History
Athens was preceded on its site riverside site by a trading settlement called Cedar Shoals. The University of Georgia was chartered by the Georgia General Assembly in one of its earliest acts as a legal entity, but the site for this new university, the nation’s first state-supported university, was not chosen until 1801 when a committee from the board of trustees of the university selected a hillside above Cedar Shoals. One of these trustees, friend of Thomas Jefferson and a man who was later to become a governor of Georgia, John Milledge purchased the land for the campus and donated it to the young university. It was also Milledge who named the college-town-to-be Athens, after the ancient Greek home of Plato’s Akademie, and the starting place, in many senses, of academic study.
The town of Athens grew on parcels of land from the original gift to the university, sold off to support the expenses of constructing the early academic buildings, the first of which still stands. Now known simply as Old College, it was originally christened Franklin College in honor of Benjamin Franklin. Despite the clamor of construction and what must have been, at least at times, fairly rustic surroundings, the first class graduated in 1804.
The town was officially chartered in 1806. At that time, the area was growing more populous and prosperous as it became a center of cotton processing and textile manufacture. Rail transit came to Athens in 1841 and, for a time, Athens was known as the “Manchester of the South” after the bustling English mill town.
There were no major battles in Athens during the Civil War, though a small skirmish occurred on Barber’s Creek south of town on August 2, 1864 between the Home Guard and a small fragmentary force of Union cavalry, members of Stoneman’s Raiders from East Tennessee. During the war, Athens was one of the South’s few manufacturing centers. One of the textile factories was converted to house the manufacturing processes of Cook and Brother, makers of artillery, carbines, the temperamental double-barelled cannon, and infantry rifles – notably the Enfield rifle. Vast numbers of Confederate uniforms came from the local industries and the capable seamstresses of the Ladies Aid Society. At the beginning of the war, 113 students were enrolled at the University of Georgia, but the campus was university was closed in 1863 for the remaining duration of the war. The chapel served as an Army hospital and 431 Union prisoners were housed on the campus. Sherman’s Union soldiers destroyed the rail connection to Atlanta during the waning months of the Civil War, but isolating Atlanta from the supply resources of Athens was of much higher tactical priority than doing any lasting damage to Athens, itself.
Athens became an educational, political, and literary refuge for freed slaves during Reconstruction, as religious and cultural leaders emerged in the community. At one time, three different black newspapers were published in Athens. Athens was the center of one of the first trends toward the development of a professionalized black middle class.
During the war, many prominent residents of Athens had accumulated capital through wartime profits and had the foresight to do their banking through European financial institutions, so that their wealth was not lost with the collapse of Confederate currency. Manufacturing and trade flourished in the Athens area and the population and local economy continued their rapid growth into the 1880s when, within a space of eight years, mule-drawn streetcars, paved streets, telephone service, public schools, and a police force all arrived in Athens. The first decade of the twentieth century brought the construction of a new City Hall, a seven story building, a nine story building, and a theater that would go on to host most of the major African-American performers of the early half of the century.
The Navy trained pilots near Athens during World War II. In 1961, Athens was the scene of one of the more peaceful integration experiences in the South, when two African-American students became the first to study at UGA. A strong regional music scene developed in the 70s, which flowered in the 1980s into a nationally noted source of the “Athens rock” sound.