 History
North Augusta: Last in a Long Line of Great Ideas
After decades of living in the shadow of its larger sister city, North Augusta is well on the way to coming into its own.
by David Foster
If ever a geographical area had its future stamped by never-say-die entrepreneurial spirit, the hillsides and river bottom that comprise North Augusta are certainly it.
For sure, during all the days North AugustaÑand its three predecessorsÑwere building, folks in Augusta, especially business and social leaders, cast a not-so-sanguine eye to the "threats" from the other side of the river. Since the moment James Oglethorpe's men stepped ashore near where Saint Paul's Episcopal Church stands today to found what would become the dominant city in the region, South Carolinians have cast an envious eye across the river, often with designs to better the Georgians.
The European history of North Augusta goes back through a series of dead-end towns spun into existence by a series of contrarian South Carolina entrepreneurs who just didn't like Augusta very much. All three of these towns were located along the river between the end of the shoals and about where the Fifth Street Bridge crosses today.
First was Savannah Town, settled by South Carolina fur traders around 1698. Had the Georgia Colony not been founded in 1736 and quickly taken economic dominance over the region, what we know as Augusta today could just as easily have been South Savannah Town or just South Savannah, which can give even the most precocious student of what ifs something of a spinning head.
The second upstartÑand this one for sure a competitor for AugustaÑwas a tobacco and cotton-trading development, Campbell Town, established by South Carolinian John or Leroy Hammond around 1790 just below the last shoal on the river (about where the 13th Street Bridge is today; the shoals were flooded when the New Lock and Dam was built in 1935).
In 1821, about 10 years after Campbell Town had given up the ghost, entrepreneur Henry Shultz founded Hamburg with one agenda, to whip Augusta any way he could. This settlement would come to flourish as a prime South Carolina trading center and find even greater success when the South Carolina railroad terminated there in 1833.
By 1890 Savannah Town and Campbell Town were only memories and Hamburg little more than a deteriorating slum. At about that time a young Augusta real estate developer, James Urquhart Jackson, decided to fulfill his boyhood dream of building a residential and commercial center on the north side of the river, not so much to compete with Augusta, but to complement the Garden City. Unlike most every other city and town in the CSRA (or the entire South until that time), North Augusta was not so much a town founded to serve a river or railroad link, but strictly as a real estate development.
But regardless of their degree of success or failure, each of these towns made some marked contributions to the history and culture of the area.
Savannah Town never had a chance. Founded at the site of an old Indian village, Savannah Town could have become the queen inland city along the Savannah, and did enjoy great status for almost 40 years before Augusta was settled as the inland city of the new Georgia colony, its primary coastal market Savannah and not Charleston. But once Augusta was settled in 1736, the Indians only had to come as far as the southern bank to trade their deerskins and other pelts, bypassing Savannah Town. Soon, most of the South Carolina traders became Georgia traders and that was the end of that.
By the close of the Revolution, Augusta itself was hardly a metropolis and in addition to deerskins and other pelts, the agricultural regions around it were growing much more diversified and lucrative, with major cash export crops such as tobacco and indigo adding new opportunities for shipper and warehousemen. For a South Carolinian named either John or Leroy Hammond (there are conflicts in the literature) this was a prime opportunity to go Augusta one better. He built some warehouses across from what is today Harrisburg on the Georgia side and competed tooth-and-nail with Ezekiel Harris to store and ship agricultural products. It was a nasty trade war and Hammond himself, legend has it, was a victim of the hard feelings, mysteriously killed in 1799. He did, however, provide a very popular ferry service and his warehouses flourished. But as cotton became the greater crop, Augusta's warehouses and wharves continued to improve and no one stepped in to fill Hammond's shoes. So Campbell Town languished and, by 1810, it was footnote.
Henry Shultz, founder of Hamburg, despised everything Augustan. Period. Though no died-in-the-wool South Carolinian (he was born in Germany and did not come to the U.S. until 1806), he was determined to make his creation not only Augusta's rival, but if at all possible, its commercial conqueror (See "Henry the Great of Hamburg," December/January 2000). He was a brilliant businessman as well as a class A, mean-tempered old jerk. But make money he did, for a while, and his town grew. The steamboats particularly liked the deeper north channel of the river and when Hamburg was chosen as the western terminal for the South Carolina railroad, Hamburg's economy grew even more, despite the fact that Shultz was going broke due to reckless management.
But when Augusta relented and decided to allow the railroad to build a bridge and come into the Georgia city, Hamburg received its death sentence. By the Civil War it was little more than a settlement; by 1900, it was pretty much a slum. (One of old Hamburg's terminals remains to this day on the yards of Augusta Block and Concrete off Aiken-Augusta Highway. Worth a trip.)
All of this made for a snug little Augusta. No matter what the South Carolinians threw at them, sooner or later it dried up and blew (or washed) away. Then up pops James U. Jackson, an Augusta-based real estate man looking to (a) make a buck or million and (b) fulfill his boyhood dream of a real city on the bluffs and plains across from Augusta.
From about 1890, with the help of the Mealing family, Jackson acquired some 600 acres along the river and up today's Georgia Avenue. He then contracted with a New York urban design and planning firm to lay out a downtown and some residential areas. He also decided to replace the ferry with a steel bridge at 13th Street to give Augustans greater access to his new properties, which put the old ferry out of business, but guaranteed his North Augusta project commercial success.
In 1897, he acquired Augusta's trolley lines from W.B. Dyer and ran a leg across his bridge. Later he continued the line all the way to Aiken, making it the longest inter-urban trolley line in the world.
At the turn of the century, Jackson began developing the cherry on top of his South Carolina sundae, the 600-room Hampton Terrace Hotel complete with an 18-hole golf course. Now this was one doozy of a winter visitor palace and was filled with all the celebrities of the day. But a fire in 1917 destroyed the frame building and it was, oddly, never rebuilt. The Hampton Terrace fire was considered by many the end of North Augusta's glory days.
Other than that and its slow growth as a bedroom community over the next 70 years, not much happened in North Augusta. Then, about 1995, Augustans rediscovered the Savannah River. Riverwalk came into being in Augusta, but North Augusta went Augusta a few better with some very prominent riverside developments, like the golf course directly across the river from downtown (and the new homes it has spawned), while rich folks decided to plant homes along the bluffs overlooking the river just north of North Augusta's downtown.
While Augusta was debating what to do with its canal, North Augusta was turning an old railroad bed into a seven-mile greenbelt, complete with recreation complex and paved bicycle and walking trails. By the turn of the 21st century, the upstart was freshening its downtown, looking to expand the Greeneway and actively promoting itself as a competitor to Columbia County's suburban sprawl. Well competing for the suburbanite, but not the sprawl.
Perhaps more importantly, North Augusta was avoiding internecine wars over local politics while at the same time finding a whole new well of community pride. The city might have been founded by a real estate speculator and designed by a bunch of Yankee architects, but over the past 15 years it has given its big sister across the river some real lessons on what it means to be a community. And considering the facelift underway across the North Augusta area (now called "South Carolina's Riverfront"), one might be a bit hard pressed to decide which is dour.
If John Hammond and Henry Shultz are taking all this in from some celestial vantage point, I have a feeling they are grinning from ear to ear. As for James U. Jackson, I have a feeling his spirit is feeling smug as well.
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