Credit President Dwight D. Eisenhower and former Florida Gov. Farris Bryant for Gainesville’s westward migration since Interstate 75 opened here 50 years ago.
Under Eisenhower’s leadership, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 paved the way for the national interstate system, first envisioned as a way to mobilize the military across the country during times of national crisis.
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The former general had been impressed by the German autobahns used by the Nazis to move quickly during World War II and less impressed by the U.S. road system as a lieutenant colonel accompanying a military truck convoy from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco in 1919.
The original plan called for I-75 to pass west of Newberry on a more direct line to Tampa, but Bryant wanted the freeway to bisect his home county of Marion, and Gainesville was the beneficiary of the new route through Alachua County.
Growth in Gainesville until that time mostly had sprung up around downtown and the University of Florida but would henceforth heed Horace Greeley’s Manifest Destiny plea to “go west, young man, go west.”
Over the coming decades, shopping centers and subdivisions would spring up around the interchanges and spread ever westward as the faster freeway and widened state interchange roads — from two to four and then to six lanes — made it easier to commute to work and shop from farther distances while also filtering passing travelers past Gainesville. At last count, 72,500 car trips a day pass through Gainesville on the interstate, according to the Florida Department of Transportation.
Dwight Manghue was 17 and working for Zinke-Smith, the Pompano Beach company that paved the stretch of I-75 through cow pastures from Williston Road to 39th Avenue.
He recalled that Williston, Archer and Newberry roads where the interchanges were built were two-lane roads.
“It was just a way for people in the countryside to get into work,” Manghue said of Williston, Archer and Newberry roads. “There were no restaurants, no hotels, no shopping plazas. Lots of cows.
“It was just a very small town with a college, and that was it.”
Former state Rep. Perry McGriff grew up in Gainesville and said that before the interstate was built and the connecting roads widened, a trip to Jonesville took 45 minutes and a drive to visit his mother’s family in Arcadia south of Lakeland would take 4½ hours. Today, that trip down I-75 would take just over three hours.
His father, Perry McGriff Sr., was county surveyor and involved in surveying the right of way for the interstate.
Construction through Alachua County would start on Halloween 1961, according to records from the former State Road Department, now the Florida Department of Transportation.
Mark Barrow, local historian and co-founder of the Matheson Museum, said a Timucuan Indian village was discovered at Williston Road during construction.
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“People were going out at night with flashlights picking up arrowheads,” he said.
According to a front-page article published on July 24, 1964, in The Sun, an afternoon paper at the time, an impatient Gov. Bryant arrived with a motorcade that Friday morning and cut the ribbon at the Newberry Road interchange, leaving before the official 10 a.m. ceremony and before all local officials had arrived. That officially opened a 548-mile segment southward, including the Sunshine State Parkway starting in Wildwood.
The next day would see the interstate’s first fatality in Alachua County, according to the July 26 edition, as Mrs. Sue M. Cleveland of Santa Monica, California, died at the scene after the car driven by her daughter left the road, overturned and struck a concrete culvert in the median five miles north of Alachua.
McGriff, a Gator football and baseball player in the late 1950s, said the interstate made it easier for Gator fans to travel to games and, combined with the success of the football team under coach Ray Graves in the 1960s, brought more fans to town.
Stadium capacity was increased from 46,000 to 63,000 between the 1965 and 1966 seasons.
Gainesville’s westward expansion was not immediate. The Haufler family would donate farmland to build Santa Fe College in 1968 and would build apartments in the Northwest 39th Avenue area.
Rubye Sullivan was a teacher at Terwilliger Elementary School on 62nd Street starting in the early 1970s and watched the construction of North Florida Regional Medical Center, which would open in 1973, and The Oaks Mall across the street, opening in 1977.
She and her husband, Jim, would build a home in 1975 on 20 acres along Southwest Eighth Avenue just east of 122nd Street, three miles west of the interstate.
She said they ate out a lot before their kitchen was ready and that the only restaurant east of 34th Street was the Burger King still near the mall today.
At the time, Southwest Eighth Avenue west of I-75 was a limerock road surrounded by cattle farms. It would be another 10 years before subdivisions such as Hayes Glen would start appearing along the road, she said.
McGriff was on the County Commission when it approved the zoning for The Oaks Mall. He notes sheepishly that he thought the plan to widen Newberry Road at the mall — then to four lanes — would be sufficient to control traffic for years to come.
“I have to say my wonderful thinking didn’t work out that way,” he said.
Clark Butler started buying land along Archer Road east of the interstate in 1970, including Stengel Air Field, a makeshift airport with dirt runways that was much used during World War II. After 1970, it would be another seven years before the state would open an interchange at Archer Road.
Deborah Butler, Clark’s daughter, said that at the time the area also consisted of small industrial buildings, an abandoned go-cart track and dilapidated hotels in former military barracks used by pilots-in-training during World War II.
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Clark Butler first would build a mobile home park, followed by apartments along Windmeadows Boulevard. The first 83,000-square-foot portion of Butler Plaza would open in 1975 and include a Publix Supermarket and Gresham Drugs.
Deborah Butler said UF had wanted an I-75 interchange at Archer Road for some time to provide easier access to campus and UF Health Shands Hospital. The original plan was to expand Archer to four lanes, but she said her father knew the road would be quickly overwhelmed because southwest Gainesville did not have a grid of roads. He bought the abandoned railway and donated it to the state to build a six-lane road. The Archer Road interchange would open in 1977.
A Winn-Dixie shopping center would open on the south side of Archer Road in the late 1970s.
After opening the first phase of Butler Plaza, Clark Butler stopped developing for 10 years because of national economic conditions, Deborah Butler said. Resuming in 1984, Butler Enterprises would purchase more land a little at a time and add a million square feet of retail, apartments and mobile homes into the 1990s.
Downtown Gainesville already was starting to feel the pressure when the interstate opened as shopping centers had started moving farther from downtown. Barrow said the opening of Butler Plaza and The Oaks Mall in particular hastened downtown’s slump, which wouldn’t start its slow rebound until the mid-1990s.
“It just shifted the whole center of Gainesville out about where the interstate is, maybe farther west now with all of the population centers,” Barrow said.
Traffic shifted from U.S. 441 to the interstate as the primary north-south route through the county, said Steve Lachnicht, Alachua County’s growth management director.
“You can still see some of the remnants of that past development. The older properties, the old hotels along Southwest 13th Street (U.S. 441) are just from a different day, a different pattern of development,” he said.
The interstate and widened interchange roads also promoted residential development farther from Gainesville’s job centers, he said, noting that Haile Plantation would become one of the more prominent developments when it started construction in the late 1970s.
“At the time, it was pretty far west before most development occurred, and now it’s very much surrounded by other development,” Lachnicht said.
Although east Gainesville did not share in the growth, the Airport Industrial Park was built to take advantage of the interstate, with Waldo Road widened and connected to Williston Road so traffic from the industrial park could reach I-75.
In later years, the U.S. 441 interchange in Alachua would draw distribution centers to move goods to stores throughout Florida.
The interstate continues to be a major draw for developers, with Celebration Pointe and the Butler North expansion near the Archer Road interchange and Springhills near 39th Avenue at various stages of development.
Lachnicht notes that as traffic congestion on the interstate and supporting roads during peak times increases commute times, there is a trend locally and nationally to redevelop closer to city centers.
“What we’ve seen in more recent years has been some reduction in vehicle miles traveled,” he said.
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