Fall 2012 marked the last semester of Augusta State University; beginning in 2013, ASU merged with Georgia Health Sciences University to form a new institution, Georgia Regents University (later renamed Augusta University). In honor of the long history of ASU, students in my Honors Freshman Composition class in Fall 2012 undertook a project to research and write about ASU’s campus, located in the historic Summerville neighborhood of Augusta. The campus boasts many interesting and unusual buildings and artifacts, and each student chose one campus feature as a topic.
Most of the students in ENGL 1113 were in their first semester of college, and the campus was an entirely new environment for them. We visited the Special Collections at Reese Library, where archivist Carol Waggoner-Angleton introduced the class to archival research tools and methods. The students dug through scrapbooks, old newspapers, cemetery records, and letters, in addition to perusing books and articles on local history.
The following pages are the results of their research. Keri Jones’s article on the History Walk provides an overview of the historic Summerville campus, and it begins our history; you can, however, click through in any order.
Walker Family Cemetery — Breana Walton
We have two Payne Hall projects; these two authors used the same secondary sources, but they each found different primary sources, resulting in slightly different perspectives on the history of Payne Hall.