Today I spent longer than I care to admit trying to locate precisely the “parade ground” in Augusta, Georgia, where local African Americans and USCT troops staged a celebration of the Fourth of July in 1865.
I finally found it on this 1872 bird’s eye map, next to what is now known as Magnolia Cemetery on the present-day site of May Park.
The parade ground was developed by the Augusta city council as a city park on the eve of the Civil War, and you can track that development in the local newspaper at the time. But what threw me off for a long time was the presence of a federal arsenal outside of Augusta (on the other side of town). It also had a parade ground. Just not the parade ground I was looking for.
