The Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse in St. Augustine started life around 1780, when a Minorcan carpenter named Juan Genopoly turned his home at 14 St. George Street into a classroom. Genopoly was one of 600 refugees who had walked seventy miles through swamps and wilderness to escape brutal indentured servitude at a failed indigo plantation in New Smyrna. Classes cost twelve and a half cents a week, quill pens and parchment included, and unruly students were reportedly stuffed into a space hollowed out beneath the stairs.

The last class graduated in 1864. The building became a tearoom, then in 1931, nine former students reassembled the room from memory. A rusted anchor and chain still wrap around the exterior, bolted on in 1937 to keep the whole thing from blowing away in a hurricane.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the schoolhouse back to the Minorcan exodus, connecting Genopoly's classroom to the larger story of a refugee community that walked out of servitude and built a new quarter in America's oldest city.