Academy of Richmond County
Near Augusta, Georgia
The school now called the Academy of Richmond County has been educating students in Augusta since the year the Revolutionary War ended. Chartered by the Georgia legislature in seventeen eighty-three, it is the fifth oldest existing public high school in the United States and the oldest in the South , a distinction that carries real weight in a region that was often skeptical of public education.
The founding trustees were determined to build something permanent. They opened the school on April twelfth, seventeen eighty-five as a classical boys' school offering Latin, French, Greek, algebra, and trigonometry , advanced enough that early students could transfer to universities as sophomores, bypassing their first year entirely. In this sense, the Academy was also the beginning of higher education in Augusta.
The school's early prominence attracted the attention of the new nation's most prominent figure. In seventeen ninety-one, President George Washington toured the Southern states and stopped in Augusta, where he attended oral examinations at the Academy and heard an address from a recent graduate. Washington's visit conferred a kind of founding-era legitimacy the school would invoke for generations.
The Academy occupied several buildings over its long life. In eighteen oh two it moved to a building on Telfair Street, where it remained for one hundred twenty-five years. At times the building also housed the Georgia General Assembly , Augusta served as the state capital three separate times , as well as federal courts and the local Masonic lodge, making it as close to a civic center as early Augusta possessed.
The school transitioned from a private all-male institution to a co-educational public high school after the Civil War, tracking the broader democratization of Southern education. Today the Academy of Richmond County continues as a public magnet school in the Augusta school district, its JROTC program and academic mission still intact , a living institution that has outlasted every political upheaval the state has endured for nearly two hundred and fifty years.
