Pleasant Street and Union Academy: Freedom Built in Brick and Wood
Near Gainesville, Florida
In the years immediately after the Civil War, freed Black men and women in Gainesville did something remarkable. They built a neighborhood, a school, and an entire community infrastructure almost entirely on their own, in the face of sustained hostility from the white population around them.
The area that became known as Pleasant Street drew freedpeople from Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina starting in the eighteen sixties. Many of the earliest settlers were skilled tradespeople, preachers, and teachers. Between eighteen sixty-six and eighteen eighty-six, more than sixty-five Black individuals purchased lots from the Brush estate, constructing homes, businesses, clubs, and churches. Pleasant Street would become the first Black community in Florida to receive a historic district designation.
The school came first. In late eighteen sixty-five, two white teachers from New England, sent south by the National Freedmen's Relief Association of New York, arrived in Gainesville and opened a classroom in an unfinished church with no windows and no doors. They taught sixty students that first session. White boys threw objects into the classroom to disrupt classes. The teachers did not leave.
By spring of eighteen sixty-six, their school had grown to two hundred twenty-five students, and a Freedmen's Bureau report called it one of the best schools in all of Florida. In eighteen sixty-seven, the community formalized it as Union Academy, building the schoolhouse themselves with plans and materials from the Freedmen's Bureau and their own volunteer labor.
Union Academy was the first public high school in Gainesville, for any race. From its graduating classes came most of Alachua County's Black teachers and community leaders for the next five decades. It grew to nearly five hundred students by eighteen ninety-eight. Mount Pleasant Methodist Church, rebuilt after fire in nineteen oh three, still anchors the neighborhood and holds the oldest continuously active Black congregation in Gainesville.
What was built here, against every obstacle, built Gainesville.
