School architect designed much of Augusta - The Augusta Chronicle

Geoffrey Lloyd Preacher, the architect who designed Houghton School more than a century ago, probably did more than anyone since James Oglethorpe to define the look of downtown Augusta.

Preacher was one of those talented men given one of history’s rare opportunities – he happened to be a popular architect in Augusta when the 1916 fire burned many of its dominant downtown structures. For the years following that conflagration, Preacher and his firm were extremely busy rebuilding much of the downtown we see today.

They had a hand in almost everything: the Imperial Theater; the Richmond Hotel (now Richmond Summit); renovation work on the Lamar Building and Marion Building, which had both seen extensive fire damage, Tubman school, and the Rialto, Modjeska and Lenox theaters.

Even the News Building – originally the Augusta Herald Building – had its Preacher touch.

For a man who got so much business from a fire, it’s appropriate he also designed the downtown Broad Street Fire station, what we today call the Marbury Center.

Preacher even spruced up the Partridge Inn, although others before and after had much to do with that success.

Looking at all of them, gives a sense of the Preacher style – lighter colored brick or tiles with elaborate facades. They also have distinctive ornamentation used to soften the sharper boxiness of the buildings.

In architecture school they call it Sullivanesqe, after Chicago’s Louis Sullivan in the late 1800s.

This is all pretty good for a young man from Fairfax, S.C., who came to Augusta after graduating from Clemson, and saw his career skyrocket. By the early 1920s, Preacher had moved on to bigger and better things. The South was becoming a resort region and Preacher’s firm designed new hotels around the Southeast.

He did so well, he even moved to a bigger city – Atlanta.

That’s where he designed the work for which he is best known – the elaborate art deco, neo-Gothic Atlanta City Hall. It’s the one they still use today.

When he died in 1972, Preacher’s passing was little noticed back in the town that gave him his start, but he always remembered Augusta.

In later years, The Chronicle reported him saying: “Augusta’s future, from both business and a resort standpoint, appears to me as brighter than probably any city in the South if the citizens will awake to their opportunities.”

Lloyd Preacher certainly awoke to his.

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