Oglethorpe's settlement would signal the beginning of the end of American Indian occupation that had stretched over thousands of years. By 4,500 years ago, after the ancient game had become extinct, the tribes had learned to harvest fresh shellfish and later they would cultivate squash and corn gardens.

In 1773, after several decades of trade and skirmishes with English explorers, the tribes signed away some 1.5 million acres of land at an Indian congress in Augusta.

That same year, William Bartram left his native Philadelphia to explore the Southeast, intent on recording the region's natural history and abundant plant and animal life. The Quaker naturalist, after whom the 220-mile Bartram Trail in Georgia is named, offers some of the earliest glimpses into colonial Augusta.

"The village of Augusta is situated on a rich and fertile plain, in the Savannah River; the buildings are near its banks and extend nearly two miles up the cataracts, or falls, which are formed by the first chain of rocky hills, through which this famous river forces itself."

A few years later, in 1776, George Walton became the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence. Then a lawyer from Savannah, he took the spirit of the colonial cause into the battlefield as a colonel in the Georgia militia. After he was wounded in the leg, captured and then exchanged for a captured English officer in 1779, Walton headed for Augusta, which he would help turn from a mere outpost into a "mart for the whole country above it."

Walton helped set up a constitutional government in Augusta, then serving as the state capital, and was elected governor by the Georgia Assembly in late 1779. He pushed for the city to adopt a checkerboard pattern of lots to either side of the original 40 and encouraged construction of a courthouse, a jail and a school. He again would be elected the state's governor and later chief justice.

His name graces one of Augusta's more prominent streets, as well as a Georgia county and numerous other institutions.

His remains and that of another signer of the Declaration of Independence, Lyman Hall, rest beneath the Signers Monument, a 50-foot pillar in the middle of Augusta's Greene Street. Hall, a minister by training, was born in Connecticut and eventually moved to Georgia. He, too, was Georgia governor, serving from 1783 to 1784.

Birth of the trains that continue to chug through Augusta came in 1833, when the Georgia Railroad Co. was formed. In 1835, the legislature gave the company banking powers and the resulting Georgia Railroad and Banking Co. would invest heavily in the city and region. It contributed heavily to the Augusta Canal and built a railroad to Atlanta, helping that city become the eventual capital of the state and the trading nexus of the South.

During the Civil War, Georgia Railroad and Banking's lines took Confederate soldiers to battle. From the Confederate Powderworks at Augusta, the railroads carried nearly all of the gunpowder used by the Confederacy during the War Between the States.

Spared by General Sherman's March to the Sea, Augusta would become home to some fiery characters in the post Civil War years -- one of them a champion of the farmer, the other a champion of his race.

Thomas E. Watson -- not the Kansas City Tom Watson who's a two-time Masters champion -- studied law in Augusta and would serve the area in the state legislature. During the 1880s and 1890s, he supported the interests of farmers over the entrenched Democratic political establishment. In return, he was backed by farmer alliances and, in 1891, was elected to Congress. He was nominated for vice president at the Populist convention in St. Louis in 1896, which endorsed William Jennings Bryant for president. Two years before his death, he was elected U.S. senator from Georgia. Unfortunately, as much as Populism boosted Watson's political career, his virulent attacks on Catholicism, blacks, Jews, the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson and the war effort had diminished it.

Denouncing the second-class status of America's blacks, decades before Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X were born, was Augusta's C.T. Walker. Using his family, church and schools for former slaves as support, Walker would enter ministerial training at Augusta Institute, which later would move to Atlanta as Morehouse College. He helped organize, at age 27, the Tabernacle Baptist Church, one of the more influential churches to be founded in Augusta. His opposition to the "separate but equal" status of black Americans became more pronounced after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1891. By 1900, he spoke from a national pulpit as minister of the Mount Olive Baptist Church in New York City. That same year, before an audience of 8,000 at Carnegie Hall, he declared: "The Negro is an American citizen. The amendment to the Constitution did not make us men; God made us men before man made us citizens!"

On March 22, 1916, Augustans' thoughts of spring and war that had erupted across the Atlantic turned sourly toward a bright sky in the local night. Thought to have been started by an unattended tailor's iron in the basement of the Dyer building at Eighth and Broad streets, the "Great Fire of Augusta" was fanned by unusually high winds up the building's elevator shaft. It turned northward toward the river, where it would torch several warehouses, Tubman High School, historic St. Paul's Church and more than 20,000 bales of cotton.

By the time it was contained, the fire had left 3,000 Augustans homeless and caused $10 million in damage to 25 blocks of homes and businesses.

In 1932, Augusta was unaware of the literary mark that Erskine Caldwell would leave on the city when his "Tobacco Road" was published that year. The novel, a dark-humored account of desperate, dirt-poor Jeeter Lester and his family, struck a chord in a country wracked by the Depression. It was based in part on Caldwell's observations of the poor in different parts of Georgia. It would become a best-seller -- as would a later Caldwell book, "God's Little Acre" -- as well as a play and movie.

By teaming with a friend, Cliff Roberts, to build the Augusta National Golf Course and start the Masters in 1934, legendary golfer Bobby Jones wasn't the only Augustan who would learn how to make successful alliances.

Also leaving a big mark on Augusta, much as it appears today, was the service of Lester S. Moody as secretary and director of the Augusta Chamber of Commerce from 1926 to 1964. During that tenure, the city and region would gain a number of monuments. They would include: Thurmond Dam, whose hydroelectric plant would prompt the federal government to build a nuclear-weapons plant, now the Savannah River Site, in Ellentown, S.C.; Camp Gordon, which would become Fort Gordon, and numerous spans across the Savannah River, including the 13th Street Bridge, the Jefferson Davis Bridge at Fifth Street, the Fury's Ferry Bridge and Buttons Ferry Bridge.

Moody didn't do it by himself but through friendships, teaming with U.S. Sens. Walter George and Dick Russell and U.S. Rep. Mendell Rivers, all Southern Democrats who were influential in the '40s and '50s. That influence would help pump millions of federal and state dollars into the regional projects.

Big game, colonial and literary marks, fiery characters, friends and alliances -- they've all combined to make Augusta's history as rich as its coveted green jacket.

Postcard photos courtesy of Joseph M. Lee, III. Mr. Lee's books, Images of America: Augusta, A Postcard History is a fascinating look back in time. The book is available from Historic Augusta, The Augusta-Richmond County Museum and the Morris Museum of Art.