The town itself was a railroad decision. The Timucua and their Potano descendants — the Alachua culture — had lived and farmed the savanna for centuries before the Spanish ran cattle on it in the 1600s, and in 1774 the naturalist William Bartram crossed it and wrote what is still the canonical Western description of "the great Alachua savanna." Eighty years later, in 1853, a county-seat picnic at Boulware Springs put the vote on a new site on Black Oak Ridge to meet the path of the Florida Railroad, and the town was settled in 1854 and named for General Edmund P. Gaines — the War of 1812 and Seminole Wars officer who in 1807 had arrested Aaron Burr. Major James B. Bailey sold the founding land, and his 1854 house remains the oldest in the city. The Florida Railroad reached Gainesville from Fernandina in 1859; on August 17, 1864, Captain J. J. Dickison's Confederate cavalry repelled a larger Union force at the Battle of Gainesville and the courthouse burned. The town rebuilt, was incorporated April 14, 1869, and chartered as a city in 1907.
The University of Florida moved its campus here in 1906, and the collegiate-Gothic core grew up around Century Tower as Gainesville's largest landmark. Through the early twentieth century the city built the look it still wears: the Beaux-Arts Hippodrome of 1911 anchoring downtown, the Thomas Center of 1910, and the wide-porched, oak-shaded streets of the Duckpond — the NE Gainesville Residential District — where a kid named Tom Petty grew up in the 1950s and 60s before going on to a life in music. The wild edge of the city held too: in 1971 Paynes Prairie became Florida's first state preserve and was later named a National Natural Landmark. Today Gainesville is the real Florida, the wild one — a college town in the live oaks, with bison on the savanna and Spanish moss on the porches.
Why People Visit Gainesville Florida
- Hike Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, Florida's first state preserve and a National Natural Landmark, with chances to spot wild bison, free-roaming horses, and alligators from the La Chua Trail and Alachua Sink overlook.
- Walk into Devil's Millhopper Geological State Park, a 120-foot, 500-foot-wide sinkhole with a rainforest microclimate and a chain of small waterfalls.
- Follow the Bartram Trail through the Alachua savanna country described by William Bartram in 1774, the canonical Western account of Paynes Prairie and the surrounding springs.
- Stroll the Duckpond / NE Gainesville Residential District, with its wide porches, live oaks, and late-19th and early-20th-century homes.
- Catch a show or tour the 1911 Hippodrome downtown, a Beaux-Arts former Federal Building now the city's anchor theatre and architectural landmark.
- Wander Sweetwater Wetlands Park for boardwalk views of alligators, wading birds, and the headwaters that drain into Paynes Prairie.
- Day-trip to nearby Micanopy, Cedar Key, and the Santa Fe and Ichetucknee springs region for spring runs, antique shops, and Gulf-coast back roads.
