Newnansville: Florida's Forgotten Fourth City

Nothing visible from the highway marks the spot where one of Florida's most important early towns used to stand. Newnansville, named for a hero of the Patriot War of eighteen twelve and established as the seat of Alachua County in eighteen twenty-eight, was for a brief period the fourth-largest community in the entire Florida Territory. Today it is a cemetery, a forest, and a green historical marker.

The town's rise was dramatic. During the Second Seminole War from eighteen thirty-five to eighteen forty-two, hundreds of settlers displaced by Seminole raids fled to Newnansville, clustering around Fort Gilleland for safety. The population swelled. For a few years in the late eighteen thirties, only Saint Augustine, Pensacola, and Tallahassee surpassed it. A courthouse, post office, hotels, and a land office filled the dusty streets. It was the commercial and administrative hub of interior Florida.

What the war gave, the railroad took away. In eighteen fifty-four, the Florida Railroad Company built its line well to the east of Newnansville, running through the pine flatwoods rather than the established town. The Alachua County Commission followed the tracks: the county seat moved to Gainesville that same year. Without government and without a railroad, Newnansville had no economic reason to exist.

The decline was swift and nearly total. By the eighteen eighties two more railroads had been built, both bypassing the old town site. The remaining residents drifted away. By the eighteen nineties Newnansville had effectively ceased to exist as a living community.

What remains is the historic Newnansville Cemetery, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since nineteen seventy-four. The graves mark generations of frontier Florida: soldiers, settlers, county officials, and the ordinary families who built a town that the railroad decided was in the wrong place.