HISTORY >> THE BATTLE OF GAINESVILLE
CIVIL WAR SYMPOSIUM Thursday, August 13 6:00pm – 8:00pm Matheson History Museum 513 E University Ave. BATTLE OF GAINESVILLE REENACTMENT Saturday, August 15 10:00am Sweetwater Park behind the Matheson History Museum
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ach year in August, under the guidance of local re-enactor John McLean, Civil War re-enactors gather behind t h e M at h e s o n H i s t o ry Museum to recreate the Battle of Gainesville, which was fought there on August 17, 1864. Soon after Abraham Lincoln was elected President, Gainesville residents participated in mass meetings to demand Florida’s immediate secession from the United States. Governor Madison Starke Perry — the only Florida governor from Alachua
County — called a special Convention of the People for January 3, 1861. In his 1994 book, “Florida’s Eden: An Illustrated History of Alachua County,” John B. Pickard stated that the convention’s temporary chairman, Dr. John C. Pelot of Newnansville (the former county seat, located approximately 1.5 miles north of Alachua), expressed his county’s overwhelming feeling when he said that ‘Northern fanaticism had endangered our liberties and institutions,’ while the election of the ‘wild abolitionist’ Lincoln had destroyed all hope for the future.” On January 11, 1861, Florida became the third state to secede from the Union and Alachua County JULY/AUGUST 2015
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