Qualla: Mary McLeod Bethune Home

Mary McLeod Bethune Home: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY 2.5. She started with a dollar and fifty cents. In 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune opened the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls with five students, her young son, and almost nothing else. She fashioned pencils from charred wood, made ink from elderberries, and stuffed mattresses with Spanish moss. She raised money selling sweet potato pies to railroad workers. Within two years, enrollment had grown to 250 students. The modest two-story house on what became the Bethune-Cookman campus would be her home from 1913 until her death in 1955, and the base from which she would become one of the most influential African-American women of the twentieth century.

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Mary McLeod Bethune Home: The Seventeenth Child, Born Free

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lvklock, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mary Jane McLeod was born on July 10, 1875, in Mayesville, South Carolina, the seventeenth child of Sam and Patsy McLeod, and the first born free. Her parents had been enslaved, and most of her older siblings had been born into bondage. She walked five miles each way to attend a ...

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Image: Lvklock | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mary McLeod Bethune Home: A School Built on Sweet Potato Pies

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bethune chose Daytona Beach because the Florida East Coast Railway was bringing laborers to the area, and their families needed schools. She purchased a plot of land near the city dump for five dollars down. With no desks, no books, and no supplies, she improvised everything. The...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mary McLeod Bethune Home: Advisor to the President

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lvklock, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bethune's influence reached far beyond Daytona Beach. She became a close friend of Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and in the 1930s, Roosevelt appointed her to lead the Division of Negro Affairs within the National Youth Administration, making her the first Black woman to ...

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Image: Lvklock | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mary McLeod Bethune Home: What the House Holds

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY 2.5. The Mary McLeod Bethune Home sits on the northeast corner of the Bethune-Cookman campus, west of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It is an American Foursquare, a practical two-story frame structure with wings extending to each side and a hip-roof porch spanning the front. Th...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY 2.5

Mary McLeod Bethune Home: A Legacy Carved in Stone and Bronze

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ebyabe, CC BY 2.5. In 2022, a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune became the first representation of an African American in the National Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol, representing the state of Florida. It replaced the statue of a Confederate general. The symbolism is inescapable: a woman bo...

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Image: Ebyabe | CC BY 2.5