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Friday, March 29, 2024
<p><span>The University of Florida's first female cheerleader outfit from the 1930s before UF was a co-ed institution.</span></p>

The University of Florida's first female cheerleader outfit from the 1930s before UF was a co-ed institution.

In early August, the Matheson History Museum will unveil “Gators and Beyond: A Sports History of Alachua County.”

The 1,800 square foot exhibit will run in the main gallery from August to the end of February 2019 and will cost around $4,000, said museum curator Kaitlyn Hof-Mahoney.

It will feature the first UF football teams from 1906 to around 1920, local high schools, a minor league baseball team from the ‘50s and Fleming Field, a field from the early 1900s that saw Babe Ruth and Jim Thorpe grace its grounds for spring training.

Hof-Mahoney said she started working on the exhibit in February, but the idea has been around for much longer.

Several years ago, donors from the Rick and Barbara Anderson Sports Fellowship started working with museum staff on sports history in Alachua County, and that research has grown into the exhibit.

Hof-Mahoney and volunteers have dug up all kinds of history about sports in Alachua County.

“What’s really been interesting to me is finding all of the kind of hidden stories,” Hof-Mahoney said. “Like the first female cheerleader when UF was not a co-ed institution or looking at things that people just don’t think of when it comes to Gainesville and Alachua County sports.”

There will be plenty of Gators history in the exhibit, but museum director Peggy Macdonald said there is a lot of great history outside of UF that has been forgotten over the years.

In particular, she said two African American high schools, Lincoln and A.L. Mebane, were closed during the process of desegregation, ending the teams that played there.

“These are teams that are, you know, lost to time,” Macdonald said. “There’s now a Lincoln Middle School and Mebane Middle School, but it’s not the same. There’s a sense of loss in the community, and the sports history tied to those African American schools is important.”

Macdonald said a lot of people connect to sports who may not have the same connection to history, and sports provides an avenue for the community into local history.

She had just binge watched “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” last weekend, and she likened the schools’ stories through sports to Bourdain’s travels.

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“He uses food to talk about world cultures, and you wind up learning more… because it’s so engaging,” she said. “And we hope to accomplish the same sort of thing with sports.”

The University of Florida's first female cheerleader outfit from the 1930s before UF was a co-ed institution.

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