The UWF Historic Trust manages the University of West Florida's 8-acre downtown campus, Historic Pensacola. Historic Pensacola is a living laboratory providing University students the opportunity to live, work, and study in a National Register Historic District.

The University of West Florida Historic Trust is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and sharing the history of Northwest Florida.

Florida Statute created the Pensacola Historical Preservation and Restoration Commission in 1967. The State legislature defined the purpose and powers of the Board and assigned it a variety of tasks. These tasks included the acquisition, restoration, preservation, maintenance, reconstruction, reproduction, and operation of certain ancient or historic monuments, locations, remains, buildings, and other objects of historical interest to the city of Pensacola. The name was changed in 1970 to the Historic Pensacola Preservation Board (HPPB). As time passed, the organization became one of eight Preservation Boards under the supervision of the Florida Department of State, designed to foster preservation activities throughout Florida. By the 1990s, State priorities had changed, and preservation activities were supported mostly through a State-funded grant program, making most of the Preservation Boards obsolete. Meanwhile, thanks in large part to the 1983 acquisition of the T. T. Wentworth, Jr. Collection, the HPPB had evolved into a major museum complex, operating a series of theme museums and historic houses set for different time periods, known collectively as Historic Pensacola Village. The Wentworth Museum opened in the old Pensacola City Hall building in 1988. By the year 2000, the HPPB was the last remaining Preservation Board in the State of Florida, and there was a lot of political pressure to discontinue it also. In 2001, the Historic Pensacola Preservation Board became a Direct Support Organization of the University of West Florida, and changed its name to West Florida Historic Preservation, Inc. (WFHPI). In 2007, the University added the Arcadia Mill site in Milton to the properties under WFHPI's administrative control, and in 2009, the Pensacola Historical Society merged with WFHPI, more than doubling WFHPI's archival holdings, and greatly enlarging the artifact collections, too.