Birthplace of Augusta Chronicle

On this site on August 30, 1785, Greenburg Hughes published Augusta’s first newspaper, the Augusta Gazette, which continued, after he went to Charleston, until September 30, 1786, when John Erdman Smith, State Printer, began publishing the Georgia State Gazette or Independent Register, which on April 11, 1789, became Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State; in 1819 its name was changed to Augusta Chronicle and Georgia Gazette; in 1820, to Augusta Chronicle; in 1821, to Augusta Chronicle and Georgia Advertiser. In 1837 absorbed States Rights Sentinel, became a daily published as Daily Chronicle and Sentinel until it absorbed the Constitutionalist and, in 1885, the Augusta Chronicle, whose descent from those two early gazettes justifies its claim as the South’s oldest newspaper, founded August 30, 1785. Since the yellow fever epidemic in 1839, it has never missed an issue. Among its editors prominent in public life were: Dennis Driscol (1804-11), who launched controversial journalism in Georgia; A.H. Pemberton (1825-36), first in State to urge nullification; N.S. Morse (1862-66) of Connecticut, whose diatribes against President Davis revealed Union sympathies which became undisguised upon the arrival of Federal troops after the surrender; Ambrose R. Wright (1866-72), Maj. Gen., C.S.A., elected to Congress from this District; Patrick Walsh (1873-99), Mayor of Augusta and U.S. Senator; Pleasant A. Stovall, Asst. Editor (1877-90), minister to Switzerland; and James Ryder Randall, Co-Editor (1877-87), famous poet who wrote "Maryland, My Maryland."