| Hampton Terrace Hotel, North Augusta |
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Information AboutHampton Terrace Hotel, North Augusta |
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James U. Jackson organized the North Augusta Hotel Company; costing approximately $536,000 to build the hotel. The hotel was completed in April of 1902, and in December of 1903 it was opened to the public. The Hampton Terrace was located on a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside. The hotel was very important to the local economy and outranked both cotton and banking in its profits. Many prominent and influential people of the early twentieth century visited the Hampton Terrace including Harvey Firestone, John D. Rockefeller and Vice-President Howard Taft. The Augusta Chronicle highlighted the hotel as one of the best in the country. The Hampton Terrace represented the epitome of Augusta's hotels. The hotel itself occupied the entire city of North Augusta. Residents and visitors of North Augusta alike can still find visible remnants of the once legendary golf course. By taking State Highway 230/Martintown Road south off I-20, drive approximately 4 miles until you reach an old Winn-Dixie shopping plaza located nearby SRP Federal Credit Union. Driving into the plaza and behind the shopping center you will find a large grassy knoll which, upon further examination, reveals the remnants of an old fairway. This piece of land has gone unnoticed over the years, largely to construction and development of the city over time, but fortunately the efforts of one young man dedicated to the research and preservation of the Hampton Terrace has helped to bestow this information onto the public. It has been argued that had the hotel not burned down, the shape and face of North Augusta known today may have been vastly different, rivaling it's predecessor Augusta for wealth, size, and affluence. Few people realize that the Hampton Terrace was a great part of North Augusta's development. The hotel had five floors, four of which contained rooms for five hundred guests, and three hundred rooms. The frame on the building grounds was longer than two football fields and had enough windows for seventy average sized houses. |
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