Union Academy shows local Black community’s love of education

The Union Academy, circa 1900. Courtesy of State Archives of Florida
The Union Academy, circa 1900.
Courtesy of State Archives of Florida

Lincoln High School is famous in Gainesville as the Black high school that was forced to close for desegregation. The school had strong community support, and the day its doors closed there were marches in the street. 

But it was preceded by another Black school, Union Academy, founded just after the Civil War. The little school, established and maintained through community support, paved the way for Black education, and public education, in Alachua County. 

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the city of Gainesville found itself growing, both in economy and population, bolstered by the Florida Railroad and production of Sea Island cotton and other crops. 

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Many white families had moved to Gainesville during the war, and both white men and Black freedmen brought their families after the war, looking for jobs and opportunities, according to a 1986 article about Union Academy by historian Murray D. Laurie, published in the Florida Historical Quarterly. 

According to Murray, the Gainesville census shows the Black population in Gainesville increasing from 46 to 765 between 1860 and 1870, representing over half the city’s population. 

After the war, the Freedmen’s Bureau arrived to help deal with a multitude of aftereffects, from homeless refugees and orphans to banking and healthcare for freedmen.  

The Bureau quickly found that education was a top priority of the freedmen. Education opportunities in Alachua County were limited to a small private school for white children, and in 1865 there was still no state-supported public school. 

With money and teachers sent by northern churches and organizations, the Bureau founded a school by placing Catherine Bent of Newburyport, Massachusetts. with about 60 Black students in a run-down church with no doors or windows in November 1865. 

Bent lived mostly in isolation, her salary paid by the New York Bureau of the Freedmen’s Union Commission while the white community in Gainesville largely refused to speak to her. 

She was soon joined by a second teacher, Harriet Barnes of Norwalk, Connecticut. 

The teachers reported in March 1866 that the children were learning well and eagerly, but complained that white boys often threw things into the classroom to disrupt classes. 

A report to a Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner on Florida freedmen schools in spring 1866 lists the Gainesville school as having 225 students, and praises Barnes and Bent for running one of the best schools in the state, despite local hostility strong enough that even finding rooms to board for the teachers was a challenge. 

“Perhaps no colored School was ever established in the South, under auspices more unfavorable than the one in Gainesville,” the letter states. 

By October 1867, the Black community was tired enough of the windowless church that they formed a board of trustees to purchase a 40,000-square-foot lot to move the school to a new site, where it became known as Union Academy. 

The new location, located on the corner of what is now NW 1st Street and NW 6th Avenue in Gainesville, was built by volunteer local Black artisans, supervised by architect and carpenter Reuben Alley, who was employed by the Bureau. 

The Union Academy, circa 1870. Courtesy of State Archives of Florida
Courtesy of State Archives of Florida The Union Academy, circa 1870.

For years, school was held at that one-story building with a white picket fence, an open porch, and a belfry with a $40 bell purchased in 1870 by the trustees. 

In 1872, the trustees also bought a parlor organ for music lessons. 

Support from the Freedmen’s Bureau and other northern societies was gone by 1874, but the stigma around public schools was also fading. 

Teachers at Black schools were paid less than those at white schools, but trustees of the Union Academy worked with the Alachua County Board of Public Instruction to promote their needs. By 1880, Union Academy was known for its strong exam results, and as the only public school in the county that was graded and used uniform textbooks, according to Murray. 

In 1883, the trustees conveyed the property deed to the city of Gainesville for $2,000 so the school could receive funds from a bond issue passed by citizens which supported Union Academy and the East Florida Seminary. The money was to be used for renovations, but could not be spent on property the city did not legally own. 

Though it isn’t clear what renovations were made in 1883, the trustees had told the city commission that it needed renovations to expand its “Normal” department, which trained teachers. The last of the white northern teachers had left 10 years earlier, and Black graduates of the Normal department were staffing Union Academy, as well as smaller rural Black schools in the county. 

An annual $3,000 appropriation from the state legislature also supported the Normal department, funding sponsored by Matthew Lewey, a prominent Black citizen of Gainesville who served in the Florida House. 

Willett Hancock, curator of exhibitions at the Matheson History Museum, whose senior capstone at UF focused on Union Academy, said the school’s success after the Freedmen’s Bureau left, was a sign of the Black community’s determination to have education. After Reconstruction, state funding also began to drop off. 

“Then they were really more dependent on their own community funding, and Gainesville’s local Black representatives to The State House of Representatives also procured funding for the Academy, but it was really a community-supported school because they saw the importance of it, and believed in it,” Hancock said in an interview. 

In the 1890s, the school was renovated again to add a second story, which the superintendent of the time, W. W. Holloway, said made Union Academy large enough to comfortably accommodate 700 students.  

The belfry was moved up, and the picket fence still encircled the school, which now held 11 classrooms. The construction had cost $1,100, bringing the building’s estimated value to $6,000. 

By 1922, the school was considered overcrowded with approximately 500 students in grades one through nine, taught by 11 teachers. 

A young Black man named A. Quinn Jones was the new principal. He was fresh from an assistant principalship in Pensacola, and looking for opportunities for improvement, according to an oral history interview with Jones, recorded in April 1975. 

The school moved to a new building on Columbia Avenue—now NW 7th Avenue—in 1923, and was renamed Lincoln High School, though it likely still taught all grades. The property, with a long dorm building in addition to the classroom building, had formerly belonged to a different Black school. 

Though the school board’s policy was to sell school buildings that were no longer needed, there has been no record found of the Union Academy’s fate, and the structure built with a belfry by Black artisans is missing from its place on NW 1st Street and NW 6th Avenue. 

A. Quinn Jones Center. Courtesy of ACPS
Courtesy of ACPS A. Quinn Jones Center.

A bond issue passed in 1920 spurred the construction of two new public high schools in Gainesville, one for white students, and the other for Black students. Both were of red brick, a rarity for Black high schools. 

The school at 1108 NW 7th Ave. now serves as the A. Quinn Jones School, serving students in grades 6-12, across the street from the A. Quinn Jones Museum & Cultural Center

Whatever the name or building, Black education in Gainesville has never lacked for the Black community’s support, whether through monetary donations, workmanship or time. Hancock said that legacy of work is part of what keeps Union Academy relevant today. 

“It’s important, not just because there are people alive who can trace their parents’ education or their grandparents’ education to it, but as a reminder to us of what the education system used to be, and how far it’s come, and how hard of a fight that has been,” Hancock said. 

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Real Gainesville Citizen and Voter

Very interesting story!. Thanks, Ms. Reitz.

Pat Fullam

A very interesting article. While I live in Gainesville I’m not from Florida and have been trying to learn more about my new home. The Main St. Daily News is an excellent source for information
about the past and present times of this area. Thank you.

Jean

I enjoyed the article. Although born and raised here, I did not know about the schools before Lincoln High School. Thank you.