Augusta, Georgia was founded in 1736 as part of the British colony of Georgia, under the supervision of colony founder James Oglethorpe. It was the colony's second established town, after Savannah. Today, Augusta is the second-largest city in Georgia, and the largest city of the Central Savannah River Area.
Augusta, Georgia was first used by Native Americans as a place to cross the Savannah River because of Augusta's location on the Fall Line.
In 1736, two years after James Oglethorpe founded Savannah, he sent a detachment of troops on a journey up the Savannah River. He gave them an order to build at the head of the navigable part of the river. [1] The job fell into the hands of Noble Jones, who created the settlement to provide a first line of defense against the Spanish and the French. Oglethorpe then named the town Augusta, in honor of Princess Augusta, wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales.
The town was laid out on the flat slopes of the Savannah River, just east of the sand hills that would come to be known as Summerville. The townspeople got along peacefully most of the time with the surrounding tribes of Chickasaw, Creek, [2] Yuchi and Shawnee Indians.[ citation needed ] The Shawnees in the region were known as the Savano Indians. The name of the Savannah River is an Anglicization of their tribal name.
In 1739, construction began on a road to connect Augusta to Savannah. This made it possible for people to reach Augusta by horse, rather than by boat, and more people began to migrate inland to Augusta. Later, in 1750, Augusta's first church, Saint Paul's, was built near Fort Augusta. It became the leader of the local parish.
The town's relationship with the neighboring Cherokee who traded with Augusta was not as good as its relationships with other tribes. During the Anglo-Cherokee War their war parties came close to Augusta and were repulsed by the Creek. [2]
While slavery was originally banned in the colony by James Oglethorpe, [3] it soon became an integral part of Georgia's history. [4] Under Georgia's new constitution, a new political structure was laid out in 1777; Augusta's parish government was replaced by a county government, Richmond County, named after the Duke of Richmond.
During the American Revolution, Savannah fell to the British. This left Augusta as the new state capital and a new prime target of the British. By January 31, 1779, Augusta was captured by Lt. Col. Archibald Campbell. But Campbell soon withdrew, as American troops were gathering on the opposite shore of the Savannah River. Augusta again became the state capital, but not for long. Augusta fell into British hands once more before the end of the war.
From then until the American Civil War, with the establishment of the Augusta Canal, Augusta became a leader in the production of textiles, gunpowder, and paper. The Georgia Railroad was built by local contractors Fannin, Grant & Co in 1845, giving Augusta a rail link to Atlanta. The railroad connected to the Tennessee River at Chattanooga, Tennessee, thus providing access from inland Georgia to the Mississippi River. The cost-savings of this link from the middle of the country to the Atlantic Ocean via the Savannah River increased trade considerably.
In 1845, Augusta was the location of the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention, today one of the largest Protestant denominations in the country. Due to increasing tensions between northern and southern Baptists on the subject of slavery in the 1840s, southern Baptists decided to withdraw formally from the national Baptist organizations. [5] They met at the First Baptist Church of Augusta in May 1845 and formed the new convention, naming it the Southern Baptist Convention. [6]
By 1860 Augusta had a population of 12,493; it was then one of 102 U.S. cities to have a population of over 10,000, and was the second largest city in Georgia.
Originally, Augustans welcomed the idea of the Civil War. The new Confederate Powderworks were the only permanent structures constructed and completed by the Confederacy. Over 2000 Augustans went away to fight in the war, but war did not set into the minds of Augustans until the summer of 1863 when Confederate sympathizers came crowding into Augusta, leading to shortages in housing and provisions. Next came the threatening nearness of General Sherman's advancing army, causing panic in the streets of the once-quiet town. However, the city was never burned to the ground. After the War, Augusta and Georgia were both under martial law during the period known as Reconstruction. During this time, African American civil rights were expanded. [7] Following the end of Reconstruction, the European American majority population of Georgia and other Southern U.S. states enacted Jim Crow laws to limit the rights of African Americans. These restrictions would not be lifted until the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century.
Specifically, the Richmond County School System refused to educate African American students at all. In 1899, a group of parents took their objections in a class actions suit the Supreme Court in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education . The court ruled that the use of state funds was not within federal purview under the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education.
In 1828, the Georgia General Assembly granted a formal charter for the Medical Academy of Georgia, and the school began training physicians in two borrowed rooms of the City Hospital. By 1873, an affiliation was made with the University of Georgia, and the school became the Medical Department of the University. The school would become the Medical College of Georgia in 1956. In 1914, University Hospital was founded near the Medical College, forming the anchor of a heavily developed medical sector in the city.
Unlike most Southern cities, Postbellum life for Augusta was very prosperous. By the beginning of the 20th century, Augusta had become one of the largest inland cotton markets in the world. A new military cantonment, named Camp Hancock, opened nearby during World War I. In 1916 a large fire destroyed over 700 buildings in the city including many of its finest residences. [8]
In 1927, Owen Robertson Cheatham founded the lumber company Georgia Pacific in Augusta, before it moved to Portland, Oregon, and later to Atlanta. [9]
Prior to World War II, the U.S. Army constructed a new fort in Richmond County, Camp Gordon, which was finished a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Many new soldiers were brought to this camp to train to go off to war. Within the few months after WWII, many of the GIs at Camp Gordon had been sent back home, and the importance of the army in the community seemed to almost come to an end. Music legend James Brown, then a teenager, often performed for the soldiers. Brown grew up in Augusta during the 1930s and 1940s (he lived with his aunt, who was the madam of a house of prostitution on Twiggs St.).[ citation needed ]
In 1948, new life came to the city when the U.S. Army moved the Signal Training Center and Military Police School to Camp Gordon. Later, in November 1948, the Clarks Hill Reservoir was created by a newly constructed dam, which provided the city with a supply of hydroelectric power. In 1950, plans were announced to build the Savannah River Plant nearby, which boosted the city's population about 50,000. Augusta moved into the second half of the 20th century on the threshold of becoming an urban industrial center in the South. E-Z-GO and Club Car, the two largest golf car manufacturers in the world, are centered in Augusta, and the Norfolk Southern and CSX run through the middle of downtown Augusta. The city is also a large private company hot-spot, home to the Georgia Bank & Trust and CareSouth.
The Civil Rights Movement shaped Augusta as it did the rest of the United States. In 1961, soul musician Ray Charles canceled a scheduled performance at the Bell Auditorium [10] when he learned that the Black attendees would be segregated from the whites and forced to sit in the balcony. A few days after the Kent State shootings and Jackson State killings in May 1970, Black 16-year-old Charles Oakman was tortured and beaten to death in a county jail. White officials refused to provide answers, prompting Black citizens to demonstrate for racial justice at the county jail. White officials responded to property damage with physical violence, and police shot at least 60 people and killed six participating in the collective rebellion.
Today, African Americans constitute 53.6 percent [11] (2006 estimate) of the population of Augusta-Richmond County. Slavery and Jim Crow continue to shape present inequities, and race relations remain contentious in city politics.
Beginning in the late 1970s, businesses started leaving downtown Augusta for both Regency Mall and Augusta Mall, which started a trend of urban abandonment and decay. To counter this trend, city politicians and business leaders promoted revitalizing Augusta's hidden riverfront (obscured by a levee) into Riverwalk Augusta, with parks, an amphitheater, hotels, museums, and art galleries. The first segment of Riverwalk Augusta was opened in the late 1980s and later expanded in the early 1990s. However, the renaissance of the riverfront did not appear to be spilling over into Augusta's main street, Broad Street, as more businesses were leaving and more storefronts boarded up. Broad Street is the second widest Broad street in America. [12]
In 1995, members of the art community and downtown boosters started a monthly event called First Friday. It was a night festival whose aim was to bring crowds back to downtown. It featured local bands, street performers, and art galleries with extended evening hours. Since 1995, more businesses have returned to downtown, including many new restaurants and bars. A block of upper Broad Street has been named Artists' Row and is home to several locally owned art galleries. First Friday still continues today in addition to many revitalization efforts to downtown. Downtown Augusta has become an epicenter of new growth in recent years though with new focuses on revitalizing historic structures in Downtown to include the former First Baptist Church on Greene Street as well as the Miller Theater, the Lamar Building, and King Mill - all located on Broad Street - which are continuing to be revitalized by developers. Investments have also been made into public art which includes the establishment of the Augusta Sculpture Trail in Downtown Augusta as well as new featured murals showing Augusta native James Brown and some of his notable works. Other new developments have been proposed for new construction in future years to include new mixed use developments along Telfair Street, Greene Street, James Brown Boulevard, and Ellis Street as well as a new hotel on Broad Street and the conversion of the Fifth Street Bridge into a new pedestrian bridge over the Savannah River.
In 1995, citizens of the city of Augusta and Richmond County voted to merge governments. Citizens of Hephzibah, Georgia and Blythe, Georgia decided to remain separate. The consolidation took effect January 1, 1996 with the city of Augusta surrendering its city charter and merging operations with Richmond County.
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The Augusta Museum of History [13] highlights Augusta's history and famous natives and Historic Augusta [14] has helped preserve architecturally important sites throughout the city.
In 2013, the U.S. Army announced the relocation of the U.S. Army Cyber Command from its Fort Meade in Maryland to Fort Gordon in Augusta. This announcement led to a cyber security economic boom in the Augusta metro region with many defense contractors and other private cyber security companies relocating their headquarters and their workforce to Augusta. A later announcement in 2017 by then Georgia Governor Nathan Deal of an investment of $100 million dollars to construct a state of the art cyber training facility in Augusta on the site of the former Georgia Golf Hall of Fame and Botanical Gardens. This Georgia Cyber Center was completed the next year in 2018 and now provides office and collaborative spaces for cyber-related companies such as Parsons and BAE Systems as well as is the home of the Augusta University and the Augusta Technical College cyber security and information technology programs and a new cyber crime lab for the Georgia Bureau of Investigations.
Savannah is the oldest city in the U.S. state of Georgia and the county seat of Chatham County. Established in 1733 on the Savannah River, the city of Savannah became the British colonial capital of the Province of Georgia and later the first state capital of Georgia. A strategic port city in the American Revolution and during the American Civil War, Savannah is today an industrial center and an important Atlantic seaport. It is Georgia's fifth most populous city, with a 2020 U.S. census population of 147,780. The Savannah metropolitan area, Georgia's third-largest, had a 2020 population of 404,798.
Columbia County is a county located in the east central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 156,010. The legal county seat is Appling, but the de facto seat of county government is Evans.
Darien is a city in and the county seat of McIntosh County, Georgia, United States. It lies on Georgia's coast at the mouth of the Altamaha River, approximately 50 miles south of Savannah, and is part of the Brunswick, Georgia metropolitan statistical area. It is the second-oldest planned city in Georgia and was originally called New Inverness. The population of Darien was 1,460 at the 2020 census, down from 1,975 in 2010.
Augusta is a consolidated city-county on the central eastern border of the U.S. state of Georgia. The city lies directly across the Savannah River from North Augusta, South Carolina at the head of its navigable portion. Georgia's third most populous city, Augusta is located in the Fall Line section of the state.
The Province of Georgia was one of the Southern Colonies in colonial-era British America. In 1775 it was the last of the Thirteen Colonies to support the American Revolution.
The city of Savannah, Province of Georgia, was laid out in 1733, in what was colonial America, around four open squares, each surrounded by four residential ("tything") blocks and four civic ("trust") blocks. The layout of a square and eight surrounding blocks was known as a "ward." The original plan was part of a larger regional plan that included gardens, farms, and "out-lying villages." Once the four wards were developed in the mid-1730s, two additional wards were laid. Oglethorpe's agrarian balance was abandoned after the Georgia Trustee period. Additional squares were added during the late 18th and 19th centuries, and by 1851 there were 24 squares in the city. In the 20th century, three of the squares were demolished or altered beyond recognition, leaving 21. In 2010, one of the three "lost" squares, Ellis, was reclaimed, bringing the total to today's 22.
Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.
The Savannah Historic District is a large urban U.S. historic district that roughly corresponds to the pre–Civil War city limits of Savannah, Georgia. The area was declared a National Historic Landmark District in 1966, and is one of the largest urban, community-wide historic preservation districts in the United States. The district was made in recognition of the Oglethorpe Plan, a unique sort of urban planning begun by James Oglethorpe at the city's founding and propagated for the first century of its growth.
Julius Curtis Lewis Jr., often known as J.C. Lewis Jr., was an American businessman, philanthropist and Chairman of J.C. Lewis Enterprises, Lewis Broadcasting Corporation, J.C. Lewis Investment Company, and Island Investments. He served one term as Mayor of Savannah in the late 1960s as a Republican.
The city of Savannah, Georgia, the largest city and the county seat of Chatham County, Georgia, was established in 1733 and was the first colonial and state capital of Georgia. It is known as Georgia's first planned city and attracts millions of visitors, who enjoy the city's architecture and historic structures such as the birthplace of Juliette Gordon Low, the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, the First African Baptist Church, Congregation Mickve Israel, and the Central of Georgia Railway roundhouse complex. Today, Savannah's downtown area is one of the largest National Historic Landmark Districts in the United States.
The culture of Augusta, Georgia is influenced by the many different perspectives and histories of its community members, as well as its own history. The large military population of the area as well as the city's rural surroundings have affected the types of festivals and culture produced within the city. Another major influence on the culture of the city is the annual Masters golf tournament held in April of each year. The most prolific cultural medium produced by the city is its musicians, as evidenced by James Brown, Jessye Norman, and Wycliffe Gordon. Though notably, the writer Frank Yerby and visual artist Jasper Johns were Augusta natives as well.
The Augusta metropolitan area, officially the Augusta-Richmond County metropolitan statistical area according to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Census Bureau and other agencies, is a metropolitan statistical area centered on the city of Augusta, Georgia. It straddles two U.S. states, Georgia and South Carolina, and includes the Georgia counties of Richmond, Burke, Columbia, Lincoln, and McDuffie as well as the South Carolina counties of Aiken and Edgefield. The official 2023 U.S. census estimate for the area was 629,429 residents, up from 611,000 at the 2020 U.S. census.
The Savannah metropolitan area, officially named the Savannah metropolitan statistical area by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, is a metropolitan statistical area in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is centered on the city of Savannah and encompasses three counties: Bryan, Chatham, and Effingham.
Riverwalk Augusta is a city park along the Savannah River in downtown Augusta, in the U.S. state of Georgia. The park is alongside and on top of Augusta's levee. It extends from the 13th Street Bridge to the Gordon Highway bridge. Sites along the Riverwalk include St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Georgia Cyber Center, and the Morris Museum of Art.
Chatham Area Transit (CAT) is the provider of public transportation in the Savannah, Georgia, metropolitan area. The Authority was founded in 1987, evolving from previous transit providers. Services operate seven days a week.
The Augusta Museum of History is a history museum located in Augusta, Georgia, U.S. The museum was founded in 1937 to preserve and share the history of Augusta and its surrounding area. On display are numerous artifacts, images, and dioramas that showcase the broad spectrum of the region's history. The Museum of History is the only Museum in the CSRA accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
The following is a timeline of the history of Savannah, Georgia, United States.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Augusta, Georgia, USA.
East Georgia is a thirteen-county region in the U.S. state of Georgia, bordering South Carolina. North of Coastal Georgia and the Lower Coastal Plain, part of the region lies in the Fall Line section of the state. The largest county by population in East Georgia is Richmond County, and its most populous city is Augusta, anchoring the Augusta metropolitan statistical area. Tabulating the region's counties, its population as of the 2020 U.S. census was 479,864.