Hogtown and the Seminole Pigs

Before Gainesville was Gainesville, there was Hogtown. The name did not come from some frontier farmer's barnyard. It came from the Seminole people.

In the early eighteen hundreds, a band of Seminoles settled near a cluster of springs and creek hollows in what is now the northwest edge of Gainesville. They raised hogs, trading with the Americans who came through. The white traders called the place Hogtown, and the name stuck even after the Seminoles were gone.

They were gone by treaty. The eighteen twenty-three Treaty of Moultrie Creek required the Seminoles of north Florida to give up their lands and move south to a reservation in the center of the peninsula. Chief John Mico, who had led the Hogtown band, received twenty dollars from the United States government as compensation for the improvements his people had made here. Twenty dollars. For a working settlement, a herd of animals, cleared land, and a way of life.

The Seminoles left. American settlers moved in. Hogtown grew into a rough frontier community, hugging the edge of Hogtown Creek. By eighteen fifty-three, when Alachua County voters chose to move the county seat from Newnansville to a new railroad junction to the east, Hogtown was simply swallowed by the growing town that would become Gainesville. The two communities ran parallel for a decade or more, two names for two worlds colliding on the same ground.

The former site of Hogtown was not officially annexed by the City of Gainesville until nineteen sixty-one. The name survived in local memory and eventually became one of Gainesville's most affectionate unofficial nicknames. You still see it on shop signs, on creek walking trails, on bumper stickers. A Seminole village's name, filtered through American derision, returned as local pride.