Green Cove Springs honors native artisan Augusta Savage with historical marker

CLAY COUNTY-Fla. — Clay County and the City of Green Cove Springs unveil a Historical Marker of Augusta Savage, a world renowned sculptor, teacher, and civil rights activist close to her childhood home at 1105 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., in Green Cove Springs on Thursday, September 1, at 6:30 p.m.

Community leaders say that composing a marker that described Savage in 1235 characters was challenging, as her legacy offered the world so much more.

The gifted artisan was born in 1892, the seventh of 14 children born to Edward and Cornelia Fells. Savage showed early signs of her talent by sculpting objects from red clay found in her neighborhood. Oddly enough, her father, a part-time minister, shunned her talent, describing her handiwork as “graven images” outlawed by the Bible.

The family moved to West Palm Beach when Augusta turned 15 where her talent caught the attention of her teachers who paid her a dollar a day to teach clay modeling lessons.

At age 16, she married and had a son with her first husband John T. Moore. He died several years later. She married again and soon divorced her second husband James Savage. Throughout this time, she continued sculpting. After winning 25 dollars at a county fair for one of her pieces, she began selling her art. She saved enough money to move to Jacksonville, thinking she would get commissioned to create busts for wealthy blacks. But the venture failed.

She then attended the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes (now Florida A&M University) in Tallahassee. A year later, she accepted a scholarship at Cooper Union, a New York college that offered a tuition-free education to select students.

New York opened up a whole new world filled with success, failures, another marriage and family troubles. She even studied art in Paris before landing in Harlem. There she opened two galleries that failed. Savage left the art world in 1940 and moved to Saugerties, New York where she lived in relative obscurity, supporting herself by teaching art and working on a mushroom farm. In 1960, she moved in with her daughter Irene to New York City and died from cancer in 1962.

Savage’s most famous piece “The Harp,” was inspired by “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing;” a song written by Jacksonville brothers James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson. A 16 foot-high plaster sculpture painted to look like rock, was prominently displayed at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, but was destroyed when the fair closed. A mural based on “The Harp” can be seen on a building in downtown Jacksonville, across from James Weldon Johnson Park.

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