24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Hawthorne, FL

Hawthorne is a small city in Alachua County, about 17 miles east of Gainesville, and it is part of the Gainesville metropolitan area.

Hawthorne was incorporated on June 23, 1881, as the 'City of Hawthorn' - the final 'e' was not added to its name until 1950.

The town grew from settlements called Jamestown and Waits Crossing, and Jamestown was named after James M. Hawthorn, the man the city's name ultimately honors.

Two railroads crossed at Hawthorne - the Peninsula Railroad's north-south line arrived in 1879 and the Florida Southern's east-west line reached the town soon after - making Hawthorne a busy rail transfer point with two separate depots about a half-mile apart.

Phosphate was discovered near Hawthorne in the late 1870s, and after the Great Freeze of 1894 destroyed the area's citrus groves, local growers switched to Sea Island cotton until the boll weevil ended the cotton trade.

Hawthorne had a population of 1,478 at the 2020 census, and despite being a city, the Census Bureau counted 100% of its residents as living in rural areas.

Hawthorne has 525 households, spread across about 7.4 square miles of land at the intersection of U.S. Highway 301 and State Road 20.

The 16-mile paved Gainesville-Hawthorne State Trail, built on an abandoned railroad line through the Rails-to-Trails program, ends in Hawthorne.

Hawthorne's Little Orange Creek Nature Park opened in 2017 on land the city acquired in 2011 - about 65 acres of nature park south of State Road 20 and roughly 2,800 acres of conservation land to the north.

The more than 11,000-acre Lochloosa Wildlife Management Area sits immediately adjacent to Hawthorne, and its Cross Creek Trail is part of the Great Florida Birding and Wildlife Trail.