FELLSMERE — Sometime in the 1920s, a Fellsmere student may have flipped a penny, hoping for heads. But he never found out how it landed.

Andy Davis knows.

As project superintendent with Doug Wilson Enterprises Inc. of Cape Canaveral, his crew is restoring the Old Fellsmere School, a 1916-era building, on a $2.97 million city contract. They’re hoping to be done in January, City Manager Jason Nunemaker said.

One of the workers recently found the 1920 penny on top of a door frame. Davis envisioned a student flipping the coin and losing it. And he was lucky without knowing it.

“It flipped heads up,” Davis recalled. “We also found a young girl’s homework from 1920 behind a baseboard. It was still kind of legible math homework.”

Such finds, which he has turned in at City Hall, provide a rare glimpse into the lives of everyday people back when the school was built.

The 27,000-square-foot building, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, was built in 1916 for about $40,000 and housed classrooms for kindergarten through 12th grade for more than 60 years, local historian Clarence “Korky” Korker has said.

After the School Board relocated classes in 1982 to a more modern building, City Hall used the Old Fellsmere School into the mid-1990s. Then storm damage and public-access problems forced the city staff to relocate into the current modular buildings provided by the Harris Corp.

But now City Hall is coming back. Nunemaker said plans call for the Boys & Girls Club to move into the basement and the south part of the first floor, while city staffers relocate into the second floor and the north part of the first floor.

The northernmost section of the basement, meanwhile, will become a kitchen devoted to the city’s specialty: frog legs. Organizers of the annual Fellsmere Frog Leg Festival, who started raising money in 1990 for the restoration plans, will have a permanent headquarters.

Davis said the challenge has been taking a structure that was built before building codes and retrofitting modern wiring and plumbing — including an elevator and central air conditioning — without interfering with the 1916 glory. The result is various square holes cut into the old brickwork for new shafts and ducts. They will be covered by grills.

“This is my first real restoration job to this extent,” Davis said. “I really don’t mind coming to work everyday. This is a rare opportunity.”

Davis and Dean McMurphy, with Door & Window Systems Inc. of Cocoa Beach, said they have a keen respect for tradesmen who had to do everything by hand and built a structure that has withstood every storm and hurricane since 1916.

Replacing a broken brick or wood timber from 1916 means making it anew, McMurphy said. It’s not ready on the shelf at the home-improvement store.

“You can’t get parts for this,” McMurphy said. “Everything we need has to be custom-built. … Everything has to fit right back together or there are gaps. That’s the hardest part about restoration.”

Tags: history, Indian River County, Schools

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