Downtown business owners try to keep smiling amid pandemic - 1736 Magazine, Summer 2020

Most metro area residents have heard of the Great
Fire of 1916, which burned many businesses in downtown
and homes in the Olde Town neighborhood.
But very few know about an equally devastating fire
in 1829.
That blaze, on April 3, destroyed parts of downtown
and nearly 850 homes. Augusta was much smaller then,
so the damage had an even greater impact on the pre-
Industrial Revolution town. The aftermath was severe
enough that city leaders passed an ordinance requiring
buildings in certain areas be made of brick instead of
wood.
Another fire in 1858 resulted in the city getting a
360-degree view of the marble obelisk in front of the
Municipal Building on Greene Street. The 172-year-old
monument marks the burial place of two of Georgia’s
three signers of the Declaration of Independence –
George Walton and Lyman Hall.
Monument Street, the north-south thoroughfare cut
in the middle of the 500 block, was not the result of
forward-thinking city planners – it was the result of a
fire that burned down buildings blocking its view.
Everyone got so used to seeing the monument from
Broad Street that the structures were never rebuilt.
And 1921 was a banner year for fires – five major
buildings were destroyed, including the Bon Air Hotel
(which was rebuilt); the Albion Hotel (replaced by Richmond
Hotel two years later); The Augusta Chronicle
(which moved into the Augusta Herald building); and
the Harrison and Johnson buildings (both of which were
gutted and rebuilt).
Augusta’s first serious epidemic showed up in 1839 –
yellow fever. It afflicted about half the town’s residents,
killing 240 of them, including one of the founders of the
Medical College of Georgia, Dr. Milton Antony, who
contracted the disease while tending to the sick.
The disease came back in 1854. “The community,
panic stricken, are fleeing in every direction to escape
its ravages,” The Chronicle reported that year.
Augusta residents have a “camping party” outdoors following the 1886 earthquake that rocked the Southeast. For a time, people felt
safer outdoors than in buildings.
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