Hungerford: The School That Made Eatonville a Beacon
Founded by Tuskegee graduates Russell and Mary Calhoun and modeled on Tuskegee Institute, the Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School educated Black students for generations. Its campus is gone; its land is Eatonville's biggest argument.
3 minute read
Before Eatonville had a festival, before it had a museum, it had a school — and for more than a century, the Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School was the engine of the town’s ambition. Founded by two Tuskegee graduates on the Booker T. Washington model, Hungerford educated generations of Black students in academics, trades and agriculture at a time when much of the South offered them nothing at all. Its campus is gone. Its land is now the most contested ground in Eatonville, and its story explains why.
A Tuskegee on the Florida frontier
Russell and Mary Calhoun, both trained at Tuskegee Institute, established the school in the 1890s — the National Register nomination for the Eatonville Historic District dates the founding to 1889, while other accounts give 1897 or 1899, a discrepancy historians still note. What is not disputed is the design: a normal and industrial school where students learned literature and mathematics alongside farming, carpentry and the other trades of self-sufficiency. Connecticut philanthropist E. C. Hungerford backed the school with land and money given in memory of his son, Robert — hence the name over the gate — and the campus grew, by most accounts, toward 300 acres of classrooms, dormitories, workshops and farmland at Eatonville’s edge.
For Black families across Florida and the wider South, Hungerford was a destination: a boarding school in a self-governing Black town, where a child could be educated without apology or permission. It completed the triangle that defined Eatonville — St. Lawrence A.M.E. and Macedonia for the spirit, town hall for self-rule, Hungerford for the mind. Zora Neale Hurston grew up in its shadow; the Eatonville of her books is a place that took learning seriously because institutions like Hungerford made learning normal. Alumni carried its training into teaching, farming, business and the ministry across the region.
A thread of the institution never left town. Eatonville’s Wymore career education campus traces its own lineage to Hungerford — a 1989 Orlando Sentinel account of the town’s National Register campaign described the Wymore Career Education Center as established in 1889 as the Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School — and Hungerford’s name still rides on the athletic field where the town holds its Juneteenth celebration. Alumni associations kept the school’s memory organized long after the district took over, which is one reason the land fight of the 2020s found such a prepared constituency: Hungerford graduates and their descendants are scattered across Central Florida, and they vote, organize and testify like it.
From beacon to empty field
The school’s independence ended in the 1950s, when the Hungerford property was deeded to the Orange County school district — a transfer whose circumstances Eatonville has questioned ever since. Hungerford continued as a public school, but the campus shrank over the decades as parcels were sold off, and the last public high school on the site closed in 2009. The remaining school buildings were demolished in 2020. What had been nearly 300 acres at its height is today roughly 117 acres of fenced, mostly vacant land along Interstate 4 — the largest single piece of Eatonville, and the subject of the preservation fight we trace in The Fight for the Hungerford Land.
You cannot tour Hungerford; there is nothing left standing to tour. What you can do is stand on Kennedy Boulevard, read the heritage markers, and understand that the empty acreage behind the fence is not empty at all — it is a schoolyard where thousands of Black students once learned trades and Latin in a town their grandparents built, inside a community that considered education a form of freedom. That is the weight the current argument over the land is really carrying. For the rest of the town’s story, start with our Eatonville hub and the town guide, and find the Hungerford site on the Orlando Top Spots Map.
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