Boggs Hall, GeorgiaStateIndustrialCollege

Georgia Historical Society Photograph Collection VM 1361PR, Bx 2, Folder 82

Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, Georgia

GeorgiaStateIndustrialCollege, the first public institution of higher learning established in Georgia for blacks, was unusual because it was located adjacent to the white resort area of Thunderbolt, connected by the streetcar line from Savannah.However, the relationship between the school and community has always been amicable with the two acting as helping hands to each other.

On 26 November 1890, an act of the Georgia Assembly resolved to “establish in connection with the StateUniversity, and forming one of the departments thereof, a school for the education and training of Negro students.”Thus the GeorgiaStateIndustrialCollege for Colored Youths was born, a result of the Second Morrill Act of 1890 and one of the first Negro land-grant colleges.A preliminary session of the school was held in Athens, Georgia from June to August 1891, conducted by Principal Richard R. Wright.In October 1891, GeorgiaStateIndustrialCollege moved five miles southeast of Savannah, onto the former plantation of Placentia, just south of Thunderbolt.Regular school sessions began at the Thunderbolt site that October.

Major Richard R. Wright served as the first President of the college from 1891 until 1921.During its first thirty years the enrollment of the school increased from eight students to five-hundred and eighty-five students.The original campus consisted of eighty-six acres, fifty-one of which were farm and thirty-five campus.When founded, the school had only Boggs Hall, Parsons Hall and a farmhouse.The above Sanborn Insurance maps show the campus with two auditoriums, one two-stories and the other three-stories constructed of tabby, a workshop, and a blacksmith shop.Under Wright four new buildings were erected including Meldrim Hall (1896), Hill Hall (1901), the Dairy Barn & Creamery (1904), and a complex including the shoe repair shop, the laundry and the home 

Economics' building (1915).The initial educational program offered by GeorgiaStateIndustrialCollege included only agriculture and mechanical arts, as well as a four-year high school.

C. G. Wiley, Wright’s successor, serving as President from 1921 until 1926, admitted the first women students to the college and initiated regular summer sessions in 1922.Dr. Benjamin F. Hubert, President from 1926 to 1947, discontinued the high school and normal departments and the school transformed into a four-year college offering bachelors degrees in agriculture and home economics.In 1931, when the StateUniversity system was placed under a Board of Regents, the college began offering degree programs in English, natural sciences, social sciences, and business administration.

During the 1930s and 1940s numerous buildings were added and on 18 January 1950 the school was renamed Savannah State College.By 1956, the year of Thunderbolt’s centennial, the school had grown to one-hundred and thirty-six acres with thirty buildings and was Georgia’s largest institution for the higher education of blacks.