RICHMOND COUNTY

 

Richmond County is one of the original headright counties acquired from the Creek Indians by treaty in 1733 and organized as the colonial Parish of Saint Paul in 1758.  There was a trading post established at the head of navigation on the Savannah River, Richmond County's eastern border, in 1735.  The following year General James Oglethorpe built a fort to protect the post on the site of Augusta.  At the time of the Revolution, the parish became Richmond County, named to honor the Duke of Richmond who had defended in Parliament the colonists' cause and who had earlier advocated their independence.  Augusta, the county seat, was named for the wife of the Prince of Wales, the Princess Augusta.  Augusta was the state capital from 1785 until 1795.  Originally Richmond County included Glascock, Columbia, and McDuffie counties plus parts of Warren and Jefferson.  Richmond became the seventh county in order of creation.

 

There was fighting in and around Augusta several times during the Revolutionary War.  The city was captured by the British in the spring of 1780.  A temporary stronghold known as Fort Grierson and commanded by British Light Colonel James Grierson was headquarters for the occupation.  It was located at the present junction of Eleventh Street and Reynolds Street within the city.

The following September, Colonel Elijah Clarke and a band of Patriots tried to recapture the town.  They drove British troops and their Indian allies into the White House, a large trading post built in 1758 and operated by Robert McKay.  A four-day siege ensued, and, with the British troops on the point of surrender, reinforcements arrived to drive the Patriots away in haste. Twenty-nine of their wounded were left behind and thereafter denied the normal conventions of capture.  To please the wounded British Colonel Thomas Brown, thirteen of the Americans were hanged in the stairwell of the White House so he "could watch their dying."  The others were handed over to the Indians for torture and eventual death.  Treatment given the captured Americans was apparently in the minds of Clark's Patriot forces the following summer when, together with General Andrew Pickens and Colonel "Light Horse" Harry Lee, they retook the town.  British Colonel Grierson who was captured with his men was shot by an unknown Georgia rifleman while a prisoner.

 

In 1845 and 1846 the city constructed the Augusta Canal, running nine miles.  It was early evidence of the community's interest in industrial development. 

 

Augusta figured prominently in the development of the railroad industry, as the home of the Georgia railroad – chartered in the 1830’s.  The first railroad in Georgia, and only the third on the country, the Georgia railroad ran from Augusta to Athens and opened up commerce throughout the region.