ADDRESS OF MAJOR JOSEPH B. CUMMING 
 
 ON OCCASION OF CELEBRATION OF MUNICIPAL CENTENNIAL OF 
 THE CITY OF AUGUSTA. 
 
 One hundred years ! A century ! How great ! How small ! 
 What a mere span compared with the life of the human race, even 
 when measured by the Mosaic account which attributes only six 
 thousand years to man’s presence on this planet ! What a mere 
 needle’s point beside those eons, which in the belief of the learned 
 of this age have elapsed in the building of the everlasting hills, in 
 fixing the shores of old ocean, in hollowing the river’s rock-bound 
 beds ! Oh, the littleness of a hundred years, measured by 
 the great facts of nature, which represent time too long for 
 our minds to grasp or our thoughts to hold ! Even in our habits 
 of thought, we belittle a century soon after it has drifted back 
 into the boundless past. We are apt, for instance, to think of 
 William the Conqueror and Richard the Dion Hearted as practically 
 contemporaries ; yet a century and more rolled between them. 
 Coming down nearly to our own times, we are prone, of course in a 
 careless way, to regard our original thirteen states as belonging to 
 the same period. Yet between the oldest and the youngest there 
 was a stretch of one hundred and twenty-five years. How little is 
 a century ! And yet how great ! A single one of many solemn 
 facts attests its greatness. In its course it removes from beneath 
 the sun and the stars, from under the bending sky, from city and 
 from country, from hill and field, from the banks of rivers and 
 from the riverless prairies, from the ocean’s shores and from the 
 ocean’s waves — from every habitation and haunt of man, it re- 
 moves, by the time it has run its course, every mortal whom it 
 found at its beginning. If nothing else could be said of the great- 
 ness of a century than that it sweeps aivay before its close every 
 mortal it found at its opening, w 7 e would, say great and awful is a 
 century of time ! 
 
 While any subject might be selected for my discourse without 
 violating any express condition of my commission to speak to you 
 on this. Centennial occasion, I feel, nevertheless, that there is an 
 implied undertaking on m3 7 part to make Augusta my theme. 
 
 When I approach it, I find myself perplexed in deciding how to 
 deal with it. Shall I transport myself, in imagination and by the 
 
2 
 
 aid of records, to that point in Augusta’s history, the centennial of 
 which we are here to celebrate, and I live for a time only in it ? 
 Shall I, by the aid of traditions and of contemporaneous documents, 
 and confining myself to the one point of view, present a sketch of 
 the place and its people as they were then ? This were easy and 
 safe but meagre. Or shall I endeavor to lead you down the path of 
 a century through all the story ? This were long and tedious. In- 
 deed, the subject is one which I find difficult and tiresome, for it 
 holds nothing of thrilling, soul-stirring interest. 
 
 I trust that none of my hearers have come here expecting any- 
 thing like a consecutive and detailed historical sketch of Augusta. 
 To any such I must say at the outset that their expectations will 
 not be fulfilled. I shall not say that they will be disappointed, for 
 nothing, me thinks, could be more interesting, even to the degree 
 of dreariness, than a minute recital of the uneventful history of a 
 small town during the course of a hundred years. Such is the 
 drama of human life, that in no year of the hundred have there not 
 been episodes and experiences of more absorbing interest to the 
 actors therein than the history of wars or famine or pestilence or 
 any of the tragedies in the lives of States. But their interest lived 
 and died with the actors in them, the memory of them has perished, 
 and, even if it could be revived, it would invoke no interest from the 
 living of today, absorbed, as they are, by the concerns of the all 
 exacting present. Certainly, too, there have lived in Augusta in 
 the century, the close of which we are now celebrating, citizens in 
 all walks of life, in all its avocations, of peace and of war, of whom 
 any city may be proud. But if I should undertake to speak of 
 them, what could I do in the compass of this occasion but present 
 to you a catalogue of names ? Homer could make a catalogue inter- 
 esting and even poetic, as when, in the close of the second book of 
 the Iliad, he gives a list of the ships that sailed from Greece and 
 her islands and the men they carried to the siege of Troy, and called 
 the long roll of the defenders of that devoted city. But a less than 
 Homer should not undertake such a feat. 
 
 The way, in part at least, in which I shall endeavor to comply 
 with the expectations of the occasion, will be to present to you pic- 
 tures of Augusta at various periods of her history, and, as if a 
 hundred years were not field enough, I will go back to her very 
 origin one hundred and sixty-three 5*ears ago. 
 
3 
 
 The first thing to do for the infant then just beginning to live was 
 to name it, and the loyal Oglethorpe gave her the name of the Prin- 
 cess Augusta. ' Augusta, unlike some of her neighbors, has not been 
 moved to change her name bestowed by her father in her infancy- 
 Atlanta, for instance, commenced life as “Marthasville.”' - Of course 
 she could not be expected to tolerate long so plain a name as that, 
 sure to be corrupted into “ Marthysville.” Its rusticity could not 
 comport with the fine airs and metropolitan ways she was soon taking 
 on. She must have a name suggestive of greatness, vastness, 
 expansion as wide as ocean or at any rate as far as to the shores of 
 ocean. Think of the great and brilliant “ Gate City” covering all 
 her glory with the name of “Marthysville !” But Augusta, whether 
 because her name had been chosen more wisely at the first or 
 because she is proverbably conservative and slow, has been satisfied 
 to retain the name she received from her sponsors in baptism. 
 
 Let us take a glimpse of this infant in her cradle. The striking 
 feature of the little Augusta was then, as it is now and ever will be 
 while waters seek the sea, the noble river which bathes her northern 
 limits. Not only was it and is it and ever will be it, her great fea- 
 ture, but it was her cause. Because a water highway could connect 
 her with Savannah and thence with the mother country and the 
 world, Augusta came into existence. How beautiful was her 
 tutelary river then ! The axe had not denuded its banks.-- The 
 plowshare had not reduced its hillsides to red powder to stain forever 
 its then crystal waters. The willow and the reed dipped into its 
 stream on either bank, lining with emerald both sides of an unpol- 
 luting conduit for its waters. Noble forests came down to its very 
 edge and spread their shade far over its bed. Between such banks 
 and in such shadow flowed a vast volume of water, clear and cold 
 as the springs from which they took their source. Over rapids the 
 beautiful river came with a roar, or through long stretches it flowed 
 in impressive silence. But ever, in roar or in silence, the same 
 clear limpid water, a suggestion of which is given us dwellers in 
 this age sometimes in a long autumnal drought, but the perfect 
 beauty of which is lost forever. In this glorious stream abounded 
 such fish as rejoice in clear waters. The fresh water mussel, to 
 which mud is death, was found in myriads, furnishing food for 
 man, and a pearl of no mean beauty as an ornament — for woman. 
 No wonder that the Indian haunted the shores of this magnificent 
 river as of a Pactolus, a river of gold for all his wants. Not strange 
 
4 
 
 that along its banks the school boy still finds the frequent Indian 
 arrow head. No wonder that the archologist unearths on its islands 
 the populous Indian burying ground — for where men live their 
 graves soon outnumber their habitations. 
 
 The existence of the rapids a few miles northwest of this spot, 
 presenting an impassible barrier to further navigation of the river, 
 except by the canoe of the Indian, determined the general site of 
 town. The high bluff, emerging here from the alluvial lowlands, 
 decided its particular location. 
 
 But why, it may be asked, was this settlement made at all at that 
 period ? There were thousands of square miles and millions of 
 acres of fertile, finely watered and nobly timbered lands between 
 Savannah and this bluff below the rapids, sufficient to provide the 
 increasing population for generations with ample farms and planta- 
 tions. Why was this extensive intervening region left unpeopled 
 by the white man ? 
 
 Again, what was to be the business of this isolated and remote 
 settlement ? 
 
 Both questions may receive one and the same answer. It was the 
 trade with the Indians. Pelfry, skin of every kind, including even 
 that of the buffalo, which were in those days a not distant neighbor 
 to the spot where we are now assembled, was the staple of a brisk 
 trade with the aborigines. I read in the sketch -which our fellow 
 townsman, Mr. John North, has lent me, of the half-breed German 
 Cherokee Indian, Se-quo-yah, or George Gist : “ Augusta was the 
 great center 'of this commerce, which in those days were more ex- 
 tensive than would be now believed. Flatboats, barges and pirogues 
 floated the bales of pelf to tide water. Above Augusta trains of 
 pack horses, sometimes numbering one hundred, gathered in the 
 furs and carried goods to and from remote regions.” 
 
 While there was a strong element of romance and adventure in 
 this trade, the threading of the primeval forests bj r mere paths, the 
 constant association with nature presenting here a novel and virgin 
 aspect, the floating down a beautiful stream of limpid waters be- 
 tween banks covered with noble and variegated growth, gorgeous 
 with flowers and musical with the song of birds— so different from 
 the dusty beaten paths of commerce in this prosaic day, alas ! 
 
 I fear that these sentimental features of the situation had no effect 
 on the keen traders of that day. Trade is trade. Its ultimate 
 objective is money making. It is successful only wheu it brings 
 
5 
 
 profits. It is most successful when its profits are greatest. Primi- 
 tive nature, grand forests, noble rivers, song birds, the jasmine, the 
 wild honeysuckle, the bay and magnolia about its paths do not 
 modify its essential spirit. So we find our trader, who gave import- 
 ance to infant Augusta, plying his avocation not for the romance 
 which in that age accompanied it, but for colossal profits. I read in 
 the same sketch as follows : “ The trader immediately in connection 
 with the Indian hunter expected to make one thousand per cent. 
 The wholesale dealer made several hundred. The governors, coun- 
 cils and superintendents made all they could. It could scarcely be 
 called commerce. It was a grab game.” 
 
 History repeats itself ! The poor Indian was the real producer in 
 this business. With tireless foot, with scanty food, with, at the 
 first at least, ineffective weapons of the chase, in sunshine and 
 storm, through forest and across streams, b} r day and by night, he 
 pursued the beasts of the woods. His labor, his fatigue, his hunger, 
 his privation, at last have the reward of a skin stripped from the 
 deer or the buffalo. More weary leagues to get his pelf to the trader. 
 There the fruit of the toil and danger of the chase is exchanged for 
 a few colored beads, a yard of cheap calico, or at most a few ounces 
 of powder and a scanty weight of lead, and the trader has closed a 
 transaction — ‘‘made a deal” — which pays him one thousand per 
 cent, profit. 
 
 Thus history repeats itself. Then, as now, trade furnished 
 greater rewards than production. Then, as now, the producer 
 toiled for its benefit more than for his own. 
 
 The chapter in Augusta’s history which I have thus far consid- 
 ered, extended from its first settlement in 1735 to the outbreak of 
 the Revolution. During this period it grew steadily, but its popu- 
 lation even at the end of the period was probably not high up in the 
 hundreds. 
 
 If anything of man’s work of this first period remains, I do not 
 know it, except a few streets and their names, Centre, Broad, Ellis, 
 and Reynolds. 
 
 The Revolutionary history of Augusta is most interesting. But 
 I shall not dwell on it, for the reason that less than a year ago at 
 this same place, and in the hearing of substantially this same audi- 
 ence, an eminent citizen of the State delivered a most eloquent and 
 exhaustive oration on that subject. Nothing of interest, whether 
 of matter or style, of form or of substances, could be added to that 
 
6 
 
 masterly presentation by Hon. Emory Speer. It was heard by you 
 at the time with deep interest, and doubtless abides fresh and vivid 
 in your memory. I shall only say in passing that the little town 
 witnessed deeds of valor by friends and foe not surpassed oh more 
 imposing theatres. It also witnessed acts of barbarity, not only by 
 Indian allies, but b}^ men of our own race, not outdone by the 
 alleged horrors of the Cuban war. For, my hearers, war is war, 
 war is cruel, war is barbarous, war makes fiends of men, whether 
 they be Spanish or Anglo-Saxon, whether they strike for conquest 
 or for freedom, whether they fight to impose or to shake the yoke. 
 
 The next division in the history of Augusta covers the years be- 
 tween the close of the Revolutionary war and the end of the 
 century. I shall call this the “ Tobacco Age.” Up to the war, it 
 may be said with substantial accuracy, that the life of Augusta, its 
 reasons to exist, w r as the Indian trade. The little agriculture which 
 existed near and around it was for the purpose of home support. 
 Nothing left it for export except the peculiar yield of the forest. 
 Nothing came to it from beyond the woods seaward, but the articles 
 to be exchanged for these sylvan products and a few staples for 
 consumption by its meager population and on a few outlying, not 
 distant plantations. But by the end of the Revolutionary war the 
 yield of the forest had greatly diminished. Its denizens them- 
 selves were fewer. They were already feeling the pressure of 
 deadly civilization, and, depressed in spirit, were retiring towards 
 the setting sun. The red man was still not an infrequent figure in the 
 little town. The deer skin— but no longer the buffalo robe — Indian 
 ponies and various simple articles of Indian handiwork were still 
 brought to Augusta for sale or barter. But this commerce had 
 shrunken to a very slender rivulet compared with the great stream 
 which a few years earlier had flowed through the little town. But 
 now, first to supplement and then to replace this waning traffic, 
 came the tobacco business. As we are informed by that conscien- 
 tious and accurate historian, who to our great sorrow departed from 
 our midst a few years ago, Charles Colcock Jones, the settlers from 
 Virginia brought them the seed and the cultivation of this plant. 
 The industry soon attained in soil and climate admirably adapted to 
 it, large 'and flourishing proportions. Government tobacco. ware- 
 houses were established at various points in the interior of the State 
 west and northwest of Augusta, and were presided over by govern- 
 ment inspectors. To these warehouses the tobacco was brought by 
 
7 
 
 the producers of the contiguous country, was inspected, weighed 
 and packed in hogsheads, all under °overmnental supervision. The 
 market where this tobacco was to pass from the hands of the pro- 
 ducer into the hands of the merchant was Augusta. How did it 
 make the journey from the interior warehouse to this mart? Some 
 of it, in districts contiguous to the Savannah, floated down the river 
 in boats, the percursors of the Petersburg merchantmen of the 
 present day. But the most of it made the trip in a mode which, as 
 far as my knowledge goes, was peculiar to this trade and absolutely 
 unique. The day of pack horses, sufficient for the transportation of 
 loads of small bulk but comparatively large value, as pelfry, was 
 passed. The wagon roads of the. country were few. The wagons 
 themselves were not numerous. So, as Col. Jones tells us, “the 
 hogshead or cask being made strong and tight and having been 
 stoutly coopered, was furnished with a temporary axle and shafts 
 to which a horse was attached. By this means it was trundled 
 over the country roads to market. 
 
 Thus for a while Augusta was, as greatness went in that day, 
 a great tobacco market, and whether nurtured by skins or tobacco 
 it continued to grow. Under the conditions of transportation of 
 that age it could not but grow. A navigable river flowing past its 
 doors to the ocean gave it an immeasurable advantage over any 
 place not similarly situated. What would have become of poor 
 little “ Marthysville ” having no river, without the railroads? But 
 the lordly Savannah was to Augusta as the Thames to London, the 
 Tiber to Rome, and the Nile to all Egypt. So, by the end of the 
 century Augusta had grown to be a very flourishing town of about 
 2,000 inhabitants. 
 
 It was in this tobacco age, but when it was waning, and at the 
 opening of the next period, which I shall call the cotton age, that 
 the event occurred of which we are now celebrating the iooth anni- 
 versary. In Januarjq 1798, the Legislature incorporated the free- 
 holders residing in a certain area, which may be roughly described 
 as lying between the river on the north and Telfair street on the 
 south, and between Elbert and Marbury streets on the east and 
 west. The charter then granted has never been repealed. We live 
 under it at this day. Movements have been made from time to time 
 of late years to substitute a new charter for this venerable instru- 
 ment; but they have come to uought. It has been built upon and 
 enlarged in some particulars to meet the wants of a later civilization, 
 
8 
 
 but in its essential parts it remains as it was in the beginning. A 
 most liberal and comprehensive “general welfare’’ clause, which 
 provided; -“ The said City Council shall also be vested with full 
 power and authority to make such assessments on the inhabitants 
 of Augusta, or those who have taxable property within the same, 
 for the safety, benefit and convenience of said city, as shall appear 
 to them expedient,” has served the city a good turn on many an 
 occasion, when progress in public works would otherwise have 
 been arrested for lack of some specific authority from the Legisla- 
 ture to the City Council. But this provision of the charter has 
 lost much of its beneficent elasticity since the constitution of 1877. 
 
 I trust that this audience will, at this point in my remarks, per- 
 mit me the indulgence of a gratified feeling by reminding them that 
 the first executive of the cityq intendent, as that official was then 
 called, inaugurated on the occasion which now, after the lapse of 
 one hundred years, we are celebrating, was my grandfather, 
 Thomas Cumming. Then just completing his thirty- third year, for 
 thirty-six years thereafter he resided in Augusta, leading and closing 
 here a life which, I trust I may be pardoned for speaking of as that 
 of the good and just man, “vir integer vitae scelerisque purus,” the 
 good citizen, seeking no office, but avoiding no public dutj-. He 
 was not only the first intendent of the city; he was also the presi- 
 dent of its bank, and held that office from the foundation of the 
 bank until his death in 1834, the old Bank of Augusta, chartered 
 in 1810, and pursuing its honorable and prosperous career until 
 swept away, like so many hitherto solid institutions, by the great 
 war between the states. If a breath of reproach ever attached to 
 the name of this good citizen, it has not reached the ears of his 
 descendants of this day, who still in the fifth generation cherish 
 his memory' and seek in it inspiration for unambitious and faithful 
 citizenship. 
 
 The next period in the history^ of Augusta I shall call the 
 “Cotton Age” by the opening of the century, near whose close 
 we are now standing, the cotton gin had come into common use. 
 With climate and soil adapted the best in the world to the cultiva- 
 tion of r cotton, with this product itself more universally adapted 
 than any other to all the uses for which cloth is needed, whose 
 place in preceding periods was supplemented and inadequately sup- 
 plied by the fabrics of wool and flax and silk, its cultivation had 
 been discouraged previously by the impracticability of separating 
 
9 
 
 the fibre from the seed. Where this result was effected at all it was 
 accomplished slowly, laboriously, expensively and scantily by hand. 
 Whitney’s cotton gin produced a stupendous industrial revolution. 
 It is a fact of no small interest in connection with the history of 
 Augusta that Whitney manufactured his gins at a little factory, the 
 power of which was furnished by the little Rocky Creek on the 
 plantation of the late Mr John Phinizy, now almost included in the 
 present boundaries of the city. 
 
 At once the kingdom of a new and great monarch, King Cotton, 
 rose to power. Practically all the cultivable land in Georgia and 
 Carolina was speedily embraced in his wide domain. The compara- 
 tively feeble forces of tobacco and indigo were promptly subdued 
 and banished into the unreturning past. This great potentate made 
 rapid and extensive inroads on the primeval forest. In the service 
 of this great king roads were opened; and at the right season of 
 the year, in the beautiful autumnal weather, when the skies were 
 at their bluest, when the air held a light haze, softening and 
 mellowing the landscape, when the forests were glorious in their 
 robes of the turning leaf, these roads were crowded with the royal 
 progress of the king from the interior of his realm to the great 
 outer world. Right merrily did his majesty descend from his rural 
 seats to his busy mart. In those days, when the railroad was not, 
 fine,- teams of mules were the motive power of land transpor- 
 tation. Great care was taken in their selection and pride felt in 
 their equipment. A part of the equipment was a bow cf bells, 
 raised high over the withers of at least the leaders of even- team. 
 These were not the dull little tinklers of the horse car, heard only 
 when that now almost obsolete affair is close upon the foot passen- 
 ger; but bells — bells that rang loud, clear and musical on the still 
 autumnal air. And thus, with music along his route, coming up 
 from the valleys and resounding from hill top to hill top, King 
 Cotton came marching down. 
 
 Ret us pause here and unroll a map of this period before our 
 mental vision. Our map shall have no regard for State lilies. It 
 will be in the form of nearly half of a circular disc, whose base line 
 shall run through Augusta as its centre. This half circle shall have 
 a radius of 200 miles, and shall sweep around the city* from a point 
 200 miles northeast of it to a point 200 miles southwest. Through- 
 out this region cotton is raised. In this truly vast area where is 
 
IO 
 
 there a cotton market but Augusta? Atlanta, Macon, Columbus, 
 Chattanooga, Athens were unborn. Where could the cotton come 
 for a market but to Augusta ? 
 
 All roads led to our little city. As the traveler even of this day 
 still occasionally encounters the old Roman milestone in ever}' part 
 of Europe, with the Roman inscription “S. P. Q. R.,” “Senatus 
 populusque Romanus,” reminds us of the time when all roads led to 
 Imperial Rome, so throughout the region I have sketched all the 
 mile stones, to have their truest significance, should have marked 
 the distance to Augusta — Augusta on the Savannah. 
 
 Where could the cotton come except here? Why must it, of 
 necessity, under the conditions of that age, come hither ? Oh, the 
 river, the river ! Our Thames, our Tiber, our Nile ! It beckoned 
 it to its banks and solicited it to embark on its bosom. Here, then, 
 it was in fact collected. Hence, in the first years of this century, 
 in flat boats and barges, and later by steamboats, it was floated 
 down the river to Savannah, where it found itself at the gateway of 
 the outer world. So already at the commencement of the century 
 one hundred thousand bales of cotton found a market in Augusta, 
 and one hundred thousand bales represented then many times the 
 amount of money enclosed in the same number now. 
 
 This period was Augusta’s most prosperous. Without rivals, 
 without competitors, she collected ■ on the banks of her fostering 
 river the wealth producing crop of a vast tributary, and gathered 
 in its magnificent proceeds. For the boats, at first barges and flat- 
 boats, and then several distinct fleets of steamboats, which took the 
 cotton to the port, brought back the hardware, the groceries, the 
 dry goods, the furniture, in a word all the necessaries and luxuries 
 of life of that age, for consumption in that extensive back country, 
 from which the cotton was drawn. The wagons which brought the 
 staple to Augusta, marched back with the same merry chimes, laden 
 with the merchandise I have mentioned for the use of the producers 
 of the cotton — master and slave — in the interior. How easy then 
 for the merchant of Augusta to grow rich. It is true the one 
 thousand per cent, profit of the Indian trader was a thing of the 
 past. Even the three or four hundred per cent, of an earlier gen- 
 eration of Augusta merchants had ceased. Still his profits were 
 very large. And they came so easily. How little of wear and 
 tear was in his life ! How different from the strain on the faculties 
 of the business man of this day ! His at first weekly, then semi- 
 
II 
 
 weekly mail was received. It was then his business to write in 
 reply a few of those formal, ceremonious, stilted letters of the 
 period,- which he subscribed; “With great esteem and distin- 
 guished consideration, I have the honor to be your obedient, humble 
 servant.” This done with great deliberation, not to say solemnity, 
 and the letters turned over to a clerk to be copied by hand, there 
 was nothing to make even a ripple of excitement in the business 
 life of your solid merchant of that age until the arrival of the next 
 weekly and semi-weekly mail. Our tormentors, the three or four 
 daily mail deliveries, and those fiends of modern life, the telephone, 
 the telegraph and the ‘ ‘ticker, ’ ’ afflicted him not. What steadiness of 
 nerve, what sweetness of temper, ought not your merchant of that 
 time to have had ! What piety, too, for with his leisurely, easy 
 going life, he could attend church Sunday, and was not obliged to 
 make that day one of literal and absolute rest of body and brain to 
 repair the ravages of six days of physical and mental tension. The 
 fortunes of that period are in a large measure what Augusta is 
 living on at this day. The struggles of these later times have been 
 considered successful if they have been able to keep the accumula- 
 tions of that period from being worn away by the attrition of many 
 years of ‘ 1 hard times. ’ ’ 
 
 The next period of Augusta’s history I shall call “ The Manufac- 
 turing Age.” The immediately preceding period, which I have 
 just been speaking of as the “ Cotton Age,” was not only the 
 time of Augusta’s greatest prosperity to her own people, but also 
 of her greatest relative importance to the rest of the world. At 
 that time she dominated commercially a wide territory, in which 
 she found not a single rival. She possessed in the Savannah river 
 a magnificent highway of the only kind then used for heavy traffic, 
 between herself and the outer world. In the last quarter of that 
 period, it is true that a new kind of highway, one, as the future 
 was to show, of stupendous potentialities, was extended to her 
 doors from the sea. I refer to the old South Carolina railroad. 
 But this rathei added to than subtracted from Augusta’s relative 
 importance; it diverted no commerce from her, and it increased the 
 facilities of that which she already had. 
 
 But all this was soon to change. About 1840 the Georgia rail- 
 road became a potent factor in Augusta’s history. Its tendency, 
 so long as it was merely a local road, extending 100 miles or so into 
 the interior, was not so much to bring trade to Augusta— for that 
 
12 
 
 trade already came by the wagon roads — as to build up rival 
 markets in the interior. Moreover, Macon, Columbus, --Athens and 
 other places in the interior began to divide with her the commerce 
 of a back country, which was once all her own tributary province. 
 I shall not dwell tediously on this evolution of a new 7 situation. 
 Suffice it to say that the relative, if not absolute, decline of Augusta 
 w r as apparent. At this time thoughtful and public spirited citizens 
 realized the fact that something must be done to invigorate her 
 languishing life. The scheme which commended itself to them was 
 the construction of a canal to furnish water pow r er for manufactur- 
 ing purposes. The result v T as the old Augusta canal, constructed 
 between 1845 and 1847. This project did not at first meet wfith 
 unanimous approval. Respectable and conscientious citizens 
 opposed it on honest grounds of public policy. I shall not w 7 eary 
 you with the details of that struggle. I shall not even pause, 
 though sorely tempted to do so, to say a few words of affectionate 
 eulogy of that private citizen, the originator and master spirit of the 
 enterprise, who in the midst of an exacting professional practice, 
 and with the cares of a large family, gave, as president of the Board 
 of Canal Commissioners, several years out of the prime of his life 
 to unselfish and gratuitous devotion to this public w 7 ork. This old 
 canal was a slight affair compared with the present w 7 ork, w T hich 
 was brought up from its former small estate to its present magnifi- 
 cent proportions, under the administration as Mayor and largel} 7 by 
 the wise measures of our venerable fellow citizen, Mr. Charles Estes, 
 who still abides with us. Neither w r as the first effort at manufacturing 
 on the canal successful, but it failed not from any inherent error in 
 the general idea of making Augusta a manufacturing centre, and the 
 failure brought no discouragement to this aspiration. The old canal 
 accomplished its purpose. It directed the business thought of Augusta 
 into an additional channel. Previously nothing was considered but 
 commerce. Naturally, for trade had made Augusta one of the most 
 favored places in the country. When that trade began unmistakably 
 to withdraw 7 from her, it is not strange that she became alarmed and 
 felt the forebodings of death. But since the advent of the Manu- 
 facturing Age a new stream of life has been coursing through her 
 veins. 
 
 The next period in the history of Augusta was “ The War Age.” 
 Short it w 7 as, compared with the shortest of other periods, but not 
 to be measured by its duration in years as to the place it will hold in 
 
13 
 
 her history. It is true that Augusta, unlike in this respect many 
 Southern towns, knew not the actual tramp of hostile armies; but 
 she knew and felt the exultation and the bitterness of "war in every 
 other aspect of the dreadful scourge. How glorious, too, is her war 
 record! Of the military companies forming her volunteer battalion 
 in the peace time preceding the war, the Clinch Rifles, the Ogle- 
 thorpe Infantry, the Irish Volunteers, the Richmond Hussars, the 
 Washington Artillery, all went promptly to the field with full ranks 
 and took their places in the earliest organizations of the Confederacy. 
 But these old and already historic companies were but a fraction of 
 those which Augusta sent to that great conflict. There were at least 
 ten other companies which came into life with that crisis. All these 
 were at “ the front,” and most of them from the beginning to the 
 end of the struggle. That meant that there were men constantly 
 falling in their ranks and new men going to take their places. Be- 
 sides this, not a few young men of Augusta for one reason and 
 another joined military organizations elsewhere. I think I am safely 
 within bounds when I say that first and last Augusta sent two thou- 
 sand of her sons to the battlefield. How many of these were num- 
 bered among the “ unreturning brave!” How many returned only 
 on their shields! 
 
 But that was not all. There was the front and there was the rear. 
 There was the field where the men battled, and there was the home 
 where the women waited. There were the brave hearts in the camps, 
 and the aching hearts by the firesides — not in a few homes, but in' 
 all. - There were mingled sorrow and pride, grief and joy — sorrow 
 for the fallen, pride for the hero. Grief for the death of dear ones, 
 joy for their glorious memory! We who are still living and were 
 living then know that that was the period of Augusta’s highest as 
 well as intensest life. We know that that was the time when the 
 sordid, the selfish, the commercial in us was subdued by our higher 
 nature. While we live we can attest with our tongues the nobility 
 of Augusta in her war period. But in a few more mornings such 
 witnesses will have taken on the silence of the tomb. Well then is 
 it that enduring monuments commemorate that period of Augusta’s 
 history.' They will ever be her most glorious memorials. As the 
 stately shaft in her principal thoroughfare towering heavenward is 
 the loftiest of all her monuments, so it marks the culmination of her 
 spiritual life. In the time to come great railroad systems may rear 
 huge habitations for themselves on her soil. Successful commerce 
 
14 
 
 may build themselves palatial exchanges within her borders. Learn- 
 ing may here construct for itself some vast temple, dedicated to 
 books and science. Religion itself may here uprear ostentatious 
 fanes. But while God and man rate the spiritual above the material, 
 self-sacrifice above self-indulgence, duty above success, so long will 
 the private soldier of the Confederacy, fronting the eternal east from 
 the top of that noble column, be a type and a memento of Augusta’s 
 highest life. Spare it ye forces of nature! Disturb it not, thou 
 dreadful earthquake! Pass it by, ye destroying cyclone! Blast it 
 not, thou deadly lightning! Touch it not, ye frosts, with insidious 
 fingers! Guard it, ye spirits of air and earth, that it may speak to 
 distant ages of Augusta’s noblest and highest life! 
 
 But one other period remains — -the period stretching from the close 
 of the war to the present day — which I shall call “ The Iron Age.” 
 Primarily I so denominate it for the reason that it is the period when 
 the iron road has become a tremendous factor, an upbuilder or de- 
 stroyer, in the history of towns and cities. Augusta, like all other 
 industrial centres, has felt the influence of this force, whose enor- 
 mous development is a thing of this post bellum period. I make 
 bold to believe that that influence has been on the whole beneficial 
 to Augusta. I cannot explain her steady and satisfactory growth 
 on a contrary supposition. But I would not discuss that intricate 
 question on an occasion like this. Suffice it to say that she has be- 
 come and is a very important railroad centre, from which distribution 
 can be made in all directions, inward and outward, to the land and 
 to the sea. 
 
 But I have called this period “ The Iron Age ” for another reason. 
 There has ever been among the myths of the human race a belief in 
 a golden age. The characteristics of that mythical period are ease 
 and plenty, love and peace, life blessed with good things acquired 
 without effort, and crowned with tranquil happiness. Those same 
 traditions have ever taken note also of an “ Iron Age.” That age 
 has always been the then present. The dwellers in every period 
 have regarded it as an iron age. Pressed with the hard con- 
 ditions, the bitter struggles of life, they have been prone to regard 
 the past and the future as more to be desired than the present. 
 Their thought has been: Life was easy in the past; it will be happy 
 in the future. In the past it was golden in its beauty and excel- 
 lence. Now it is iron in its hardness. 
 
 Very justly, 1 think, we may call this latest period of Augusta’s 
 
15 
 
 history ail iron age in a business sense as compared in the same 
 sense with the golden past. The struggle for business success in 
 these latter times has been severe. The conditions, - not merely 
 locally but generally, have been unfavorable. Notwithstanding, to 
 her credit be it said, she has gone ahead. She has' taken no step 
 backward, but many forward. She has grown, and she has taken to 
 herself in nearly every particular the fruits of a progressive civili- 
 zation. But why should I prolong this already too tedious discourse 
 by speaking of this phase of her history to those who not only know 
 it, but have made it ? 
 
 Thus, with no design on my part to distribute Augusta’s life up 
 to the present hour into seven ages, like Shakespeare’s division of 
 man’s life, I find that it has naturally and of itself fallen into those 
 parts. And now, one lingering look backward and I am done. 
 
 We dwellers in this age, looking over this relatively long period, 
 have just grounds, as citizens of Augusta, to be gratified at the 
 retrospect. From the day she came into life, an isolated outpost of 
 the white race, a speck of civilization in the wilderness, down to the 
 present hour, her course has been respectable, honest, honorable. 
 True, no brilliant “ boom ” period with its inevitable reaction finds 
 a place in her history. But her progress has been steady and her 
 advance always held nullum vestigium retrosum. The little settle- 
 ment at the head of navigation, perched on the very bank of its 
 river of life, has gradually spread far and wide over the adjacent 
 plain and climbed the sides of its circumscribing hills. In the bitter 
 times of war, she has risen heroically to the fullest measure of patri- 
 otic duty. In the long periods of blessed peace she has been con- 
 spicuous for her civic virtues — the chiefest of which are law and 
 order and financial integrity. Of these, she now reaps the rich re- 
 ward in credit unsurpassed and in respect unfeigned. In time of 
 pestilence, which has twice visited her habitations, she has had the 
 fortitude for the trial and has uttered no cry for help. When swept 
 by devastating floods, she has found in her own stout heart and in 
 her own reserved resources, strength to meet the ordeal, and has de- 
 clined, not churlishly but proudly, all proffered assistance from with- 
 out. All this she has done without the blare of trumpets or the 
 beating of drums or the waving of flags. Quiet, self-contained and 
 self-sufficient, she has maintained her steady way onward and up- 
 ward. Our fathers and our fathers’ fathers planted wisely, and if 
 from that far shore whither they went long since, their vision could 
 
i6 
 
 revert to this time and this expansion of their work, they would 
 know that those who came after them have been true to their trust 
 and their opportunities. 
 
 Why, then, should I withhold high sounding words in speaking 
 of Augusta? Why should I hesitate and falter at the epithet 
 “ great?” Wherein consists the greatness of a city ? Not in popu- 
 lation. Athens, the light of whose greatness in art and arms shines 
 on and on down ages, would have been engulfed in the population 
 of any of a thousand cities of inglorious Cathay. Sparta and Thebes, 
 great and immortal, how slender were they in population! Rome 
 was already great when her citizens were less numerous than our 
 own. It is the quality not the number of citizens that makes the 
 greatness of a city. The patriotic in war — the law abiding and honest 
 in peace — the constant in adversity — on these firm foundations is 
 built a city’s greatness. 
 
 Then, oh, Augusta, strong in this test, call thyself “Great.” For 
 once sound a loud trumpet, blow a clear clarion blast to the world, 
 proclaiming in tones not to be challenged thy real merits. And hope 
 for thyself — aye, secure for thyself — excellence in all the time to 
 come. X ' J My people are of the same blood and lineage as of old. Civic 
 virtue is prized as much now as in the days of our fathers. The soil 
 that nourished them is equally generous to us. The atmosphere in 
 which they lived lives of industry and usefulness, many of them 
 through four score years, plays about your heads. The same benefi- 
 cent sky bends over us. And our river! With it my story began, 
 and with it will end. Oh, our river! Shorn of much of thy pristine 
 beauty, thou art strong and beneficent still, thou great and lordly 
 Savannah ! Thou everlasting traveler from the mountains to the sea, 
 didst lure the little Augusta to nestle on thy banks. Here thou 
 didst nourish her infancy. Thou didst give her strength as she 
 grew. In time thou didst bring her wealth. Thou art still benefi- 
 cent to her, furnishing her drink, for her fighting the fire fiend, for 
 her turning the wheels of her factories. Let no man think thou art 
 not also still the guardian and protector of her commerce, not dead 
 but sleeping. At any threat of danger to her prosperity, thou mayst 
 awake and, as of old, show to thy beloved city how powerful thou 
 canst be in her behalf. For thy God-built highway all the works of 
 puny man are impotent to abolish or annul. Augusta’s fostering 
 river still flows by her gates and will do so forever. Labitur et 
 labetur in omne volubilis sevum.