While it may seem hard to believe now, Forrest Hills was once a suburb of Augusta, an outlying district of our city located far from the hubbub of 1920s Broad Street. That’s back when most people got around on streetcars, in horse drawn buggies, or on foot. In the more than 90 years since Blanchard and Calhoun Real Estate Company developed Forrest Hills, Augusta’s footprint has substantially expanded. Forrest Hills no longer feels like a far flung ‘burb. Home listings in the area frequently use phrases like centrally located, close to shopping and dining, and in city charmer. Location, location, location aside, we think it has a lot to do with the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of tires on the neighborhood’s charming brick roads. Blanchard and Calhoun designed the neighborhood as an automobile suburb, reflecting the increased use of cars as a means of transportation in the mid- to late 1920s. So they put some thought into these streets: the bricks, the high granite curbs, and rows and rows of Darlington oaks. Known in the industry as Augusta Block, the bricks that line the streets of Forrest Hills were manufactured by the Georgia Vitrified Brick and Clay Company. They can be found on the streets of more than two dozen Southern cities – in Clearwater, Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Charleston, Columbia, and Wilmington. A staunch preservationist who lived at the corner of Lombardy Court and Buena Vista Road for many years, equated brick roads with romance. She was such a passionate protector of Augusta’s history that city officials scheduled the resurfacing of the bricks on Lombardy Court while she and her husband were traveling in Europe for fear she would have prevented it. While that one section of Forrest Hills’ bricks was lost to “progress,” the rest of the iconic brick roads remain intact – a little piece of nostalgia right here in the heart of our growing metropolis.