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Eighteen men strong, the Gainesville Guards posed for this photograph in 1884 or 1885, just after Alachua County's new courthouse was finished, the courthouse with the short-lived eagle atop the cupola. The Guards, which included many of the city's socially-prominent men, wore decorative uniforms, sashes across their chests, and were armed with javelins or lances which seated in sockets at stirrup level. This is the same militia-type unit which was ordered to quell looting and rioting in Fernandina only three or four years later, and responded to the order to find themselves in a city stricken with a yellow fever epidemic; several of them died. This photograph is reproduced from a yellow, faded and deteriorated original owned by Archie L. Jackson of Gainesville, whose grandfather and namesake may have been a member of the elite home guard unit.