Capital City, Three Times Over

Augusta has been the capital of Georgia not once but effectively three times, and each time for different reasons. When Savannah fell to the British in seventeen seventy-eight during the Revolutionary War, the colonial government fled north and attempted to reconvene in Augusta. The British took Augusta too, in early seventeen seventy-nine, without a fight. Patriots recaptured the town in seventeen eighty-one after a siege at Fort Cornwallis, led by Elijah Clarke and Light-Horse Harry Lee. After the war, Augusta formally served as the state capital from seventeen eighty-five to seventeen ninety-five, a decade during which new streets were named for Revolutionary War heroes: Washington Street, Jackson Street, McIntosh Street.

During the Civil War, Augusta again became critical to the Confederate government, though not as a political seat. Its location deep inland, its railroad connections, its access to the canal, and its existing federal arsenal made it the ideal location for Confederate war production. The city was never captured during the conflict, which meant its factories kept running until the very end.

That wartime immunity left Augusta with something rare: a largely intact antebellum urban fabric. The broad avenues, the brick commercial blocks on Broad Street, the canal district buildings did not burn. They survived, which is part of why walking through Augusta's historic center today is a walk through layers of American history that few Southern cities can still offer.