Drive a few miles west of Bunnell on County Road 13, past the small farms and quiet crossroads of Espanola, and the pavement under your tires gives way to brick. The bricks are rust-red, weathered by more than a century of Florida sun, and stamped on their faces with the words “GRAVES B’HAM ALA” for the Birmingham, Alabama company that produced most of them. The road narrows to nine feet wide, barely enough for a single vehicle. If another car appears coming the other way, one of you will need to pull off into the scrub to let the other pass.
This is the Old Brick Road, one of the few remaining stretches of the original Dixie Highway anywhere in Florida, and possibly the longest preserved section in the entire state. It runs roughly nine miles north from Espanola through the scrub forests and pine flatwoods of Flagler County, crossing the St. Johns County line and continuing for two more miles to County Road 204 near the former settlement of Spuds. It is older than Flagler County itself. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And in 2025, it is once again at the center of a fight over whether modern development can coexist with one of northeast Florida’s most distinctive historical landmarks.
This is the story of how the Old Brick Road came to be, why it survived when nearly every other stretch of the Dixie Highway was paved over or destroyed, and what happens to it next.
A Road Built Before the County Existed
The story of the Old Brick Road begins in April 1914, when Isaac I. Moody, the Bunnell-area land developer who would later go on to found Flagler Beach, announced the approval of a $650,000 bond issue for a new highway to connect Hastings in St. Johns County south through Espanola to Bunnell, and then east to Ocean City Beach, the coastal settlement that would later be renamed Flagler Beach…