Harrisburg-West End Historic District, Augusta

Photo: Gwringle, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

West of downtown Augusta, the Harrisburg-West End Historic District ties together four eras of the city in one neighborhood: an 18th-century tobacco village, early roads out to the resort town of Summerville, rows of 1880s mill housing along the Augusta Canal, and an early 20th-century residential area. Its best-known landmark is the 1797 Ezekiel Harris House, one of the finest 18th-century houses still standing in Georgia.

• National RegisterListed June 7, 1990
• Boundaries15th St., Walton Way, Heard Ave., Milledge Rd. and the Augusta Canal
• Must-seeEzekiel Harris House, 1822 Broad St.
• House museum hoursThu to Sat 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sun 1 to 5 p.m.

Ezekiel Harris and the Village of Harrisburg

In 1794 Ezekiel Harris, a tobacco merchant from South Carolina, bought 323½ acres west of Augusta, planning a tobacco trading town to rival it. He built a tobacco warehouse on the river, put up his large house in 1797 to lodge planters who came with their crops, and ran a free ferry to draw business. He was not a successful businessman. Costly lawsuits forced him to start selling lots in 1799, and by 1800 the area was known as the Village of Harrisburg. It stayed a thinly settled community until the 1870s.

The Mills and Their Villages

The 1875 enlargement of the Augusta Canal set off the next wave of growth. Sibley Mill rose in the early 1880s on the site of the Confederate Powder Works, which was taken down after the Civil War; only its tall obelisk chimney still stands. Sibley bought land across the canal for worker housing, and the John P. King Manufacturing Company, built in 1882 just east of Sibley, did the same. By 1900 the old village was a crowded mill neighborhood.

Other sections grew at the same time. The Augusta Land Company developed an L-shaped area south of Broad and west of Tuttle Street, and the West End, bounded by Hicks, Eve, Walton Way and 15th Street, became a distinctly different, non-mill neighborhood. Augusta annexed the area in 1882 as its 5th Ward.

Churches and Schools

Corner stores and grocers spread along Broad Street, and churches went up across the district. The oldest is Christ Episcopal Church, built in 1871 in Summerville as the Church of the Good Shepherd and moved to Greene and Eve streets in 1882. Others include Crawford Avenue Baptist, Central Christian, and two historic Black congregations, Hosannah Baptist and St. John’s Baptist. Three historic school buildings survive, including a school on Walker Street between Crawford and Tuttle that was one of Augusta’s first public schools for African American children, and the 1934 Martha Lester School on Broad Street.

Change and Survival

The mills declined in the 1930s and sold off their houses to private owners. Houses along Pearl Street near the Sibley and King mills were cleared for urban renewal in 1972, and in the early 1980s the John C. Calhoun Expressway split the district into north and south halves. Through it all, Harrisburg has remained a neighborhood of property owners proud of its history.

HarrisburgMill-era houses

Augusta CanalThe district’s eastern edge

Nearby: the Summerville Historic District on the hill above, and more Augusta historic sites.