Establishment , founder of Augusta 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
Noble Jones, who the following year 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. During the
American Revolutionary War, the
Siege of Augusta resulted in the retaking the city from the British by the Americans. Augusta was the second state capital of Georgia from 1785 until 1795. A historical marker in Augusta reads:
Development 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. During the
American Civil War, Augusta was home to many war industries, including the main facilities of the vast
Confederate Powderworks. After the war, Augusta had a booming textile industry leading to the construction of many mills along the Augusta Canal to include Enterprise Mill, Sibley Mill, and King Mill. The devastating
Augusta fire of 1916 damaged 25 blocks of the city's downtown and wiped out many buildings of historical significance, some dating back to the 18th century. Augusta was a major center of economic activity during
Reconstruction and thereafter. 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 into a
riot involving some 500 people; during the unrest, six Black men were killed by police, each found to have been shot in the back. The noted singer and entertainer
James Brown, a native of Augusta, was called in to help quell lingering tensions, which he succeeded in doing. Air, groundwater, and soil were all believed to be contaminated, and people living in the area were hoping for government assistance to move away from Hyde Park. Two of five neighborhoods in Hyde Park appeared to have arsenic, chromium, and dioxin, while all five were found to have PCBs and lead. However, residents were told it was not a risk to their health unless they somehow ingested it on a regular basis. At the time the article was written, the citizens still questioned why the EPA and ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Disease Registry) did not consider these chemicals as a threat to them. Hyde Park also has higher rates of certain illnesses (such as cancer, infections, rashes) than the average in America, and the citizens question why that is not considered. ==Geography==