Historic Hodgson Hall in Savannah
A year ago, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced the Georgia Historical Society (GHS) as the recipient of a $500,000 federal challenge grant to go toward its Next Century Initiative Capital Campaign. The campaign, launched in 2015, seeks to renovate and expand the GHS Research Center to protect its archival and library collections, which are housed in one of the oldest purpose-built libraries in the U.S.
This week GHS officials were joined in Savannah by local lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA01) and Mayor Eddie DeLoach to officially launch the renovation project of historic Hodgson Hall.
Hodgson Hall, which was dedicated to GHS in 1876, is one of the oldest purpose-built library buildings in the U.S. and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its last major renovation took place in 1970 when it added the Abrahams Annex, a modern archival addition. That project was the first physical addition to Hodgson in over 90 years.
The current project, which is supported in part by a gift from The Delta Air Lines Foundation as well as the NEH, will be used to “upgrade, maintain, and preserve the Research Center,” according to GHS President and CEO Todd Groce.
He continued, “This is phase two of a total transformation of our campus. We developed an administration building a few years ago and now we’re doing part two of that, which is renovating Hudson Hall, which is the oldest library building in the Southern U.S., and then we are going to expand the archives and actually double the storage capacity of the archives so we’ll be able to collect even more material, even more Georgia history going forward.”
