The University of Florida: From Seminary to Flagship
Near Gainesville, Florida
The University of Florida is so embedded in this city that it is easy to forget it was not always here, and that its arrival was not inevitable. The school that became one of the largest research universities in the United States has a complicated, wandering origin story.
It traces its roots to eighteen fifty-three, when the East Florida Seminary was established in Ocala. That was Florida's first state-supported institution of higher learning. In eighteen sixty-six, the seminary reopened in Gainesville, taking over the grounds of a small private college that had closed during the Civil War. So Gainesville had a university-level institution before the University of Florida officially existed.
The more direct ancestor came from a different direction. Florida Agricultural College was established at Lake City in eighteen eighty-four under the Morrill Act, making it the state's first land-grant college. Then in nineteen oh five, the Florida legislature passed the Buckman Act, which reorganized all of the state's competing higher-education institutions into two: a university for white men in Gainesville, and a college for women in Tallahassee. The University of the State of Florida opened its first semester in Gainesville on September twenty-sixth, nineteen oh six, with one hundred two students and a small cluster of Collegiate Gothic brick buildings that still stand today.
The school's name was simplified to University of Florida in nineteen oh nine. The alligator mascot followed organically: in nineteen oh eight, a Gainesville merchant named Phillips Miller ordered pennants in Charlottesville, Virginia, for his store. His son Austin suggested putting an alligator on them, since no other school had one and it was native to Florida. The football team began calling itself the Gators by the nineteen eleven season.
Today the campus spans nearly two thousand acres. More than sixty thousand students attend. The Florida Museum of Natural History, housed here, holds more than forty million specimens. The university is the city.
