Follow
Please add profiles for those who were born, lived or died in Augusta-Richmond County, Georgia.
Official Website
History
In 1735, two years after James Oglethorpe founded Savannah, he sent a detachment of troops to explore the upper Savannah River. He gave them an order to build a fort at the head of the navigable part of the river. The expedition was led by
Nobel Jones, who created a settlement as a first line of defense for coastal areas against potential Spanish or French invasion from the interior. Oglethorpe named the town in honor of Princess Augusta, the mother of King George III and the wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Oglethorpe visited Augusta in September 1739 on his return to Savannah from a perilous visit to Coweta Town, near present-day Phenix City, Alabama. There, he had met with a convention of 7,000 Native American warriors and concluded a peace treaty with them in their territories in northern and western Georgia. Augusta was the second state capital of Georgia from 1785 until 1795 (alternating for a period with Savannah, the first).
Augusta developed rapidly as a market town as the Black Belt in the Piedmont was developed for cotton cultivation. Invention of the cotton gin made processing of short-staple cotton profitable, and this type of cotton was well-suited to the upland areas. Cotton plantations were worked by slave labor, with hundreds of thousands of slaves shipped from the Upper South to the Deep South in the domestic slave trade. Many of the slaves were brought from the Lowcountry, where their Gullah culture had developed on the large Sea Island cotton and rice plantations.
The city experienced the Augusta Fire of 1916, which damaged 25 blocks of the town and many buildings of historical significance.
As a major city in the area, Augusta was a center of activities during Reconstruction and after. In the mid-20th century, it was a site of civil rights demonstrations. In 1970 Charles Oatman, a mentally disabled teenager, was killed by his cellmates in an Augusta jail. A protest against his death broke out in a riot involving 500 people, after six black men were killed by police, each found to have been shot in the back. The noted singer and entertainer James Brown was called in to help quell lingering tensions, which he succeeded in doing.
Adjacent Counties
- Edgefield County, South Carolina
- Aiken County, South Carolina
- Burke County
- Jefferson County
- McDuffie County
- Columbia County
Communities
- Blythe
- Fort Gordon
- Hephzibah
Links
Fort Gordon (Official Site)
Historical Photos of Augusta 1899-1910
The Stephen Vincent Benét House
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Rucker Lamar Boyhood Home
President Woodrow Wilson's Boyhood Home
