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Front Page Florida News
The first edition of The Florida Alligator was printed September 24, 1912, the same year Railroad Barron Henry Morrison Flagler (Florida’s first land developer), fulfilled his life-long dream of riding his East Coast Railway into a terminal in Key West. The day Flagler turned his “Folly” into a monumental achievement came just two months after the Titanic struck an iceberg, and sake in the frigid North Atlantic.
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Titanic by Willy Stöwer
Henry Morrison Flagler (holding hat in circle) greets a crowd upon his arrival on the first train into Key West, Florida, January 22, 1912. Flagler built the Florida East Coast Railway as a way of linking his string of hotels and other properties in Florida, finally stretching the railway across seven miles of open water in into Key West, the southernmost point in the United States. (Hutton Archive)
By the light of the Floridia Moon
Henry Morrison Flagler, the most powerful Railroad Barron of the Gilded Age and Florida’s first Land Developer, greeted a joyous crowd that had anxiously awaited his arrival to Key West, aboard the first FLORIDA EAST COAST RAILWAY train to reach the end of Flagler’s life-long line. on the first East Coast Railway train into Key West (January 22, 1912). Flagler built the FEC (railway) as a way of linking his string of luxury hotels along Florida’s East Coast, St. Augustine, Ormond Beach, Palm Beach, and Miami. Finally, and most challenging, was continuing south, across seven miles of open, water to the small island of Key West. Reaching the United State’s southernmost point, just 90 miles north of Havana, was Flagler’s “Moon,” and he had walked on it. [FLAGLER’S FOLLY]
tuesday
september 24, 1912
Vol. 1 No. 1
The first edition of The Florida Alligator, was little more than a transcription of UF president Albert A. Murphree‘s opening speech to that year’s new students, THE CLASS OF 1912. Four hundred young white men sat and listened to Murphree tell them why they had made the right decision, moving to Gainesville, and paying to attend, what Murphree described as one of America’s finest universities. He said the University of Florida was the South’s answer to the more established, so-called elite, Ivy League institutions, where the New England Yankees might have rowed a mean boat, but on Florida Field, they’d be little more than nose-in-the-air Gator Bait.
•FLORIDA HISTORY
FRESHMAN LOVE (1936)
florida photographic archive
Florida In Time
Henry Morrison Flagler, Guilded Age Railroad Barron and Florida’s first Land Developer, greets a crowd upon his arrival on the first East Coast Railway train to pull into the Key West station. (January 22, 1912). Flagler built the FEC (railway) as a way of linking his string of hotels along Florida’s East Coast, St. Augustine, Ormond Beach, Palm Beach, and Miami. Finally, and most challenging, was continuing south, across seven miles of open, water to the small island of Key West. The southernmost point in the United States, just 90 miles north of Havana, Cuba, had been “FLAGLER’S MOON.” the same as the Moon had always captured the imagination of another of Florida’s most imaginative dreamers. John F. Kennedy spent much of his youth (winters) in Palm Beach at the Kennedy oceanside estate on the island Flagler chose to make his permanent Florida Home, building Whitehall, a white, plantation style mansion, bringing the Gilded Age to the south.
The Ormond Hotel — On his railroad’s way from St. Augustine to Key West, Henry Flagler made an important and personal stop in Ormond Beach. He built the legendary hotel in 1888, and at the turn of the century, he invited his friends, fellow “titans of industry,” to visit and “winter” in Florida:
John D. Rockefeller
Henry Ford, —
Harvey Firestone —
Thomas Edison —
University of Florida
Evolution
1853 — East Florida Seminary (Ocala)
1861 — East Florida Seminary closes
CIVIL WAR (IN FLORIDA)*
1866 — East Florida Seminary reopens
1884 — Florida Agriculture College (Lake City)
In Lake City, the KKK calls itself Christian*
1903 — The University of Florida
1905 — Buckman Act restructures Florida’s higher education, bringing six individual institutions together, making one University of Florida.
1924 — A number of white women are admitted ( ERA*)
1930s — Despite the Great Depression, UF expanded its campus infrastructure, kicked off with the construction and opening of the original Florida Field in 1930. Throughout the decade, the university saw significant academic growth with the creation of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, including new programs in landscape architecture, building construction, and, into the 1940s, (urban) planning.
1940s — Florida State University (in Tallahassee) was still a school for girls (women), and the University of Florida (in Gainesville) was for boys (men).
Romance on the Ichetucknee River (SPRINGS)
The Ichetucknee River and Spring was halfway between the two, and in the 1940s became a favorite North Florida meeting spot for romantic, higher education liaisons.
1958 — INTEGRATION
1985 — Association of American Universities (BLAHBLAHBLAH)
2023 — Where did the “Independence” go?
New Student Edition
Ron DeSantis Campaign Staff
“Welcome to Gainesville” by Ben Sass
Reading it now, Murphree’s message was understandably propagandist, but how fundamentally Christian it was is still striking. Murphree preached, more than spoke. He sang the expected academic praise of UF, but it was noticeable that he seemed to say most important was that the University of Florida lived with, and religiously followed the Word of the Lord.
Without saying it out loud, Murphree was claiming UF to be the finest “Bible College” in the land … The Southland that is.
At the time, The Florida Alligator, was more a tool of the university’s Christian Conservative administration, than a trusted purveyor of news. Of course there were always students who wanted to honestly report the news, but the University of Florida’s “newspaper” wasn’t always the place to do it.
For sixty years, The Alligator remained the administration’s tool to tell the community how the Gator Athletic Department was performing (some things never change), how accomplished and acclaimed the professorial recruits were, and to explain (or hide) how UF spent our money.
Not yet was The Alligator “allowed” to speak its mind, to criticize, scrutinize, and report on what the administration was hiding, and keeping out of The Alligator. The university wasn’t “allowing” its journalism students to be journalists.
The plainly obvious conflict and difference of opinion became most extreme when college-age American men were being forced to kill and die in an Asian jungle called Vietnam.
—30—
THE INCREDIBLE PULP
by Alligator Staff Writer David Klein
september 9, 1979
for The St. Petersburg Times
INSURRECTION DAY
thursday
october 6, 1971
vol 65 no 75
INDEPENDENCE DAY
thursday
february 1, 1973
vol 65 no 75
ALBERT A. MURPHREE (THE PREACHER)
STEPHEN C. O’CONNELL (THE DICTATOR)
ROBERT Q. MARSTON (THE FUNDRAISER)
FATHER MICHAEL GANNON (PRAYING FOR PEACE)
ERICH FARBER (SUNSHINE STATE SCIENTIST)
HOWARD APPLEDORF (LIVING AND DYING IN A COLLEGE TOWN)
HARRY CREWS (“FEAST OF SNAKES”)
JERRY UELSMANN (PHOTOSURREALIST)
CRIS COLLINSWORTH (GOOD AS GOLD)
Murphree’s Opening Message (alt. intro)
JFK — Another Floridian who dreamed of the Moon. Kennedy had grown up (at least wintered) on the small, barrier island Flagler had turned into PALM BEACH.
Whitehall — Flagler built the plantation style, marble-ladden mansion to be his “winter” home. He settled in Palm Beach after ten years living at his Ormond Hotel, just north of Daytona Beach. It was there, at the turn of the 20th Century, where he hung our with his Gilded Age, Industry Titan buddies, lazing and sipping mint julips on the Ormond’s elegant veranda.
John D. Rockefeller
Henry Ford
Harvey S. Firestone
Thomas A. Edison
At the turn of the 20th Century, one of the group’s favorite pastimes, was to walk down to the beach, and stake their spot with large, sun screening umbrellas, and an elaborate arrangement of comfortable wicker tables and chairs. They were set up to watch the automobile races that were run on the uniquely suited, hard packed, smooth sand that was made of a silty fine quartz.
