Bunnell

Bunnell is the oldest incorporated community in Flagler County and the one place here whose story doesn't begin with ITT. The settlement grew up in the 1880s around a sawmill operation associated with Alvah Bunnell, whose name the town took, and it matured as a crossroads of the Florida East Coast Railway, turpentine stills, cattle ranching, and row crops — potatoes and cabbage above all, a legacy the county still celebrates with its Potato Festival heritage. The Town of Bunnell incorporated in 1913, and when the Florida Legislature carved Flagler County out of pieces of St. Johns and Volusia counties in 1917, Bunnell's central location, rail access, and shipping points made it the natural county seat — a designation it has held continuously ever since, with the historic 1920s-era courthouse still anchoring the old downtown.

Mid-century Bunnell had an industrial chapter that quietly shaped the whole county: the Lehigh Portland Cement Company opened its southeastern plant east of town after World War II, laying a rail spur in 1952 that connected the plant to the Florida East Coast Railway in Bunnell. The plant closed in 1965 after labor disputes and economic pressure, but the abandoned rail corridor later became the Lehigh Greenway Rail Trail, completed in 2010. Meanwhile, ITT's Palm Coast project, announced in 1969, grew up entirely around Bunnell — and eventually dwarfed it in population while Bunnell kept the courthouse, the fairgrounds, and the farmland.

The modern story is land. Through annexations of more than 87,000 acres in the early 2000s, Bunnell became the second-largest city in Florida by land area — roughly 138 square miles, the overwhelming majority of it ranchland, timber, and agriculture rather than rooftops. Within and around that footprint sits Daytona North, known locally as the Mondex, a sprawling rural acreage subdivision platted in the mid-20th century where most residential roads are still unpaved and a special service district created in 1983 funds road maintenance through an assessment on property owners. Bunnell's newest chapter is the Grand Reserve golf community on the city's east side, where D.R. Horton has been building out an 847-home master plan since purchasing the residential component in 2017 — on track to grow the small city's population by more than half at build-out.