Oglethorpe Ward

Oglethorpe Ward was established by the newly formed state government in 1787 as the city’s seventh ward. It is ironic that this ward—an anomaly within Oglethorpe’s urban and regional plan—should carry his name. This area west of the original town common was never divided into garden lots, but instead seems to have been part of what was set aside as “Indian Lands.” In 1760 lots of varying sizes in the area adjoining the West Common, then referred to as “Yamacraw” (a name the area retains), began to be granted to prominent merchants and planters. Most important were those of John Joachim Zubly and William Ewen, whose names are commemorated in the later designation of portions of this area as the hamlets of St. Gall (Zubly’s birthplace in Switzerland) and Ewensburg. Streets were laid out by the end of the eighteenth century. In 1856 Oglethorpe Ward was divided into three sections (North, Middle, and South), each subdivided by numerous narrow streets, almost all of which have disappeared. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the area gained a reputation for squalor. Flanked by industrial sites, the neighborhood attracted Russian, Norwegian, and Irish immigrant workers and free African Americans. More than two thousand small and predominantly one-story freestanding and attached wooden houses, similar to those that survive on the east side of downtown in the Beach Institute area (see 9.5, 9.6), filled the neighborhoods between the river and Turner Boulevard (the northern edge of the Central of Georgia complex), along with several industrial buildings catering to the railroad. Various redevelopments have destroyed all of these houses.