Kirby's Augusta - William Makepeace Thackeray The Missing Marker Mystery

160 years ago, British author William Makepeace Thackeray, best known for the novel Vanity Fair, came to Augusta and spoke to the locals here at what was then the Masonic Hall.

Although mostly ignored today, Thackeray was a literary lion of the mid-19th century and his visit to our town was considered such a big deal ... a century later ... that the state planted a big metal historical marker right here in a Broad Street sidewalk near the entrance to the then busiest hotel in town -- the Richmond Hotel.

As you can see, the marker's gone.

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources admitted last fall after inquirers from the Chronicle's investigative columnist that it had sent a crew over to Augusta to it because of a complaint about some of the author's descriptions of what he saw here.
The state said it planned to replace the plaque with more suitable Thackeray comments.

Good luck with that.
He actually had much to say about his visit to Georgia, and almost all if it wasn't nice.

Take, for example, this excerpt from a newspaper article: "... When I finished at Charleston I went off to a queer little city called Augusta ... a happy dirty tranquility generally prevalent ..."

Maybe Thackeray didn't like the competition while he was here.
According to news accounts, the "Wild Men From Borneo" were in town that February and Augustans were fascinated by them.

Thackeray left us and headed down to Savannah. He had been in Savannah before, which he seems to have remembered well because his hotel room was infested with fleas and he had to go stay at the home of the British consul.
On this trip, he wrote, "I am bored to extinction by this present journey. I ... make myself so disagreeable that I am sure they will never bear me for a third visit."

He got his wish.

He also got to go to Macon, where it appears he was politely received and quickly forgotten.

A Macon history does not mention Thackeray's visit as the city highlight of February 1856, but instead notes the arrival of Campbell's Original Minstrels, as well as "the Bear Woman, hailed as one of the world's greatest curiosities," and a Museum of Living Wonders that featured a bearded lady, a giantess and a dwarf.

How does a British writer compete with that?
Not well.

By the time Thackeray got to Columbus, Ga., the trip was really beginning to wear thin, prompting him to write: "The dreariness of this country, everywhere ... O, what a dismal scene."
After his Columbus lectures, he traveled to the coast and sailed away, never to return.

I wouldn't be surprised if similar fate didn't befall his historic marker.


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