The story begins in 1874, when Father Theodore Bulter acquired land for a new church and a Christian school intended to serve people of all denominations. Temporary structures went up first, and Jesuit priests were brought in to lead the new parish. Construction of the permanent church did not begin until 1897, and three years of work produced something far grander than a neighborhood parish. The architects chose a cruciform Romanesque plan, its weight and ornamentation reflecting the ambitions of a Catholic community eager to put down visible roots. The Italian marble high altar fills the apse. Two side altars occupy the transept. Six rose windows dominate the transept ends, while the aisle windows depict saints and Catholic symbols in glass that had crossed the Atlantic from Munich. A small dome crowns the crossing where nave and transept meet. Every surface declares permanence, a community building not for a generation but for centuries.

Seventy years turned out to be optimistic. By the 1960s, the neighborhood around Sacred Heart was in decline. Two major floods of the Savannah River had driven residents out, and the growth of modern suburbs pulled families away from downtown Augusta. Maintenance costs climbed as the congregation shrank. In 1971, the Diocese closed Sacred Heart. The building stood empty, and emptiness invited destruction. Vandals broke windows and defaced walls. Weather crept through gaps that no one repaired. The church that had taken three years to build began a slow collapse that lasted more than a decade. Proposals to demolish it circulated. Sacred Heart was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, a recognition that offered prestige but no funding and no protection from decay.

The rescue came in the 1980s, when Peter Knox Jr. and his sons Peter III and Boone purchased the property through their company Knox Limited. The first restoration in 1987 was primarily structural: stabilize the building before it went beyond saving. Local architect Spyro Meimarides oversaw repairs to the roof and the painstaking restoration of the stained glass windows, some of which had survived vandalism intact while others required skilled glasswork to rebuild. The Knox Foundation transformed the church into a cultural center, repurposing the sacred space for secular community use without erasing its character. The former rectory and school building now house non-profit organizations and arts groups. The nave that once held pews holds banquet tables and concert chairs. The transformation preserved everything that made Sacred Heart extraordinary while giving it a purpose that could sustain it.

Today Sacred Heart Cultural Center hosts wine festivals, choral concerts, Christmas celebrations, and an annual garden festival. Art exhibitions rotate through the gallery spaces. Weddings fill the nave with flowers and music where incense once hung in the air. The building works as an event venue precisely because of its extravagance: the stained glass, the marble, the dome, the fifteen varieties of brick all create an atmosphere that no modern construction could replicate. Augusta nearly lost this. The floods, the suburban exodus, the vandalism, the years of emptiness could have ended with a wrecking ball. Instead, Sacred Heart stands as proof that civic preservation is not nostalgia but investment. The Munich glass still glows. The brick patterns still catch the light. And every event held beneath that barrel vault adds another layer to a story that began with immigrants building something permanent in a new country.