Georgia Health Sciences University to dedicate John Wesley Gilbert Monument

Augusta, GA – Feb. 14, 2012 – Georgia Health Sciences University is honoring the memory of John Wesley Gilbert with a monument on the site of the university’s College of Dental Medicine, where a public housing complex named in his honor once stood. The dedication ceremony is slated for Saturday, Feb. 25 at 2 p.m.

The monument design, an engraved, semi-circular cast stone bench, was selected by a team of community leaders. It incorporates concrete and brick recovered from the original neighborhood and the marble sign from the community’s south entrance. Two bronze plaques from the neighborhood are affixed – the original dedication plaque that lists President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Augusta Mayor J.M. Woodall and housing authority Chairman Elbert Peabody; and one that was affixed to Gilbert Manor’s community center in 1989 commemorating the neighborhood’s namesake, John Wesley Gilbert.

Gilbert Manor was named for Gilbert, a prominent African American teacher, administrator and classical scholar born to slaves in Hephzibah. He was the first student to enroll at nearby Paine College, and the school’s first graduate. He went on to be the first black student to receive a master’s degree from Brown University and is regarded as the first black archaeologist.

Gilbert Manor was built in 1941 and an estimated 3,500 families called it home during its nearly 70-year history. In 2008, the 15-acre property was gifted to the university by the city of Augusta to provide a location for a new clinical research building for the College of Dental Medicine. The five-story, 269,000-square-foot building is about 100,000 square feet larger than the school’s previous home and allows the college to better accommodate Georgia’s growing oral health care demands. It is also slated to be the future site of the GHSU Education Commons building, a state-of-the-art classroom facility that will be shared with the Medical College of Georgia.

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