its built environment, including the Neoclassical Old Flagler County Courthouse, designed by architect Wilbur Talley, built in 1926, and dedicated on July 28, 1927, one of the more serious pieces of civic architecture a small county seat could have commissioned. It stands today as the clearest physical evidence that Bunnell’s 1920s were real, not just borrowed excitement from the coast.

The bust, the Depression, and a return to what the land actually grew

The Florida land boom collapsed in the late 1920s, well before the national stock market crash of 1929, and Bunnell absorbed that collapse along with the rest of the state. The Great Depression that followed hit an already-slowed local economy hard. Bunnell did not reinvent itself after the bust. It went back to what had supported the area before speculation arrived: cattle ranching, potato farming (a crop important enough that it still appears on Flagler County’s official seal), citrus, and timber. The 1920s and 1930s also saw a real moonshine era take hold in the rural stretches of the new county, bootleggers operating through the same backroads that had briefly carried land speculators. None of this is a flattering or dramatic recovery story. It is a small government-seat town returning to agriculture and quiet governance because that is what the land and the local economy actually supported, and that pattern, not a second boom, is what carried Bunnell through the 1930s.

The WPA rebuilds Bunnell’s civic core

One of Bunnell’s most distinctive buildings came directly out of the Depression recovery rather than the boom years. Between 1936 and 1937, Works Progress Administration crews built Bunnell’s Coquina City Hall using coquina stone quarried locally and shaped by hand into irregular blocks, work slow and labor-intensive enough that individual tool marks are still visible on the stone today. WPA workers also dug the small, man-made Lake Lucille in front of the building by hand, out of what had been a cypress mud hole; a fountain was added to the lake in the 1960s. The building served originally as a combined community meeting hall, library, and recreation facility, exactly the kind of multi-purpose public building a Depression-era town needed and could actually afford to build with federal labor. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2019 as part of Florida’s New Deal Resources. For an agent, it is a useful, tangible answer to “what did the Depression actually leave behind here”: not ruin, but one of the town’s more architecturally interesting public buildings, still in use as government space at 200 South Church Street.

Overshadowed, but never replaced, by Palm Coast

Bunnell’s role as county seat has never depended on being the county’s biggest town, which is fortunate, because it has not been for decades. Palm Coast, developed starting in 1969 as a planned community along the coast, grew rapidly and now holds well over 110,000 residents, more than thirty times Bunnell’s population. Bunnell simply did not compete for that growth, and it did not need to: county government, the courthouse, and the administrative functions tied to being the seat stayed in Bunnell regardless of where the population settled. That is a genuinely different story than most small Florida towns that got bypassed by a bigger neighbor and slowly hollowed out. Bunnell endured specifically because its role was never about population size in the first place, and that distinction is worth an agent understanding clearly before assuming a small city means a declining one.

A choreographer born into Bunnell’s agricultural economy

Bunnell’s most nationally significant native son is not a developer or a politician, but Bill T. Jones, the dancer, choreographer, and Tony and MacArthur award winner, born in Bunnell on February 15, 1952, the tenth of twelve children of Estella and Augustus Jones, migrant farm workers who later moved into factory work. Jones’s birth in Bunnell is not a footnote or a marketing hook, it is a direct, human data point confirming the same economic reality this whole history keeps returning to: mid-century Bunnell was an agricultural and farm-labor economy, and the people who lived it were real families working real land, not extras in a boom-and-bust narrative. Jones went on to found the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and become one of the most honored choreographers in American dance, a genuinely remarkable trajectory from a migrant farm-working family in a small Flagler County town.

Bunnell today, by the numbers

The 2020 Census counted 3,276 residents in Bunnell, up about 22 percent from 2,676 in 2010, real growth for a small town but nowhere near Palm Coast’s pace, and consistent with more recent local estimates that put the city approaching 4,000 residents by the mid-2020s. The population is roughly 64 percent White, 24 percent Black, and 7 percent Hispanic or Latino, a meaningfully different demographic mix than the beach towns elsewhere in the county. Geographically, Bunnell has grown mostly through annexation rather than infill: the city now covers roughly 139 square miles, an unusually large land area for a town of this size, among the largest municipal footprints of any city in Florida. That land area is not filled with dense neighborhoods. It is a mix of the original historic townsite, newer rooftops on annexed land, and a genuine amount of rural and agricultural property, which is exactly the kind of geography an agent needs to picture correctly before promising a buyer a walkable downtown experience across the whole city limits.

What is actually in downtown Bunnell today

Downtown Bunnell still centers on the same civic core its history built: the Old Flagler County Courthouse from 1926, the WPA-era Coquina City Hall and Lake Lucille, and a handful of surviving early-1900s residences, including the Lambert House, the George Moody House (1917), the Doc Deen House (1918), and the Holden House (1918), documented well enough to support a formal historic walking tour. The Bunnell Railroad Depot Museum preserves the town’s literal origin story, the railroad connection that gave Bunnell Stop its name in the first place, and Moody Homestead Park, named for the same Moody family behind the 1909 development company, is anchored by live oaks estimated at roughly 400 years old, trees that predate every part of this history by centuries. Downtown dining is modest and local rather than a destination scene, with spots like Old Sugar Mill Pancake House and Terranova’s among the longer-running names locals mention. This is an honest picture, not an inflated one: Bunnell is not selling itself as a tourism or dining destination, and an agent should not oversell it as one. What it offers is a real, walkable, historically documented civic core built around government, not commerce, which is exactly consistent with the town’s founding purpose.

Why this history is what an agent is actually selling

Every piece of this history points at the same conclusion: Bunnell was built to be a seat of government and a service hub for a wider county, not a standalone city with its own economic gravity. That was true when the legislature picked it as county seat in 1917 over towns that might have had more people, it was true when it absorbed the 1920s bust and went back to farming rather than reinventing itself, and it is true today, when a city of roughly 3,300 people covers 139 square miles and sits at the administrative center of one of Florida’s fastest-growing counties. An agent who bases a business in Bunnell is not building a pipeline out of Bunnell’s own population, the numbers simply are not there for that. They are working the county Bunnell was built to serve: courthouse staff and legal professionals whose jobs are tied directly to Bunnell, families settling on newly annexed and surrounding land, and buyers moving toward Palm Coast, Flagler Beach, and the rest of Flagler County who pass through or transact business in Bunnell along the way. Understanding that Bunnell’s whole history is a government-seat story, not a growth-town story, is what separates an agent who can explain the market from one who is simply hoping the small city limits produce enough business on their own.

What is your next step?

See exactly what getting licensed and working this market looks like in our Bunnell licensing and market guide. Then start a conversation with Adams, Cameron & Co. about covering Bunnell and the rest of Flagler County from day one.

Historical dates and figures are drawn from public historical societies, county records, and the National Register of Historic Places, and are believed accurate at time of writing; confirm specifics with the Flagler County Historical Society for research or citation purposes. Population and demographic figures are from the 2020 U.S. Census and more recent public estimates and shift over time. Educational only, not legal or financial advice.