Chelsea Barney Herbert used to ride her bike past the two-story house at 802 E. Moody Blvd and imagine owning it one day. She was a kid then, and the house was just a house, big and yellow and slightly mysterious the way old houses are to children. Years later, when the building came up for sale, she bought it. Not to live in. To give away, in a sense, to nine women who needed a place to start something of their own.
That single purchase, made a couple of years ago, turned out to be the first domino in a chain that's still falling across downtown Bunnell. A new county museum built inside a 1926 records vault. A mural going up on the wall of a former library. A folk-art tradition with only two living practitioners showing up on Moody Boulevard twice a year. None of it was planned by a committee. It started with one house and spread from there, and that order of operations tells you more about how small downtowns actually change than any redevelopment plan would.
One House, Then Two More
Herbert bought the 10-bedroom, 4,110-square-foot building, most recently home to the Salvo Art Project, and spent months renovating it herself, drawing on experience from her day job in construction. She opened it in March 2024 as Poppy's True Market, named for her two children, Poppy Jane and Truett. The house now holds nine shops, all owned by women: an antique store, a plant shop with a greenhouse on the back porch, a hair salon, a yoga studio, two art studios, and a photography studio run by Christina Katsolis, who is also the programming director at the Southeast Museum of Photography at Daytona State College.
The demand surprised even Herbert. Word spread through a Palm Coast Arts Foundation newsletter and some social posts, and within 45 days every space was filled with a waiting list behind it. "It's become an opportunity for women to take a leap into a brick and mortar space," she said. What's easy to miss in that quote is the scale of what followed. Herbert has noted that two other nearby homes have since been renovated, a small but real signal that one project changed what neighbors thought was possible for the block.
The County Followed the Market's Lead
What makes Bunnell's case unusual is what happened next. Downtown revivals in small Florida towns typically start with a city grant or a facade improvement program, and the private businesses show up after the public money clears a path. Here the order reversed. A private house renovation came first. The county followed with its own reuse project two years later.
In 2026, the Flagler County Historical Society opened the Vault Room Museum inside the historic 1926 Flagler County Courthouse at 200 E. Moody Blvd, just down the street from Poppy's. The room itself is the actual vault where the county stored its records from 1926 until 2007, a space that sat unused for nearly two decades before someone decided it belonged to the public again. It now holds 10 original courthouse benches with seating for 50 and rotating exhibits, including one on women's voting rights and one on early Bunnell history. A nonprofit called Seeking Insights for Solutions has been collecting video interviews with multigenerational Bunnell families, Black and white, about life in town going back to segregation, and those interviews play on a laptop inside the museum for anyone who stops in.
Historical Society president Ed Siarkowicz has said the response caught the organization off guard. "Everybody seems excited about the new museum and the content of the exhibits," he said after the museum's first public run during History Day this spring.
A Mural District, One Building at a Time
The momentum kept moving down the block. On the east wall of the former Bunnell Library, now home to SMA Healthcare, artist Brook Page has been painting a 1,100-square-foot mural titled Welcome to Bunnell, facing the historic courthouse directly across the street. Siarkowicz has started calling the area Bunnell's emerging art mural district, and the name fits what's actually happening even if the city hasn't put up a sign yet.
The mural itself carries a piece of Florida art history that most visitors would never guess is standing on a wall in a town most people still think of as a quick pass-through on the way to the beach. It recreates a painting by R.L. Lewis, one of the original Florida Highwaymen, a group of 26 self-taught landscape painters inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004. Lewis died earlier this year, but he saw the painting that inspired the mural unveiled at Poppy's True Market late last year before he passed. Page had worked with Lewis previously on a project in Hastings, and this mural continues that collaboration in his absence.
Poppy's True Market has become an unlikely anchor for the Highwaymen tradition locally. The market keeps a permanent collection of Highwaymen originals and giclée prints, and Frank Menino, a collector and dealer, partners with the market to bring in pieces by A.E. Backus, Harold Newton, and Al Black for periodic shows. Curtis Arnett, one of only two surviving members of the original Highwaymen, has appeared at the market three times now, most recently at this year's History Day, where he sat with his paintings and talked with visitors who may never get another chance to meet one of these artists in person.
The Day It All Comes Together
Bunnell held its second annual History Day on April 11 this year, and the event is really the clearest evidence of how these separate threads have started acting as one downtown identity rather than a scattering of individual projects. The day opened at the 1917 Holden House Museum at 204 E. Moody Blvd with a student scholarship presentation, then moved through the Vault Room Museum, the Sisco Deen Research Library, and Poppy's True Market for the Highwaymen show, with Page working on the mural in public view the whole time. Organizers also displayed bricks recovered from the Old Brick Road, a 10-mile stretch of the original Dixie Highway between Espanola and Bunnell, a physical reminder that this town's Main Street predates the interstate by a century.
Separately, the city announced in July that Coquina City Hall, another historic structure downtown, has reopened on a temporary basis for community use and private rentals while officials continue working toward a longer-term restoration. It's one more historic building rejoining daily use rather than sitting vacant, and it fits the same pattern as everything else on this list.
The Pattern Underneath It
None of these projects were coordinated by a single agency. A private citizen renovated a house because she loved it as a kid. A historical society repurposed a vault because the room existed and the story was worth telling. An artist agreed to paint a wall because a friend and collaborator wanted his work remembered. A market owner built relationships with Highwaymen collectors because the art fit the antique-and-vintage mood she was already creating. Each decision made the next one easier, and two years later downtown Bunnell has a museum, a market, a mural district, and an annual event that didn't exist before Herbert bought that yellow house.
If you live in Bunnell, the practical version of this story is simple: the things worth doing downtown on a Saturday changed in the last two years, and they're still changing. A short loop down Moody Boulevard now covers more ground than it used to.
- Start at Poppy's True Market, 802 E. Moody Blvd, for the antiques, the plant greenhouse on the back porch, and the rotating Highwaymen collection
- Walk to the Vault Room Museum inside the 1926 courthouse at 200 E. Moody Blvd for the records vault turned exhibit space
- Stop at the Holden House Museum, 204 E. Moody Blvd, and the Sisco Deen Research Library for the deeper local history
- Look for Brook Page's Welcome to Bunnell mural on the east wall of the former library building, now SMA Healthcare
- Watch for the next History Day, which the Historical Society has run each spring for two years running
None of this requires a reason to be house hunting. It's just what's actually new in a town that most people still describe by what it used to be.
If you're curious how a small downtown's momentum like this tends to show up in what buyers ask about when they look at Bunnell and the surrounding Flagler County market, that's a conversation The Goellner Team has often, and we're glad to have it whenever you're ready.
