Augusta in the spotlight: how the Masters transforms a small Georgia city

April in Augusta, Georgia, means one thing: the Masters golf tournament. It’s the only golf major to be held in the same venue every year, and is a boon for this quiet city of 195,000 people. Though it is the state’s second-largest city behind Atlanta, Augusta has suffered from the downtown depopulation that has sapped so many US cities over the past last half-century. Not that you’d notice at the moment, with the world’s golf elite and aficionados converging on the north side of town.

Tee party

It’s impossible to understate the importance of the tournament to Augusta, according to 54-year-old Steve Kling, who caddies at the club. “The whole city gets consumed by it,” he says. “It’s bumper-to-bumper traffic on Washington Road. All of the schools in two different counties have their spring break in the same week, and the kids volunteer to work there. Every hotel is booked, people rent out their houses for nice sums of money. You either stay in town and go to the Masters or work there, or you go on vacation.” Golf is now physically shaping the urban landscape in Augusta, as well – the National spent an estimated $55m (£44.7m) between 1999 and 2014 buying property up around the course.

City in numbers …

140 – hectares of pristinely manicured lawn at the Augusta National Golf Club.

500,000 – bales of cotton handled annually by the cotton exchange (once the world’s second largest) in the early 20th century.

25 – blocks of the city destroyed in the 1916 great fire that paved the way for much of the architecture we see today.

148 – Augusta’s rank out of 150 in WalletHub’s recent survey of the America’s happiest cities.

1.69 – percentage of Asians in Augusta today, which had one of the South’s first Chinese communities.

… and pictures

This YouTube video captures Augusta’s early 20th-century boomtown grandeur – before the boll weevil decimated the cotton industry.

History in 100 words

James Oglethorpe founded Augusta in 1735, one of 21 trustees tasked with establishing what would be Britain’s first North American colony in 50 years. It was built on the same 40-lot pattern as Savannah, 120 miles downstream, whose carefully homogenised layout was designed to foster a classless society. Such idealism had been ditched by 1751, however, when slavery was legalised in the state, fuelling the cotton boom that covered the south in plantations. In the subsequent civil war, this Confederate city’s wharfs, factories and stores escaped the worst of the devastation, as Gen Sherman chose to bypass it on his famous march to the sea. Officially, Sherman bridled at Augusta’s heavy defences, but some speculate it was because the soldier had an old flame in town.

Augusta in sound and vision

The Three Faces of Eve, a groundbreaking bestseller by Nunnally Johnson that told the story of a schizophrenic Augusta housewife named Christine Costner Sizemore, was adapted into a 1957 film of the same name, starring another Georgian, Joanne Woodward.

As a young child, the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, lived at 944 Twiggs Street, then a brothel run by his aunt Honey.

What’s everyone talking about?

Fort Gordon is the cyberwarfare HQ of the US. It houses 16,000 personnel and civilians to the south-west of the centre, a concentration of techspertise that local authorities are trying to capitalise on by creating a “cyber-corridor” running through Augusta. The idea is to link a recently announced $50m tech campus near the riverside to another mooted hub in the defunct Regency mall, near the Gordon Highway, where much of the current urban blight is found. Fort Gordon is massive enough that it could conceivably drive this growth singlehandedly. “When the country was at its lowest point in 2008 with the housing crisis, the prices here didn’t go down a whole lot,” Kling says. “You always have a revolving door of guys coming in and out of the base.”

What’s next for the city?

The continued resuscitation of downtown. Small initiatives, such as Artists Row, began breathing life back into the historic core in the 1990s, and the revival is picking up speed. New shops and restaurants are moving in, and the refurbished Miller theatre, on Broad Street, is due to reopen later this year. Development around a new baseball stadium in north Augusta, on the South Carolina side of the river, is stimulating the flow of people. More could be done with the walk along the Savannah river, locals say, but the city is widely considered to be finding a good balance. “I don’t think we’ll ever be as big as Atlanta,” Kling says. “We’re a quiet southern town that brings in one of the country’s biggest sporting events for a week. Other than that, it just wants be a nice little community.”

Close zoom

The Augusta Chronicle, under various names, has been reporting in the region since the year James Oglesthorpe died: 1785. A more recent interloper, Metrospirit, has recently tackled the furore over the closure of the Planned Parenthood clinic.

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