Ty Cobb and the Summerville House

Tyrus Raymond Cobb arrived in Augusta in nineteen oh four as a seventeen-year-old outfielder trying to make the South Atlantic League's Augusta Tourists roster. The team released him after two days. He found another team, came back, and by nineteen oh five was hitting three twenty-six and winning the league batting title. Two years later he was a Detroit Tiger.

Over a twenty-four-year career in the American League, Cobb compiled a lifetime batting average of three sixty-seven, still the highest in major league history. He scored more than two thousand runs and stole eight hundred and ninety-seven bases. In nineteen thirty-six he received the most votes of any player on the inaugural Hall of Fame ballot, two hundred and twenty-two out of a possible two hundred and twenty-six. No player has ever come closer to unanimous on a first-year vote.

Augusta remained his home. From nineteen thirteen to nineteen thirty-two he lived in the Summerville neighborhood, a quiet, elevated section of the city where the old cotton merchants had built their houses. He married a Richmond County woman named Charlie Lombard at her family's home in nineteen oh eight. He owned a tire business on Broad Street and an apartment complex nearby.

Sports writers called him the Georgia Peach. The nickname stuck. He was difficult, by most accounts, and complicated, in ways that historians have written about extensively. He was also, by the numbers, the greatest hitter the game has ever produced, and this city made him.