by Robert “Hutch” Hutchinson
Alachua County has had a memorial commemorating the Confederate war dead since 1904 when it was erected by the Kirby Smith Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
At the time it was put up, many of these Daughters were actually the daughters of fathers who did not return from the Civil War just 39 years earlier. As anybody who has been to other battlegrounds can attest, our monument is very much in keeping with those found by the hundreds that were erected around the nation during this era. Indeed, our monument is on the site of one skirmish in that terrible war.