Georgia Natural Wonder #58 - Augusta (Part 2). 727

[Top Row Dawg]

Georgia Natural Wonder #58 - Augusta (Part 2)

Civil War to World War II

OK we spent a whole day and post on the Augusta Canal as a Natural Wonder of Georgia. We spent yesterday on the Rapids of the Savannah River at the Fall Line of Georgia. This will be our theme for the next few wonders, Fall Line Rapids and the adjoining cities. We covered Augusta's rich history from the Revolutionary War til the Civil War. We bring it on home today with a massive history post on the last 150 years of Augusta and Richmond County. I include notable people, attractions, and a rather large Top Row Dawg Addendum. Truly a wonderful three day weekend adventure Augusta!


The Savannah, at Augusta, 1872

After the Civil War, Augusta and Georgia were both under martial law during the period known as Reconstruction. As a result the city's factories and stores revived quickly after the end of the war in 1865. The enlargement of the canal in 1875 permitted the erection of huge new factories, giving employment to thousands. Some of the Chinese laborers who worked on the canal remained in Augusta to establish one of the oldest Chinese communities in the eastern United States.


Child worker at Globe Cotton Mill in Augusta, 1909, by Lewis W. Hine

Springfield Baptist Church was the focal point of black activism during the Reconstruction era (1867-76). Delegates from across the state met there in 1866 and organized the Georgia Equal Rights Association, the forerunner of the Georgia Republican Party. Augustans Rufus Bullock, Benjamin Conley, and Foster Blodgett dominated the short-lived Republican state administration.



In 1867 William J. White founded the Augusta Baptist Institute at Springfield Church. Twelve years later the school moved to Atlanta and later became Morehouse College. White was also instrumental in the establishment of Ware High School (1880), one of the first for black youth. The closing of Ware by the Board of Education in 1897 prompted a suit that was taken all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.



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.



Augusta women erected monuments to the Confederacy, Augusta men, like the orator Charles C. Jones Jr. and the poet Father Abram Ryan of St. Patrick's Church, joined them in mourning the Lost Cause. At the same time, however, entrepreneurs like Patrick Walsh and Colonel Daniel B. Dyer were welcoming the advent of the New South of progress and industry. Populist voices were powerful in Augusta: Thomas E.Watson challenged the Augusta Democratic leadership for the Tenth Congressional District seat repeatedly during the 1890s. Defeated and embittered, Populists reentered the Democratic Party as a faction pledged to disenfranchisement of blacks and opposition to Catholics. Using the white primary, the faction emerged as the Cracker Party and controlled Augusta politics for most of the first half of the twentieth century.



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.



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.



Progress continued in Augusta during the early years of the century. Destructive floods in 1888, 1908, and 1912 provoked the city fathers to construct a massive levee along the Savannah River under the supervision of engineer Nisbet Wingfield. Levee is along today’s Riverwalk.



Augusta played a role in pioneering aviation history. The Wright Brothers opened a flying school in the city in 1911.



Augusta has served the military during most of its history. A federal arsenal operated in the city from 1819 until 1957, when the site became the campus of Augusta College (later Augusta State University).


1906

Camp McKenzie for white troops and Camp Dyer for black were located in the city during the Spanish-American War (1898). In 1911 the U.S. Army Signal Corps used Augusta for its winter training base. After two seasons of floods and heavy rains the corps removed its planes to San Diego, California.



During World War I (1917-18) 60,000 soldiers of the Pennsylvania Division were stationed at Camp Hancock, in the Hill neighborhood. A veterans hospital established during the war continues to operate. The city of Augusta purchased Camp Hancock field and opened the Daniel Field airport on the site in 1927.



In 1916 a disastrous fire destroyed 746 buildings, some of them Augusta's finest residences.



The Great Fire of 1916 broke out on March 22nd at 6:20 p.m. in Kelly's Dry Goods Store, located in the Dyer Building at the northwest corner of Broad Street and Jackson (Eighth) Street. Whipped along by high winds, the flames rapidly spread to other buildings on Broad and adjacent streets.



The fire jumped from block to block as it moved east, entirely skipping the 600 block of Broad Street, but devastating nearly everything from Fifth Street to East Boundary along Reynolds, Broad, Ellis, and the north side of Greene Streets. The disaster totally destroyed twenty-six blocks, ruining 138 businesses and 526 homes, leaving more than 3,000 homeless, and causing losses totaling more than $10,000,000. Miraculously no one was killed.



The Great Fire was called Georgia's worst natural disaster. It demolished one of Augusta's finest residential neighborhoods, destroying not only buildings, but also the canopy of trees which grew along the main streets. Many of the families who lost their homes forsook the downtown area and moved to "the Hill." The courageous townspeople rebuilt and restored the burned buildings and replanted the trees, but the fire forever changed the face of Augusta.


St. Paul's.

The city spent thousands of dollars advertising its remaining amenities during the 1920s and attracted many tourists but few businesses. In 1927, Owen Robertson Cheatham founded the lumber company Georgia Pacific in Augusta, before it moved to Portland, Oregon, and later to Atlanta.



The boll weevil undermined the region's cotton industry, and a few years later the Great Depression settled upon the region and stifled business. Sports offered an escape. There were bright spots even in the deepest years of the depression: the renowned golfer Bobby Jones headed a syndicate that purchased Berckmans Nursery and turned it into the Augusta National Golf Club, the course where the Masters Tournament was first held in 1934.




Augusta National deserves a separate Georgia Natural Wonder designation.

On the golf links of the Forrest Hills-Ricker Hotel, Bobby Jones won the Southeastern Open of 1930. He went on to victory that year in the British Amateur, British Open, U.S. Open, and U.S. Amateur –- golf’s Grand Slam and a feat yet to be repeated. A lifelong amateur, Jones won four U.S. Opens, five U.S. Amateurs, three British Opens, and one British Amateur, but called his thirteen-shot victory in the 1930 Southeastern Open, “the best-played tournament I ever turned out in my life.” Thirteen of the original Donald Ross-designed holes and the 1926 Golf House survive from Jones’ era.



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. Camp Gordon became the peacetime Fort Gordon, home of the Signal Corps.



World War II to Consolidation

Augusta's golden age

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 would boost the city's population about 50,000. Augusta moved into the second half of the twentieth 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 and Backlash

The Civil Rights Movement touched Augusta as it did the rest of the United States. In 1961, soul musician Ray Charles canceled a scheduled performance at the Bell Auditorium when he learned that the black attendees would be segregated from the whites and forced to sit in the balcony.



In 1960 students from the predominantly black Paine College successfully challenged segregation ordinances by sitting in the front of buses and at whites-only lunch counters. In 1964 black plaintiffs filed suit to integrate schools. Little progress was made until a race riot erupted in May 1970. A few days after the Kent State shootings and Jackson State killings in May 1970, six African-American students were killed after they were shot in the back for looting by police following civil rights demonstrations.



Racial tensions flared into a full blown riot with many buildings being set on fire. Finally, in 1972, a federal judge ordered the Richmond County Board of Education to bring about school integration by a massive busing program. The "magnet school" concept, in which a school specializes in a particular program of learning, has proven to be the most successful educational innovation for Augusta's public schools.Today, African Americans constitute 53.6 percent (2006 estimate) of the population of Augusta-Richmond County. While slavery and Jim Crow are but memories of the past, race relations continue to be contentious in city politics.



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 his statue in downtown it reads………Dedicated to the "Godfather of Soul" on May 6, 2005



Singer, songwriter, musician and one-of-a-kind performer, James Brown has thrilled millions around the world with his hit recordings and electrifying performances. The 1983 Georgia Music Hall of Fame inductee, 1986 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and 2003 Kennedy Center honoree has called Augusta "home" since moving here when he was five. It was in Augusta's Lenox Theatre that he first received recognition for his talent by winning an amateur contest. His songs have enriched the world, and his personality and generosity have enriched this city.



Several Augusta-area writers and musicians also came to prominence during the mid-twentieth century. Best-selling novels by Augusta authors Frank Yerby and Edison Marshall were made into motion pictures. Berry Fleming satirized the Cracker Party in Colonel Effingham's Raid (1943).



Local doctor Corbett Thigpen brought the subject of multiple personality disorder to public attention in The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Uncle John tells us that I left out something important. Yes Dr. Thigpen gets credit, but also a former Dawg football ('22, '23) letter man, Dr. Hervey M Cleckley that was just as involved in the Eve case. Uncle actually met them, his father had worked in that office while at MCG.



And opera diva Jessye Norman rose to prominence on the world stage.



Still living, she has an historical marker in Augusta that reads……

Riverwalk Amphitheater and Plaza named in honor of Jessye Norman, internationally acclaimed opera star, born in Augusta, Georgia, September 15, 1945. Miss Norman began singing at Mounty Calvary Baptist Church, 1260 Wrightsboro Road. She attended C.T. Walker Elementary School and A.R. Johnson Junior High School. After graduating from Lucy C. Laney High School, Miss Norman pursued vocal training, earning her Bachelor's Degree from Howard University and her Master's Degree from the University of Michigan. Her considerable talents were further developed at several European opera houses and concert halls until she achieved world prominence making her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1983. Miss Norman has long occupied a unique and preeminent place in the realm of opera, celebrated universally and in her own "hometown".



Miss Norman, also known as a benefactor of numerous causes and organizations both artistic and humanitarian, will always be cherished as a true daughter of Augusta, Georgia.

Urban Decline

Beginning in the late 1970s, businesses started leaving downtown Augusta for both Regency Mall and Augusta Mall. That 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.



Revitalization

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. Due to a rise in crime, attendance has dwindled over the last few years.



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. Enterprise Mill was recently renovated to include business offices and apartments.



1996 Consolidation

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.


James and James - Broad Street statue of James Brown looking north toward Augusta Common statue of James Oglethorpe. James Brown statue has since been placed on a stage-style pedestal.

The Economy

By the turn of the twenty-first century, a half-million people lived in the greater Augusta area. A large industrial base provides employment in the production of medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, textiles, and golf carts. More than 25,000 people are employed in health care. Georgia Health Sciences University offers degrees in dentistry, allied health sciences, nursing, and medicine, and its telemedicine outreach serves patients all over the Southeast.



The medical university also operates its own hospital and clinic; other area hospitals include St. Joseph, University, Doctors, and Eisenhower. Augusta Technical College provides workforce training, with especially strong programs in allied health sciences and emergency medical technology.



The U.S. Army Signal Center at Fort Gordon is the largest communications training center in the world.



The Savannah River Site near Augusta employs more than 13,000 workers. The Westinghouse Savannah River Company manages the site for the U.S. Department of Energy. The plant manufactured nuclear weapons during the cold war; its present mission is the cleanup of radioactive material.



Attractions

Augusta's Masters Tournament attracts approximately 250,000 golf fans annually, bringing in approximately $36 million in city revenue.



The city enjoys a rich array of cultural activities including ballet, opera, drama, choral societies, art galleries, and museums. The Georgia Arts Council rated the Augusta Symphony as the number one community orchestra in the state. The Augusta Museum of History and Historic Augusta won a Governor's Award in the Humanities in 2001 and 2003, respectively, and the Morris Museum of Art houses a large collection of southern art.


Morris MOA.

The boyhood home of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who spent almost twelve years of his childhood (1858-70) in Augusta, has been preserved and restored. Woodrow Wilson in Georgia.



We have already covered other historic structures in Augusta including: Meadow Garden (ca. 1790), home of George Walton, signer of the Declaration of Independence; the Old Government House (1801); the original Medical College (1835), designed by Charles B. Cluskey; and the tall chimney of the Confederate Powder Works, the only permanent structure built by the Confederacy.


Old Government House.

We have not covered the 1797 Ezekiel Harris House. Said to be "... the finest eighteenth-century house surviving in Georgia..." by The Smithsonian Guide to Historic America, the Ezekiel Harris House is an outstanding example of early Federal style architecture. Entering the impressive vaulted hallway, visitors may observe what life was like during the Federal Period in Georgia.


Fully restored in 1964 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Harris House is a reminder of the days when tobacco was the primary cash crop of the region.

Other popular attractions are the National Science Center's Fort Discovery at the Riverwalk.


This place may have closed.

And the Augusta Gold and Gardens, home of the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame. When the Golf Hall of Fame was first created by the Georgia General Assembly back in 1982, the project was believed to have the ability to transform Augusta into the “Disney World of Golf.” It was a beautiful garden and a nice place to visit, but it fell far short of the original vision. It closed the gardens in 2007. In 2017 Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announced plans for a new $50 million cyber security facility at the former Georgia Golf Hall of Fame property.



Top Row Dawg’s Addendum to History of Augusta.

Wait a minute people, two whole dictionary’s recount Augusta and no mention of several points of interest I have stumbled upon in my visits there.

Haunted Pillar

The Cursed Pillar was once part of a downtown Augusta market. According to its accompanying plaque, an evangelist wanted to preach next to the pillar but was forbidden by the authorities. He declared that the market would be destroyed, and that the pillar beside him would be the only thing left standing. A freak tornado then blew through Augusta, doing exactly what the preacher had said would be done.



But the curse wasn't through. The story continued that if anyone tried to move the pillar, they would die immediately, or at least very soon. Augusta mayor Will Jennings hired a press agent in 1931 to spread word of the curse. Accounts up until the late 1950s tell of unfortunate Augusta highway workers who were struck by thunderbolts or crushed by their machinery when they tried to move the pillar.



The pillar's power has only grown with time. Some accounts now say that the pillar will kill anyone who even touches it. We decided to ask a convenient pillar expert: Bill Prince, who runs Bill's Place liquors across the street. According to Bill, he's seen the pillar from behind his cash register nearly every day since 1961. "There's a lot of Yankees come here to take pictures of it," said Bill. "I don't know what the hell they expect to see."



The pillar was destroyed by an out-of-control car on Dec. 17, 2016. It had previously been destroyed -- and then rebuilt -- by similar crashes in 1935 and 1958. Augusta says the pillar will again be rebuilt, but hasn't said when.

Summerville

Summerville, (commonly referred to locally as "The Hill"), is a large, affluent residential area and historic district located northwest of downtown Augusta, Georgia. The district is site of the historic homes of John Milledge, George Walton, and Thomas Cumming.

History

Summerville was built in the 1780s, and established as a separate village from the city of Augusta. During the mid to late 1810s, downtown Augusta experienced a small epidemic of malaria, which caused little effect in Summerville. In 1820, a major outbreak of fever nearly wiped out the entire garrison at the U.S. Arsenal. After a recommendation from an officer, the U.S. Arsenal purchased land that is the present-day site of Augusta University.



The Stephen Vincent Benét House, commonly referred to as Benét House, is a historic house on the Summerville campus of Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Georgia. The house was built 1827–29 as the Commandant's House of the Augusta Arsenal, and is a much-altered example of Federal period architecture. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971 for its association with the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943), who lived here in the 1910s. The house, which housed the official residence of the Augusta State University for a time, presently houses the Summerville campus's office of admissions.



The Benét House is centrally located on the Summerville campus of Georgia Regents University, and is one of a cluster of buildings that formerly made up part of the Augusta Arsenal. It is a two-story brick structure, built on a side hall plan, with a two-story porch wrapping across the front and around one side. The building's interior includes finishes from all periods of its occupation, and its exterior has also been added to and altered several times.



The house was built in 1827–29, after the federal government decided to move the Augusta Arsenal to this location. The arsenal played a key role in the American Civil War, when it was used by the Confederate Army, and again in the Spanish–American War. In 1911 Colonel J. Walker Benét was appointed its commandant, bringing with him is son Stephen. Stephen Benét lived here until 1915, and it is where he began his writing career, as well as being the only major surviving structure known to be associated with his life. Benét is best known for the 1928 poem John Brown's Body, for which he was awarded the 1929 Pulitzer Prize, and the class 1937 short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster".



By 1850, Summerville became a four-season community. More permanent buildings and year-round homes sprang up as the town prospered. In 1861, Summerville was officially incorporated as a city with the boundaries defined as a circle for one-mile. Later on, Summerville became a fashionable luxury resort and golf capital with the construction of many hotels. This caused a large transformation — from a small summer resort for local residents to a winter playground for wealthy industrialists and politicians from the northern United States.



I shortchanged how wonderful Summerville is. Here are a few more images of homes.



Some of these homes quite old Augusta not burned by Sherman.



Two hotels, The Partridge Inn and the Bon Air Hotel, hosted captains of industry and former presidents of the United States.


Partridge Inn


Bon Air Hotel

Some built winter homes in the area, while others stayed permanently, escaping the harsh winters of the northern U.S. When the city of Augusta annexed Summerville in 1912, it lost its status as a separate town. Four years later, a fire swept through downtown Augusta, destroying much of the business district and neighborhoods along lower Broad Street. This caused a housing boom for Summerville.

Historic district

On May 22, 1980, Summerville was added to the National Register of Historic Places, bounding from Highland Ave., Heard Ave., Wrightsboro Rd., Milledge Rd., and Cumming Rd.


The Summerville Cemetery is very much worth a visit in our Natural Wonder search for green spaces of Georgia.

It holds the graves of……..

JOHN MILLEDGE (1757-1818), Revolutionary officer, Congressman, Governor (1802-1806). He gave the land on which the University of Georgia is built.



GEORGE WALKER CRAWFORD (1798-1872), lawyer, legislator, Congressman, Governor (1843-1847), Secretary of War under President Zachary Taylor, President of the State Secession Convention (1861).



CHARLES JONES JENKINS (1805-1883), lawyer, jurist, legislator, State Senator, Governor (1865-1868). Removed from office by Gen. Meade, he hid the State Seal, records and funds until Governor James Milton Smith was inaugurated in 1872.



JOSEPH RUCKER LAMAR (1857-1916), lawyer, legislator, jurist, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1911-1916). He compiled “The Code of the State of Georgia.”



THOMAS CUMMING (1765-1834), When Augusta was incorporated in 1798, he served as the first mayor. From 1810 until he died he was the president of the Bank of Augusta. He gave the land for the cemetery.



ALFRED CUMMING (1802-1873) Superintendent of Indian Affairs on upper Missouri, appointed by President Buchanan first Governor of Territory of Utah (1857-1861) during the “Mormon War.” He retired from office when Georgia seceded from the Union.



Historical marker on Alfred Cumming reads ………

Governor, Army officer, Indian Commissioner. Little is known of his early years, but he relocated to Augusta and was the mayor in1839. During the Mexican war he was a sutler with Winfield Scott's army. He then served as superintendent of Indian affairs for the central division from 1853 to 1856. In 1855 he was named the senior of three commissioners assigned to make a treaty with the Blackfeet Tribe at the Judith River and the first treaty with that tribe was signed on October 17. President James Buchanan appointed him as governor of the Utah Territory to replace Brigham Young in 1857. There were some threats of an uprising among the Mormons, but Young voluntarily gave way and there was no bloodshed. Cumming was a Democrat and served until 1861 and Lincoln's Inauguration, when he returned to Augusta where he lived in retirement until his death.

Continuing Top Row Dawg’s addendum to our Augusta travels is a drive through Old Town.





Stop by the visitor center and get a driving tour pamphlet for all the homes on Greene Street and wind your way through Old Town on your way back to Broad Street.



One more thing about Augusta is the Sacred Heart Cultural Center, known also as Sacred Heart Catholic Church, is an events center and a former Roman Catholic Church. It is one of the more notable and recognized landmarks in the city.



It was built by Jesuit priests and its first service was on December 2, 1900. The church had been in Augusta for 70 years, until it closed in 1971 due to modern suburban advancements. While the building was vacant, it endured much vandalism and was near destruction. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. In 1987, the Knox Foundation renovated the building and opened as a vibrant center of the city for cultural events. The Sacred Heart Cultural Center hosts special events such as wine festivals, choral concerts, Christmas events, and an annual garden festival. Artwork is exhibited on a regular basis in the Art Gallery.



Showing my age but the best thing about Augusta back in my days of traveling there for insurance claims was hands down the best used record shop in the state of Georgia - Radioactive Records. The dude had set up shop in an old bank on Broad Street. And the really rare albums he put back in the old bank vault. Cheers to you Radioactive Record dude where ever you are.


Keep finding things to add.

Wow three whole days in Augusta and I feel like I just scratched the surface. You kind of take for granted the easy crossing of the Savannah River because there are multiple bridges over to South Carolina in Augusta. But look at the state map below Augusta. You only see one bridge spanning Georgia and South Carolina until you get to the I – 95 bridge near Savannah. Boy I bet that would be a good river trip. Anyway only got a few more days before the Cocktail party and I wanted to cover St. Simons before heading there Thursday. Got time for one more Georgia Natural Wonder fall line city the next two days, hang on folks its gotten pretty rough there the last few years. Today's GNW gal wears green jacket. Added three who will steal all the votes.