Outmaneuvering Lake City to become UF's home was overriding factor in Gainesville's development.

UPDATE: This version corrects information about the Florida Railroad.

Editor's note: The online version of this story has been changed to note that David Levy Yulee was the businessman behind the Florida Railroad, which ran from Fernandina to Cedar Key. In addition, UF received free water until well after World War II.

Gainesville is celebrating its 150th birthday today and to understand the city as it is now, a trip back in time would be appropriate.

The Civil War ended but oppression of blacks didn’t — “Young Men’s Democratic” clubs flourished as covers for the Ku Klux Klan, and blacks were lynched. The racial disparities that exist today are rooted in the time of the city’s founding.

Vagrancy and theft were the big crime issues of the day. They are still issues today.

One of Gainesville’s oldest businesses, Chestnut Funeral Home, was started by descendants of emancipated slave Johnson Chestnut from the plantation of Thomas and Serena Haile. He served on Gainesville’s city commission, the first in a Chestnut political dynasty that has included modern city and county commissioners, Alachua County School Board members and state representatives.

Boulware Springs on Southeast 15th Street was a popular recreation spot in the 1860s. It still is — the trailhead for the Gainesville-Hawthorne State Trail is there. It is also a gateway to the popular La Chua Trail in Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park.

And an area on the southern end of downtown was a hub of activity because of the railroad, from which the major crops of citrus and cotton were shipped. In 1864 it was the site of a Civil War skirmish. Now it is Depot Park, the city’s beloved gathering spot.

“Without the railroad Gainesville wouldn’t exist,” said historian Peggy Macdonald. “When you go to Depot Park, it’s such a beautiful place and it’s so fun for families, but you are surrounded by history — that history of the Civil War which was fought in and around downtown Gainesville.”

Gainesville as a formal city is older than its 1869 incorporation, and ignoring that is ignoring tumultuous events that continue to echo in Gainesville today.

For the record, Gainesville was officially established in 1854. It was first incorporated in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended. Florida was under military rule until 1867 and the next year, the state ordered all cities to re-incorporate. So in 1869 Gainesville became officially a city once again.

“If the birthday is 2019, then Gainesville has had a facelift and might be lying about its age,” Macdonald said. “It was a fascinating time in Gainesville’s history, and certainly worth celebrating.”

Florida Railroad impacts

Gainesville county-seat status

It was the chugging railroad that got residents to switch the county seat from Newnansville (near what is now Alachua) to Gainesville.

Like a lot of good things do, the idea of moving the county seat from Newnansville near Alachua to Gainesville — and establishing Gainesville as a city — started at a barbecue. It was at Boulware Springs in 1853.

“It was a no-brainer. The fact that Gainesville was established is due entirely to the construction of the Florida Railroad,” Macdonald said. “It took time for Gainesville to get going but because the people from the other towns had to come to Gainesville to do business, to ship goods and receive goods. It lined the coffers of the people in Gainesville. The Gainesville businesses did well.”

David Levy Yulee, the first person of Jewish heritage to be elected to the U.S. Senate, was behind the Florida Railroad, which ran from Fernandina through Gainesville to Cedar Key. The town of Yulee and Levy County are named for him. Yulee's company finished the railroad in 1861, literally weeks before the Civil War broke out.

Contrary to legend, Gainesville was never named Hogtown. That was a settlement near what is now Westside Park.

Still, Gainesville had a lot of hogs. Swine beached in Florida with the Spaniards, and their descendant feral hogs wandered the streets. They had a particular liking for the cool crawl space under the courthouse before it was skirted to keep them out.

But Gainesville never made money off hogs. Cattle was the lucrative livestock — water was diverted off Paynes Prairie so it could become a 10,000-head cattle ranch. Sheep were also raised.

Cotton was grown with slave labor on plantations around the county — Haile was an actual plantation before it became a subdivision.

For a time immediately after the Civil War freed blacks and whites lived, if not side by side, at least relatively peaceably.

Josiah T. Walls, an emancipated slave, came to Gainesville to teach at the school of the Freedmen’s Bureau — the bureaus were created by the federal government to help former slaves and poor whites after the war. Walls was the first black elected to Congress.

Walls was a Republican, the party of Abraham Lincoln that supported the abolition of slavery. Bickering about race issues existed in the party then but Democrats were overtly racist.

During Reconstruction, whites had to take a loyalty oath to the U.S. to register to vote. Many whites, still bitter about the defeat of the Confederacy, refused. They were disenfranchised from voting while blacks were able to vote for the first time.

But Gainesville joined the rest of the South in segregating blacks, snuffing out civil rights and acting with violence.

“Intimidation of the black and white Republicans was extensive, extending even to murder,” Charles H. Hildreth wrote in "A History of Gainesville." “The daring of the murderers knew no bounds. In one instance a white man rode into a local store and calmly shot his victim.”

Lynchings occurred. Rarely, if ever, was anyone held accountable.

Public schools didn’t exist when Gainesville was founded. Separate private schools for blacks and whites were created. The black school, the Union Academy, flourished until separate public schools were built for whites and blacks in the early 1920s, said Albert E. White, president of the Lincoln High School Alumni Association.

“(Union Academy) went to the eighth grade, and at some point they went to the 10th grade,” White said. “In 1922, there were 500 students in the Union Academy. They didn’t have many teachers. It was a two-story building on Northwest Second Street. It looked more like a house or church than a school.”

Charles Chestnut III, who runs the funeral home his family started more than 100 years ago, said the slavery of his ancestors was not discussed when he was a boy.

But he remembers living in a segregated society and became a leader in the movement to crush it.

After serving in the Army and attending a mortuary school in Philadelphia, Chestnut returned to Gainesville and was an early civil rights leader.

“I came back here in 1961 and that’s when I was very involved in the movement,” Chestnut said. “My experiences in Philadelphia — how I was treated there and how I was treated here were very, very different.”

UF's effect on city:

'Berkeley of the South'



The railroad was the first economic engine and transformer of Gainesville. Next was the decision to locate the University of Florida in town.

An early incarnation of UF was in Lake City but the town-gown relationship was often full of animosity, said UF historian and archivist Carl Van Ness.

In 1905 the Florida House of Representatives agreed to create four institutions of higher learning — the University of the State of Florida for Men, the Florida Female College, the Florida Normal and Industrial College for Negroes and the Blind, Deaf and Dumb Institute.

Gainesville city officials decided to try to wrest UF from Lake City. Both offered land and money. But Gainesville offered one more enticement — water at no charge, pumped from the city’s water works at Boulware Springs.

Gainesville won on a 6 to 4 vote of the Board of Control and the Board of Education, and UF's free-water deal lasted until well after World War II.

Within 20 years, Gainesville’s economy evolved from primarily agriculture to one based on UF — its students, staff, growth and the businesses that cater to them.

“A lot of people ask what Gainesville would be like without the University of Florida. It’s the simplest question to answer — get on Interstate 75, go 45 miles north and get off at Lake City,” Van Ness said. “One thing you can’t stress enough is that this is a comprehensive university. We are a land-grant institution so we have the engineering, the agriculture, the medical school. We have everything, and that is not typical of most universities.”

As UF continued to grow, its impact grew as well. It is the single largest employer in the county, and the money it generates washes throughout the county.

Over time with the addition of Shands Hospital, UF was the catalyst for the medical industry that is an economic lifeblood of the city and county, said Jon Mills, director of UF’s Center for Governmental Responsibility and a former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.

UF also evolved into a cultural hub with the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, the Harn Museum and the Florida Museum of Natural History.

“The location of the medical complex here generated more medical complexes. That is a significant part of Gainesville,” Mills said. “You have a pretty large cultural complex that University of Florida funding was able to bring together that wouldn’t have been doable without public funding.”

UF also had a role in changing the politics of the city, which became known in the 1970s as the “Berkeley of the South” — after the activism of the University of California, Berkeley. On voting maps today, it is Democratic blue among the Republican red of the region.

Zipping I-75 traffic

changes city again

In the mid-1960s Gainesville was transformed again with the construction of Interstate 75 in what, until then, had been relatively undeveloped and far outside the city’s limits.

Once I-75 was completed, more businesses sprouted along Archer and Newberry Roads at the interchanges. Subdivisions and apartment complexes crept westward to the interstate and now far beyond.

The Oaks Mall was built on Newberry Road. The initial Butler Plaza was a single strip built at the site of the old Stengel Field airport.

Former Alachua County Commissioner Lee Pinkoson remembers Gainesville before the growth spurred by I-75. He had to cope with it decades later as the county grappled with the impact of sprawl development.

Pinkoson played in woods behind Terwilliger Elementary School before they were cleared for construction of the Oaks Mall. He remembers Stengel Field.

“Obviously the interstate had a big impact on the city and a dramatic impact on downtown businesses like Silverman’s, Fagan’s Bootery and those kind of places,” Pinkoson said. “There’s no question it changed growth. People wanted to go out to the suburbs and we had to deal with that as far as people’s expectations of a higher level of service — fire delivery, the sheriff’s office. As a result it had an impact on the county’s budget.”

After decades of development westward in unincorporated Alachua County, Gainesville grew by gobbling up unincorporated areas through annexation.

Now the city is trying to figure out how to grow within its boundaries. Again, UF is having an impact as it expands its reach from the campus eastward to downtown.

A recent attempt by the city to allow increased densities in first-generation neighborhoods including Porters, Pleasant Street/Fifth Avenue and the Duckpond drew enough opposition to force the commission to tell its staff to try again — and to talk to residents before drawing new plans.

Those neighborhoods are among the oldest in Gainesville, and among residents' concerns is the potential to wipe out the very history in their streets, homes and character.

“There are a lot of people who are very concerned — distraught — over gentrification. From UF’s perspective it makes sense to focus on developing the east part of Gainesville,” Macdonald said. “But it’s a real concern. The Fifth Avenue Festival, an annual tradition that’s coming up, was started over three decades ago by a group of residents who want to preserve that and were concerned about gentrification. We can see now why they were so concerned.”

Much of the background for this story is from “The History of Gainesville.” It was written by Charles H. Hildreth and was first published to celebrate the city’s 100th birthday in 1954 — in reference to the year it was first incorporated. The book was updated in 1979 by Merlin G. Cox.